Over the past decade, Beck has emerged as a groundbreaking force in music and an icon of personal style. With his new album, Guero, hitting stores now, we celebrate his visionary taste and wonder: Will we all be wearing this in five years?
Interview: Mark Healy
Photographs: Richard Burbridge
Beck Hansen, Husband, father, sonic adventurer, wraps his slender fingers around the microphone and looks out on the crowd assembled for this unannounced club show in the Echo Park section of Los Angeles.
"The beat," he enunciates, "is correct." Tonight Beck is working with a new band and trying out new material. Nearly everything he plays for the 300 or so fans is from Guero, his latest assault on the musically generic.
Guero is one of Beck's "fun" records-astoundingly diverse, weaving indie rock with tropicalia, field songs with electro-clash, and giving the 34-year-old every excuse to slide and shimmy and execute his signature white-guy shuffle. But tonight he's hired a dancer-a pop-lockin' flyboy in an olive-drab jumpsuit and aviators. Well, at least the beat is correct.
The night before, at an expansive studio hidden in the Hollywood flats, where he was posing for pictures and taping promos for a tsunami benefit he'll be doing in Thailand, Beck tucked his slippered feet under him on the dressing-room couch, dug into the remains of someone's Chinese takeout, and shared what was on his mind.
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