BeatRoute Magazine ON Edition - December 2019

MIKAL KARL
THE
ZEN OF
BECK
Beck measures the
weight of the world
and finds happiness
in surrender on
Hyperspace
By LUKE OTTONHOF
O
n the cover of Beck
Hansen’s new record,
Hyperspace, the California
artist known
mononymously as
Beck stands in the
foreground in a dazzling
white suit, shielding his face
from an impossibly bright light. The
backdrop looks like a half-finished
jawbreaker with its layers of gauzy
pink and blue. Behind him sits a
candy-red 1980s Toyota Celica.
The effect is almost comical:
the title suggests speed, precision,
even perfection, but here Hansen
is, towering in front of a gaudy,
boxy car that now populates scrap
yards across the world.
“It was a cheap car,” Hansen
recalls of the mid-80s Celica
models. Speaking over the phone
from Los Angeles, his voice is light
but authoritative in a way that feels
distinctly Californian. “It’s the kind
of car your friend’s mom had, it
was probably used, and they didn’t
have air conditioning in it. But at
the same time, it was this sort of
spaceship: if you had the right song
on the stereo, it could transport
you to another dimension and
transcend the everyday.”
This is Hansen’s vision on Hyperspace:
the clunky, unglamorous,
pretenseless escapism we all
require to function in a cruel world.
These activities are our Hyperspace.
“These ways we engage are
our escape from the fact that the
world is kind of a big and overwhelming
and oftentimes scary
place,” says Hansen. “We’re running
from it, we’re running towards
it, we’re trying to fix it, we’re trying
to destroy it. For better or worse,
we’re doing the best we can in our
deeply flawed, human way.”
True to form (or lack thereof),
Hyperspace is another aesthetic
dogleg in a career defined by them.
2017’s bold, uncritically happy
Colors was a deliberate attempt at
joyous pop songwriting, a marked
shift from 2014’s Grammy-winning
acoustic record Morning Phase.
Hyperspace sits between these
two releases. Compared to Colors,
it’s austere, in part thanks to
co-writer Pharrell Williams’ minimalist
tendencies. (Hansen says that
on the first day of writing, Williams
told him, “We need to make a singer-songwriter
record.”) It’s scrappy,
too, with the brash twang of “Saw
Lightning” and the raspy, distorted
We don’t get
to leave with
status or anything
that we’ve acquired.
We will all be in
the same
place.
fog of opener “Hyperlife” paired
with corresponding mid-album cut,
“Hyperspace.”
Strangely, Hansen says that
closer “Everlasting Nothing,” an
acoustic-forward meditation on
death and what follows, was the
first song written. It’s a revealing
springboard: start from the factual,
inescapable endpoint, and work
backwards. Hyperspace is in some
ways each moment between birth
and death. “Ultimately, at the end,
we are reduced to our selves
without anything,” says Hansen.
“We don’t get to leave with status
or anything that we’ve acquired. We
will all be in the same place.”
These observations are startling in
part because one would hardly expect
a multi-Grammy-winning star
to work with a cast including noted
“Happy” person Pharrell, Coldplay’s
Chris Martin, and Sky Ferreira, then
come out with a relatively sparse
mid-tempo record that feels at
times nihilistic. Hansen’s reject-anthem
“Loser” could be played out as
tongue-in-cheek nihilism, but it was
sardonic and cheeky.
Hyperspace is decidedly more serious,
maybe because 2019 and the
years preceding it in North America
and abroad demand it. Colors was
shelved for a year after the election
of Donald Trump, and now, as wildfires
tear through Hansen’s home
state (when we speak, he groans
that Los Angeles is about to enter a
heatwave) and late-capitalism continues
its extractive patterns while
commodifying clean air amid global
alarm bells, Hyperspace’s fretful
tone is apt. (Sometimes, it’s too on
the nose: “Some days, I go dark
places in my soul,” Hansen croons
on “Dark Places.”)
Hansen doesn’t intend the record
to be miserable. He explains that it’s
“a record of wanting to find shelter
and safety, something that gives
you a sense of, ‘Things are going
to be okay.’” These things can be
hard to come by. Hansen rattles off
a list of possibilities: religion, drugs,
sex, interior decorating, jogging,
restoring old cars, “or, god forbid,
firearms,” all ways to deal with what
he describes as the magnitude of
the world. “How do we navigate
our own past?” Hansen wonders
rhetorically. “And the tools, the lack
of tools, that we were given to deal
with this world?”
When asked if he relates to the
desire to escape from this world,
Hansen replies lightly, “I think this
is all escape, y’know? And I’m not
saying that in a negative way. It’s a
natural instinct we all share. It’s not
about the game, it’s not even about
the athletes, it’s about something
bigger. It’s about surrender. I think
surrender is where we find happiness.”
Hansen seems at peace with this
reality, and Hyperspace reflects
this: it isn’t anxious, but resigned
and cool. In the final moments of
“Everlasting Nothing,” Hansen offers
encouragement: “Nowhere child,
keep on running/In your time you’ll
find something in the everlasting
nothing.”
The imagery is profound, bordering
on apocalyptic. At the tail end
of a song about mortality, it feels
off-key to offer advice on how to
live, but Hansen sees it as a useful
acceptance.
“It’s not a bleak idea,” he says
bluntly. “It’s just sort of a truth, a
statement as it is. This nothingness
that’s always been there, and always
will.” ,
34 BEATROUTE DECEMBER 2019