Subterranean California Lead Pipe Pipe-Dreamin' Blues: "Loser" and Beck's History of the Twentieth Century
Participation in the New York anti-folk music scene of
the late eighties and early nineties “made Beck realize there are no
restrictions when it comes to subject matter for songs.” [1] Back in his native
Los Angeles and playing the bar and coffeehouse circuit in 1991, the unknown
musician further developed the idiosyncratic sense of humor with which he would
become associated. “I’d be banging away on a Son House tune and the whole
audience would be talking, so maybe out of desperation or boredom, or the
audience’s boredom, I’d make up these ridiculous songs just to see if people
were listening,” he recalled, adding that “‘Loser’ was an extension of that.”
[2] The legend of the song’s genesis as an amateurish burst of “impromptu
rapping” goes like this:
[…] Tom [Rothrock] and
Beck went over to producer Karl Stephenson’s house to play around. Beck laid
down some slide guitar, Stephenson looped it, and then Beck freestyled over a
Public Enemy-esque beat. When he found himself at a loss for words when the chorus
came around, he came up with a chant meant to criticize his own performance –
“Soy un perdedor,” which means “I’m a loser” in Spanish. […]
“When we recorded
‘Loser’, that was the first time I ever rapped,” Beck admitted [i.e., claimed].
“The chorus should have been, ‘I can’t rap worth shit.’” [3]
“Naturally, many of Beck’s juxtapositions read as
nonsense, but the comedy of nonsense was much of their appeal,” reflects Beck
fan Aaron Gilbreath: “Sense wasn’t the point. The words sound great together,
and sometimes, in the process, they painted a picture or suggested a deeper
meaning. […] The main meaning you’ll find is the meaning you put in them.” He
cautions against dismissing Beck’s approach as “pure improvisation, even a lack
of control,” however, insisting that the songwriter was far from “haphazardly
spewing words. Sure, Beck tossed off countless songs. So many in fact, that
they sound in-the-moment. But […] he labored over so many more.” Gilbreath
rejects the notion that the artist “never sat down to revise any lyrics, that
he didn’t test them at different shows or work them out,” continuing:
Come on. He didn’t just
keep the first thing that came to mind every time. He wrote “Pay No Mind” at
age 18 or 19 and released it at 23. Those lyrics are powerful because he
revised so many different versions of them. [4]
In considering the question of the meaning or meaninglessness
in Beck’s lyrics, the artist’s maternal grandfather’s awareness of “the sense
in nonsense” may be relevant [5]. “Beck Hansen is the ultimate example of the
postmodern condition” in the words of biographer Nevin Martell [6]. “I would
like to let the art stand still and let the viewer/listener do the subverting,”
Beck has declared [7]. (It is with recourse to this quotation that I intend to
defend myself if Beck or his partisans take offense at the publication of this
essay.) He has acknowledged a preference for images “that aren’t really
direct”, suggesting, “if you can figure out some way to layer it when you peel
that away so that there’s something else going on, it makes it all work
better.” [8] Beck is “too smart to ever entertain solely at face value,” in the
words of Ethan Smith [9]. “I think that song [“Loser”], that whole album
[1994’s Mellow Gold] got taken out of context,” Beck has explained: “I
got portrayed a lot as a clown,” he reflected with some resentment – insisting,
contrarily: “I take what I do very seriously.” [10]
Notwithstanding the reputation of “Loser” as a
slacker-nirvana Generation X anthem, Beck himself recoiled from the “slacker”
label. “I’ve always tried to get money to eat and pay my rent and shit, and
it’s always been real hard for me,” Beck objected: “I’ve never had the time or
money to slack.” [11] “I don’t know what’s up with slackers,” he mused to a
radio interviewer, adding, “That’s for rich people.” [12] “People have this
image of me as a pot-smoking, channel-surfing teen,” he told journalist Mark
Brown in 1996, but “I didn’t even own a TV for most of my adult life.” “The
‘slacker’ image grates; he works harder than anyone he knows,” Brown writes [13].
Here, as in many of his interviews, Beck’s earnestness and intelligence are
evident.
“One of society’s biggest problems,” Brown further summarizes
the musician’s outlook, “is that there’s no time to reflect. People are so
caught up in the moment that they can’t see that it’s just a small, somewhat
insignificant moment out of time that we inhabit.” “I’m really into history,”
Beck revealed to Brown, adding, “and this is just a dot in the whole chasm of
time.” [14] In the course of another interview from the same period, Beck
elaborates:
Our lifestyles now, we
don’t get to escape to a beautiful meadow, or some lakeside beautiful spot. We
need music or movies to get out of the drudgery or the pressure, the stress of
our environment. We live in these incredibly unnatural environments – unnatural,
in the sense that they’re completely different than what’s preceded it for the
last ten thousand years. [15]
“People have a general sense of superiority to the
past, but I don’t think we’re any smarter or more enlightened,” he told another
interviewer in 1998: “We were still the same people eighty years ago as we were
twenty years ago. I also think that when you come to the end of something you
have to go back to the beginning.” [16]
Beck is largely concerned with the radical disruption
and unhealthiness represented by modern life in his breakthrough hit. With its
humorous opening line, “In the time of chimpanzees I was a monkey”, “Loser”
announces in an exaggerated fashion its preoccupation with the course of history
and the biological competition between groups that defines historical epochs.
Within this broader context of eons-spanning struggle, however, Beck will set
his sights on the tumultuous twentieth century for the remainder of the song.
The other bookend line, uttered shortly before “Loser”
fades out at the end, is “Sprechen sie Deutsch, eh, baby?”, inescapably evoking
National Socialist Germany, the loser of the Second World War, and calling to
mind the patriotic cliché that “we’d be speaking German” today if not for
Allied victory. Confirming the relevance of the legacy of the Third Reich and
the outcome of the war to the themes of the song, Beck very interestingly makes
reference to a “phony gas chamber”, perhaps alluding to this line and
reiterating his incredulity nearer the end of the song when he shouts, “I can’t
believe you!” This casual instance of Holocaust denial, hidden in plain sight
in the form of an ostensibly nonsensical 1993 alternative rock single, warrants
a closer examination of the rest of the song’s content – not to mention of Beck
himself, his background, and his times.
“Don’t believe everything that you breathe,” Beck
cautions: “You get a parking violation and a maggot on your sleeve.” The
consequences of belief in what is breathed – that is, of acceptance of
ubiquitous Holocaust orthodoxy and the moral premises of the postwar order –
have been the illegitimate establishment and normalization of the Jewish state
where it did not belong and the ascendancy of the Jewish lobby in American
affairs. (See my discussion of the 1989 film The Dream Team for a
consideration of illegal parking as a metaphor for the Zionist project.) The
image of the Jew-as-maggot recalls Hitler’s characterization of the Jewish
presence in German society as being “like a maggot in a rotting body” [17]. The
“forces of evil”, Beck reveals, have further exploited the “phony gas chamber”
of their “bozo nightmare” to “ban all the music”, abolishing the sublime from
public life. “Someone came sayin’ I’m insane to complain about a shotgun
wedding,” Beck relates in words that could describe the marginalization of
critics of America’s special relationship with Israel.
Beck’s “time is a piece of wax fallin’ on a termite /
That’s chokin’ on the splinters.” The detail that the termite is “chokin’ on
the splinters” may allude to the Johnny Jenkins version of “I Walk on Guilded Splinters”, from which the track’s percussion is sampled, but the image is also
suggestive of Beck’s record – his “piece of wax” – landing unexpected and bomb-like
in the midst of a parasitic entertainment establishment, the Jews-as-termites
metaphor being an old one, long predating its most famous occurrence in remarks
by Louis Farrakhan in 2018.
The artist “tried his best to emulate bombastic voiced
lyricist Chuck D of Public Enemy,” recounts American Songwriter’s Jacob
Uitti [18]. Not, perhaps, without relevance, Chuck D and Public Enemy had
stirred controversy in recent years with lyrics and statements that garnered
accusations of anti-Semitism as The Los Angeles Times reported in 1989:
The acclaimed but
controversial New York rap group Public Enemy is again drawing accusations of
anti-Semitism with its new single, “Welcome to the Terrordome”.
The song, released this
week by Def Jam Records under a distribution agreement with Columbia Records,
addresses the controversy that swirled around alleged anti-Jewish statements
made in interviews last spring by the group’s “minister of information”
Professor Griff (real name: Richard Griffin). Public Enemy’s records had
earlier expressed support for Louis Farrakhan, the controversial Nation of
Islam minister who has called Judaism a “gutter religion”.
Griff was fired by Public
Enemy, but then rehired in the role of community liaison and forbidden to give
interviews. But group leader Chuck D (Carlton Ridenhour) continued to be
criticized by many in the Jewish community, particularly Rabbi Abraham Cooper,
the associate dean of Los Angeles’ Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust
Studies.
Among the lines in the
new song: “Told the rab, get off the rag,” “So-called chosen, frozen” and
“Apology made to whoever pleases / Still they got me like Jesus.”
Cooper said this week
that he believes the rab reference is to him – a development which he
finds particularly disturbing in the wake of a visit which he says Chuck D paid
to the center’s Holocaust museum two weeks ago. […]
Along with Cooper, the
Anti-Defamation League is also holding the record company accountable and has
sent a written protest to CBS Records president Tommy Mottola. In the letter,
Jeffrey Sinesky, ADL Civil Rights Division director, said the lyrics revived
the “repulsive and historically discredited charge” that the Jews killed
Christ. [19]
“Regrettable,” Beck biographer Julian Palacios feels
compelled to throw in, “was Chuck D’s slip into veiled anti-Semitism, a
concession of personal defeat as his righteous rage turned to maudlin
Jew-baiting.” [20]
The late eighties and early nineties had also
witnessed a growing challenge to the official narrative of the Holocaust, with
Ernst Zundel’s legal battles making headlines, Fred Leuchter issuing his
forensic report on the alleged homicidal gas chambers of Auschwitz, and
Holocaust revisionists Bradley Smith, David Cole, and Mark Weber making
appearances on Donahue and The Montel Williams Show. The 1988
comedy Beetlejuice even engaged on an encrypted level with the ongoing
controversy (See “‘Daylight Come and Me Wan’ Go Home’: Beetlejuice as
Zionist Allegory”).
 |
| Incognito-mode Beck hangs out with Winona Ryder |
“Loser” is imbued with a mix of deliberate and
serendipitous meanings, its scattered imagery conjuring the various elements of
cultural wreckage comprising the second half of the twentieth century in
America: women’s liberation (“Baby’s in Reno with the vitamin D” [i.e., dick]);
compromised masculinity (“beefcake pantyhose”); environmental and dietary
degradation (“spraypaint the vegetables”); proliferation of random consumerist
dreck (“Cheez Whiz”, “plastic eyeballs”, “rerun shows”, “daytime crap”); economic
inequality (“food stamps”, “trailer park”); demographic shifts as represented
by hip-hop and the Spanish language; and drug addiction (“junkie”, “cocaine”).
Significantly, Beck is “out to cut the junkie”, cocaine being a “nose job” –
word choice hinting both at Jewish responsibility for the popularization of
drugs as well as at surgical crypsis, a theme to which Beck would return in
“Arabian Nights”, a song included as a bonus track on a Japanese issue of
1999’s Midnite Vultures, with its evocation of “Cosmetic procedures on
the cartilage of apocalypse”. “No nose like a protest-singer nose,” he would
later observe in a rendition of “Days of ‘92”, seeming to confirm the Jews-nose
correlation.
Reinforcing the Americanness of Beck’s concerns in
“Loser”, a vision of suicide is coupled with a “slab of turkey neck and it’s
hangin’ from a pigeon wing.” The turkey, inextricable from its American
identity as celebrated on Thanksgiving, was privately favored as “a much more
respectable bird” than the eagle by Benjamin Franklin, who hailed it as “a true
original native of America” [21]. The comically horrific scene, with the larger
and ostensibly more formidable turkey’s throat presumably having been ripped
out by the smaller pigeon, suggests an avian David-and-Goliath scenario. Though
pigeons and doves are colloquially distinguished in the English language,
scientific nomenclature makes no such distinction [22], nor do languages such
as German, French, Spanish, Greek, or Hebrew, opening Beck’s “pigeon” up to
ethno-religious associations. “In Song of Songs, the moving love
depicting the loving relationship between G‑d and His nation, the ‘dove’
is […] often used to describe the bride, the Jewish people,” writes Rabbi
Menachem Posner [23]. “In the Babylonian Talmud, Brachot 53b states that
the dove is compared to the Jewish people,” Shoshanah Weiss further explains:
In a quote from Psalms
68:14; it states that even if the Jewish people are steeped in exile, they will
become as exalted as the wings of a white dove, whose wings shimmer like silver
and her wingtips with brilliant gold. A dove saves herself by either
flying away or by fighting with her wings, while other birds fight with their
beaks. Since the Jewish people are likened to a dove, the virtue of the mitzvot
[commandments] are compared to a dove’s wings which protect and save Israel
from harm. [24]
Beck has testified that “one of the great times of
music to me was [the period beginning with] the mid-Sixties, ending with
seventy-three.” [25] Whether by chance or design, Karl Stephenson’s sitar in
combination with the backmasking of the vocals, a technique popularized by the
Beatles and associated with the concept of hidden and often sinister messages
in pop songs, as well as the frequency of the word “kill” – uttered nine times
in the course of “Loser” – seems to gesture toward the sixties era of political
chaos, subversion, and high-profile assassinations. Is the irksome “stain on my
shirt” of which Beck complains a gunshot wound? Indeed, the sampled dialogue,
“I’m a driver, I’m a winner. Things are gonna change, I can feel it”, in
isolation from its original context, does convey something of the naïve
optimism of a typical John F. Kennedy speech. Some assert that these words were
spoken by George H.W. Bush – appropriately enough, the loser of the 1992
presidential race – with Beck biographer Nevin Martell, for example, claiming
these are “choice soundbites from the imminently quotable President George
Bush” [26]. The sample, in fact, is lifted directly from Kill the Moonlight,
a film by Beck’s friend and collaborator Steve Hanft. Even if apocryphal, the
connection some fans draw between “Loser” and George H.W. Bush does do
something to enhance its aura of elevated strangeness, given Bush’s CIA
background and the mysteriousness of the future president’s activities at the
time of the JFK assassination [27]. Incidentally, Karl Stephenson, who began to
struggle with mental illness around the time “Loser” became a success,
expressed concerns that Beck was going to be murdered for having recorded the
song [28].
 |
| Karl Stephenson |
The line “Kill the headlights and put it in neutral” –
suggestive of blind, willy-nilly progress through unknowable darkness – is
instructive in view of the song’s concern with American trajectories. In “Put It in Neutral”, a song Beck recorded during roughly the same period that gave
rise to “Loser” and sharing with it its suicidal ideation, Beck resolves to
“Kill the lice and throw the dice.” Perhaps corroborating the allegorical
nature of Beck’s anarchic automobile in “Loser”, meanwhile, is “American Car”,
a song by Steve Moramarco’s band Bean, with which Beck was briefly affiliated:
Where would we be without
our car?
It’s who I am, it’s who we are.
What will happen when the oil runs dry?
No more pieces of American pie.
Well we’re heading for a cliff and we got no breaks
I think this joyride was a big mistake.
Beck would reprise the theme of the perilous car ride
in 1999’s “Nicotine and Gravy”, which finds him chauffeuring an enigmatic woman
who “looks so Israeli.” “Love the way she plays me,” he acknowledges, also
fretting, “I don’t wanna die tonight.”
The “Loser” music video, storyboarded by Steve Hanft
“based on brainstorming sessions with Beck,” offers further clues as to the
meanings in the song. “Like many of Beck’s creative endeavours, the video was a
controlled accident,” writes Palacios [29]. Featuring clips from Kill the
Moonlight intercut with Beck performances as well as other assorted antics,
the video opens with Beck doffing a helmet, blurred for legal reasons, like the
ones worn by the loser Empire Stormtroopers in 1977’s Star Wars. “There’s
nothing subtle about this historical allusion in Star Wars,” writes
Christopher Klein for History:
After all, the elite
assault forces fanatically devoted to the Galactic Empire share a common name
with the paramilitary fighters who defended the Nazi Party – stormtroopers.
The Imperial officers’ uniforms and even Darth Vader’s helmet resemble those
worn by German Army members in World War II, and the gradual rise of
Palpatine from chancellor to emperor mirrored Adolf Hitler’s similar
political ascent from the chancellor to dictator. [30]
Describing his songwriting process, Beck has said, “I
open up a big cabinet, and I have a collection of helmets. I put on the
different helmets” [31]. One of those pieces of head gear, presumably, is the
Stormtrooper helmet, a prop Beck had used as far back as his New York anti-folk
days [32]. In wearing and removing the helmet at the outset of the video, Beck
is perhaps revealing himself to identify with the Stormtrooper’s losing cause. Among
the other headwear worn by Beck in the video is an Indian headdress,
reiterating the song’s concern with the course of history, its winners and
losers, also serving to contrast a traditional mode of life with the hectic,
tacky chaos of modern capitalism as glimpsed by way of a check-cashing business
and a convenience store.
Visible at another point in the video is a t-shirt
with a “Loser” logo inspired by the popular Jesus ichthys, inviting an
interpretation of Christ-as-loser or loser-as-Christ-figure, complementing the
lyrics’ allusion to the Jews’ gangster-like assassination of Christ as a
“Drive-by body pierce.” The inclusion of material from Kill the Moonlight
favors the loser-as-Christ-figure interpretation with its story of Chance
(Thomas Hendrix), a ne’er-do-well who hopes to win an upcoming open car race.
Chance, like Jesus, is depicted as a fisherman and makes a Christlike sacrifice
of blood that thwarts his opportunity to win the competition. Reinforcing the
Christ-as-loser interpretation or the idea of Christianity as a defeated force
in the twentieth century, however, Beck has acknowledged Luís Buñuel’s film Simon
of the Desert (1965) as the inspiration for the self-propelled coffin seen
in the video [33]. In Simon of the Desert, a female Satan (Silvia Pinal)
rises from the coffin in one of a series of scenes in which she attempts to
seduce the Syrian Christian ascetic Simon (Claudio Brook). At the story’s
conclusion, Satan reveals to Simon her triumph in postwar modernity, whisking
him to a raucous rock club where he witnesses a new dance craze called
“radioactive flesh”. There is no point in hoping to go home again, Satan
informs Simon, because “another tenant’s moved in.” This may refer to worldly
satanic emissaries replacing Christ and the saints in public adulation or to
the fact that the modern state of Israel had been established on land
comprising a portion of the former Syria-Palestine, with the rise of Zionism
complementing Satan’s ascendancy.
Filmed from the driver’s point of view, Beck is also shown
washing a car’s windshield with a flaming squeegee, a metaphor for a radical,
purifying clarification of the viewer’s perception. Complementing this concept
is the packaging of Mellow Gold and the “Loser” single with their pictures
of Beck wearing large goggles suggestive of an altered awareness, as with the
special lenses featured in John Carpenter’s film They Live (1988). The
cover of the single, moreover, in its striking red, black, and white color
scheme, depicts the singer wielding a pitchfork, the traditional symbol of
populist wrath, and posing as if about to stomp on something meeting with his
disapproval – termites, perhaps.
Crucially, the single’s path to hit status was highly
unusual. A true underground sensation, it was, as Palacios puts it, a “Trojan
Horse that broke through the industry bulwark.” [34] Tom Rothrock, co-founder
of Bong Load, the independent label that originally issued “Loser”, remembers:
“Before the record even got pressed, there was all this excitement, there were
bootlegs right away.” [35] “This one small slice of black vinyl was the
beginning of the end of Beck’s incognito status,” recounts Nevin Martell:
At first the single only
received airplay on indie and college stations, but then some big-time
commercial stations started playing bootlegged tapes of the song. Two of LA’s
finest, KXLU and KCRW, started spinning the tune, and the world began hearing
the phenomenon known as Beck. From LA the word spread, and soon tastemaker DJs
everywhere were covertly slipping the song into their playlists. Indeed, when
the song was added at Seattle’s influential KNND six months later, it quickly
became the station’s most requested song over Pearl Jam’s “Daughter”, no small
feat for an indie artist going up against a major label act with millions of
dollars of marketing behind it.” [36]
“Bong Load didn’t even promote the single; it just
continued to steamroll out of view,” notes Palacios [37]. Beck was still blowing
leaves for a living as “Loser” was finding its audience on college radio in
1993. Flaunting his disdain for the corporate side of the music business, Beck
would “come out onstage with a leaf blower and blow leaves at all these
industry types in the audience” when he performed live, incorporating his
day-job tool as an avant-garde musical instrument [38]. The bidding war for Beck’s
services was eventually won by Geffen, which gave the song its proper national
debut in January of 1994, transforming it into a worldwide smash. “‘Loser’ is
the only song from an indie label that has achieved Top Ten chart status on Billboard
since the birth of FM radio,” Martell writes, emphasizing the uniqueness of the
circumstances of Beck’s success [39].
The deal he struck with Geffen “was a revolutionary
contract for artistic control that allowed Beck to record for any independent
labels he chose, as well as the major-label monolith.” [40] “I was pretty aware
of the music industry treadmill, the revolving door,” Beck recalled:
I’ve been playing music
for a lot of years, so I was always very reticent about having some business
people dictate to me what I should be doing. It seemed way too foreign to me.
[…] It’s easy to be seduced by all that stuff. But I didn’t start writing music
because I wanted money or needed to be successful. But the thing with “Loser”,
it sort of took on a life of its own and was a hit before I was on a record
label. So I was lucky in having some leverage. It’s pretty rare that a song
comes out of nowhere.” [41]
“It was a position that very few performers are ever
fortunate enough to be in,” writes Martell: “Whereas most artists have to prove
their ‘commercial viability’ over the course of their first album or two, Beck
had already proven it through grassroots radio success. Geffen knew they were
guaranteed at least one runaway hit, so to them it was a surefire moneymaker no
matter how the legalese finished up.” [42]
Despite its complexity, Beck has averred that “Loser”
“was written and recorded in six hours. No plans went into it,” he further
insisted in a 1999 statement, as if defensively, adding: “It’s totally
ridiculous.” [43] “In fact,” Palacios points out, “he had been working towards
the sound that crystallized on ‘Loser’ for some time.” He goes on to quote
other remarks from Beck, also given in 1999, that throw into some ambiguity the
posited spontaneity of the 1991 recording session:
I had the idea in about
1988. I could play you four-track tapes from the late Eighties that I did with
hip-hop beats. I don’t think I would have been able to go in and do “Loser” in
a six-hour shot without having been somewhat prepared. It was accidental, but
it was something that I’d been working toward for a long time. [44]
The interpretation of “Loser” advanced in this essay
could be more easily dismissed as a gag or a piece of critical terrorism if not
for its corroboration by other examples in Beck’s output of engagement with
historical revisionism and the Jewish Question. With its parenthetically
rhyming title, “Pay No Mind (Snoozer)” – the Dylanesque second track on Mellow
Gold, following “Loser” – is a related song that returns to the themes of
crass mass culture, infestation, and extermination, and the accompanying music
video, also directed by Steve Hanft, is noteworthy. “The insects are huge and
the poison’s all been used,” Beck laments in what appears to be a sly allusion
to Zyklon-B, with Hanft intercutting the artist’s performance with close-up
images of diamonds and scenes of Jewish-looking women enjoying cocktails as a
deal is struck. “I just got signed,” Beck moans morosely. With its comedically
nightmarish cultural landscape characterized by slime, manure, metastasizing
shopping malls, and overflowing toilets as “The sales climb high through the
garbage pail sky / Like a giant dildo crushing the sun”, the song finds Beck
“separating himself off from degradation in order to carry himself through; a
transcendent alienation,” assesses Palacios [45]. “So get out your lead-pipe
pipe dreams / Get out your ten-foot flags,” Beck instructs sarcastically, the
lead pipe evoking the famous plumbing of the Roman Empire, revered as a model for
palingenesis by fascists, while at the same time drawing on the lead pipe as a
symbol of the direct action of the thug in the street. Aspirations to national
renewal and greatness as visualized in the unfurling of ten-foot banners,
however, are only “pipe dreams”, the anti-national vermin having become too
powerful, the songwriter suggests resignedly.
Released in February of 1994, Beck’s album Stereopathetic
Soulmanure consists of less commercial material recorded in 1992 and 1993.
Of interest among the album’s many quirky tracks is the crudely tape-recorded
and disjointed “11.6.45”, comprising the following anecdote told in a juvenile
voice:
It’s, uh, November 6th,
1945, and we went up to, and uh, back to the house and watched MTV and playin’
Pac-Man. It’s all really gross and all the kids were diseased. Giant airplanes,
uh, crashing underneath electro-magnetic fuse, guys with flamethrowers melting.
Taco trucks were crashed. There was sausage meat all over the – and Sasquatch
was eating a burrito.
While there is no obvious historical significance to
the specific date November 6, 1945, the title unavoidably calls to mind the
aftermath of the Second World War, the period when war crimes cases were being
tried against the defeated Axis leaders. The trial of General Tomoyuki
Yamashita before an American military tribunal was ongoing, for one example,
and the more infamous Nuremberg proceedings would begin later that month. Beck,
rather than finding anything solemn in the period, captures it with a clearly
ludicrous piece of childish testimony regarding events that could not possibly
have occurred – an implicit critique of some of the rather bizarre material
written into history after the war.
Yet another Beck release from this fertile period, the
acoustic-guitar-oriented One Foot in the Grave, appeared in June of 1994,
its most scrutiny-worthy track being the defiant “Cyanide Breath Mint”, which
is also the name Beck gave to his music publishing interest. The Beck fan who
maintains the site Whiskeyclone indicates that this song, with its
lyrics about an insular group with “people to meet / Shaking hands with
themselves, looking out for themselves”, is about “music industry types” [46].
Even after signing with Geffen, Beck “maintained a deep-rooted mistrust of the
music industry and its machinations,” Julian Palacios explains [47]. Beck
nearly renders the Jewishness of the scene explicit when he throws in a line
about “riding the scapegoat”. The “Cyanide Breath Mint” referenced in the
title, meanwhile, lends itself to more than one possible reading. It could,
again, winkingly reference the little green Zyklon-B pellets, not unlike breath
mints in appearance, with which the Third Reich is alleged to have exterminated
Jews at Auschwitz. Alternatively, it could allude to Reichsmarschall Hermann
Goering’s suicide by potassium cyanide capsule. The latter would find a
complement in the song’s flight-related imagery, Goering having served as head
of Hitler’s Luftwaffe. It is preferable to die by one’s own hand rather than
submit to the terms of judgment rendered by “music industry types”, Beck may be
saying.
Similarly, “Devils Haircut”, from 1996’s Odelay,
“seems to speak of Beck’s innate distrust of the music industry” as assessed by
Martell [48]. Beck’s populist sympathies are evident in the awareness of
“Pistols […] pointing at a poor man’s pockets.” There is, too, Beck’s typical
focus on decay and degeneracy, and mention of a “rotten oasis” in conjunction
with the desert-dwelling devil depicted on the cover of the single could
identify either Hollywood or the Middle East as sites of corruption. “You must
beware of oasis [i.e., oases] but you may enjoy the potential of the fantasy
and deliverance they offer,” Beck explained in an interview [49]. The
captivating “Devils Haircut” music video conceived by Beck and director Mark
Romanek shows the solitary singer strolling uneasily through the racially alien
metropolis of New York City, with imposing or disquieting sights like a stock
ticker, Grand Central Terminal’s Glory of Commerce sculpture, streets
teeming with foreigners, and an aircraft carrier all giving way at the end to
the revelation that a team of spies has been maintaining surveillance on Beck
for the duration of his visit. Considered in the light of the video, “Devils
Haircut” appears to hint not only at Beck’s distrust of the entertainment
industry, but at its interrelationships with finance, the security state, and
even geopolitics.
“We did a couple of shows for some computer firms
around the time of Odelay, but only because I was in debt from touring,”
Beck acknowledged, indicating his continuing distaste for the business world
and the unremitting trivialization of art within the music industry:
I tend to lose money on
the road. Most bands don’t make money unless you’re at the level of Dave
Matthews or Smashing Pumpkins. So I did some of the shows, but they’re not
really my thing. At the same time, I’m supporting a lot of people here. These
guys are like my family, and I’ve got to take care of them. But when I’m asked
to do stuff like the Austin Powers soundtrack, things that just seem
gross, I stay away. I get asked to put my music in a Toyota commercial for
ungodly sums of money, and as a rule, I stay away from most of it.” [50]
A subsequent single, 1997’s “Deadweight”, is of
interest for what it insinuates about the state of America at the close of the
twentieth century by incorporating a snatch of words from “The Star-Spangled
Banner”:
On a riptide, freaks
ride, sleep inside a parasite’s appetite
Oh say can’t you see the chemistry? The parasites? The cleanup fee?
As part of an untitled 1997 collage reproduced in the
book Playing with Matches, meanwhile, Beck includes a newspaper clipping
that he seems to have found amusing, signaling something of an irreverent
attitude toward the Jewish state:
ROME: More than 100
Brazilian teenagers smashed up a Boeing 747 during a mid-flight riot on a trip
from Sao Paolo to Rome, airport officials said today.
Crew on the Alitalia
flight had to intervene to stop the 123 youths, aged 14 to 17, causing damage
that would have risked the security of passengers, after the group went on the
rampage two hours before landing.
The plane’s captain
called police when the plane touched down in Rome and the teenagers, who were
stopping off in the Italian capital on their way to Tel Aviv in Israel, were
charged with criminal damage.
Near the clipping in the composition is a brown arm,
reaching down as if from Heaven to bless a unicorn – a choice of images that
suggests a lack of investment in Zionist mythology. [51]
“There’s a heightened sense of evil that runs through
all Beck’s songs, a sensitivity to moral pollution which only someone with
rather high moral standards would have,” argues Nicholas “Momus” Currie [52]. “There
is always a slight indication in what I’m doing of the perverseness of how we
live,” Beck himself has said [53], explaining on another occasion that “There
are aspects to the music that have something to do with disorientation in
modern life and our culture.” [54] Palacios, meanwhile, has written of Beck
offering “something almost mystic, a means by which to decode the puzzles he is
presenting, urging his audience to work their way into a new mode of thinking.”
[55]
It may be that the riddler’s identity furnishes the
key to the riddle’s meaning.
 |
| Beck's father, David Campbell |
Born under the name Bek [sic] David Campbell in 1970,
he is the son of David Campbell, a classically trained violinist and viola
player who transitioned to bluegrass and eventually found a niche as a strings
arranger for major artists during the seventies. Complicating Beck’s
ethno-religious formation, his father is a Scientologist, and his mother, Bibbe
Hansen, is of mixed Scandinavian and Jewish descent. Beck’s “half-Swedish,
half-Jewish” [56] maternal grandmother, Audrey Ostlin, was a bohemian New York
dancer and poet who associated with “lowlife and gangsters” [57]. “I had this
kind of chaotic upbringing,” Bibbe has acknowledged: “My mother was, by turns,
an amphetamine addict and a heroin addict, and had some very troubling
alliances with men. […] I just wound up getting in an escalating series of
troubles that erupted in me going to jail.” [58] Her father, Al Hansen, was an
artist who notably moved among the Neo-Dada, Fluxus, and Pop Art milieux, and
Bibbe fell in for a time with Warhol’s Factory scene, becoming a juvenile
delinquent in the process. After marrying Campbell, however, she moved with him
to California where he could pursue his music career and she would become
Beck’s “chain-smoking, make-your-own-dinner kind of mom” [59]. Whereas Palacios
describes her parents as having been “working-class intellectuals” [60], Bibbe
herself identifies with the “international cultural bourgeoisie” [61].
 |
| Beck Hansen, teenager |
Beck’s meager inheritance of Ashkenazi DNA brought
with it no Jewish money or privilege. He did, however, enjoy “a privileged
childhood […] from an artistic standpoint.” [62] “Some people would put a lot
of value into certain family customs, like a yearly picnic or Bar Mitzvah,”
Beck reflected. “With my family, it was a Truffault movie or some art object by
Joseph Beuys – things which I certainly took for granted. The more I talk to
other people about their backgrounds, the more I realized I had a whole other
experience.” [63] Beck’s mother does, however, seem to have wanted to impart a
Jewish identity to her son. “I was raised celebrating Jewish holidays, and I
consider myself Jewish,” Beck told Spin: “But I’ve read books on
Scientology and drawn insights from that.” [64] “Their poverty meant that he
couldn’t have a Bar Mitzvah as a child, though he attended Hebrew classes for
some time and enjoyed Passover, not only because it was his first experience of
getting drunk but also because Bibbe’s non-Jewish friends would turn up, and
brought a party atmosphere along with them,” Palacios writes, pointing out that
Beck “later used a Passover prayer in his [1996] ‘Little Drum Machine Boy’ jam,
a Hanukkah interpretation of surely the most vile of all Christmas songs, ‘The
Little Drummer Boy’.” [65] Jewish myths could also have a disquieting effect,
and Beck recalls that “Story of Isaac” from Leonard Cohen’s 1969 album Songs
from a Room “was so dark and creepy, it gave me nightmares.” [66] “We
stopped having Christmas when I was very young, because we couldn’t afford it,”
he relates:
I remember one year my
brother and I made a Christmas tree out of cardboard. We cut it out and stuck
it on the wall. It was a traditional sort of thing, but it was depressing. It
always is if you haven’t got any money. [67]
Importantly, Beck does not consider himself Jewish
only and traces his artistic impulse to “genetic idiosyncrasies that probably
go back to some fjord in Norway. There’s a Viking element to our lineage,” he
does not conceal, revealing that his grandfather was “big on Norwegian
mythology.” [68] Al Hansen looms largest among the future musician’s family
members as an artistic influence, and, despite the old man’s nomadic existence,
Beck enjoyed a “symbiotic, lifelong relationship with Al” [69]. Al lived with
Beck’s family for two years in California during the late seventies, and Beck
flew to Cologne several times as a young man to visit his grandfather [70], who
frequented Europe from 1969 onward, finally settling in Germany in 1980 [71]. “The
artist’s integrity, an ongoing concern for both Beck and Al Hansen, was further
strengthened and resolved by adhering to a particularly European model of
artmaking, a seven-day-a-week commitment to merging art and life.” [72] Beck,
recalling his grandfather in the eulogistic poem “Masai Ticket for Al”, dubs
him a “Parachute revelator” and a “Constructor of invitations to the garbage
life” and “garbage love” [73]. “What Beck and Al share is an eclectic rummaging
for common materials and a propensity for sampling and juxtaposing choice bits
with a sensitivity to the ‘magic’ in artmaking,” explains Wayne Baerwaldt [74],
and “Beck openly credits his appropriationist strategies in artmaking and sound
to Al.” [75]
Beck remembers his grandfather as “a great talker on a
vast network of ‘stuff’”:
Elemental and mundane,
his perpetual monologue seemed to be a simulcast of the decades from 1920 to
the ‘90s. No part of his life cancelled out another part, he was always in tune
with the whole aggregation of experiences he’d had. His view seemed to be as
expansive as the massive stores of junk he accumulated anywhere he went.” [76]
 |
| Beck with his grandfather |
Of particular interest, given the unusual themes that
would emerge in his grandson’s oeuvre, are Al Hansen’s reminiscences of the
Second World War, written late in life:
[…] I was a young soldier
in the army of occupation in Frankfurt/Main. Ein Falschirmspringer super
soldaten [sic]. I was like a young firecracker looking for a match. 508th Parachute
Infantry Regiment. Von Runstedt named us “The Red Devils”. I don’t think any
other US combat regiment was named by a German General. The 508 had the most
medals and combat citations of any other American unit in World War II.
We were billeted in
Hedderheim, a suburb of Frankfurt. Our housing area covered many blocks where
stray bombs had hit. The building next to my platoon was open to the sky. No
roof. A pile of rubble in the basement. Going up stairs, if you opened the doors
to the right, you entered apartments. To the left behind each door was the
beginning of a room and a drop. Chairs, tables, pictures on the wall. A floor
lamp. Sometimes the rug on the floor would hang a quarter meter into open
space.
My squad on the platoon
was on the top floor and through the door was such a Magritte scene. A room
intact but open to the sky. Against the wall an upright piano stood. Above it a
landscape picture. It was just a few centimeters from the edge. […]
March or so, 1946,
Hedderheim Frankfurt/Main: One night I got ready for bed, stole up the stairs
opened the door to the room on the stairs and the sky. I lifted the piano a bit
and inched it toward the edge. The floor groaned. I dashed back. Then I tiptoed
forward. Again I pushed it. Klonk! A bit went over the edge. The floor support
beams creaked. I pushed it another few inches. The floor tilted a bit but held.
I kept retreating to the doorway in case the floor suddenly gave way. I was a
paratrooper – quick on my feet. Finally I got it to the point of no return. As
it slid with a roar into the hole, I was through the door, dust wiped from my
feet, and in bed with the covers pulled up playing “heavy sleeper”. […]
Somehow pushing the piano
off a high building seems to me to be Happening/Event Art. [77]
Tellingly, Al’s multiple recollections of the war
betray no ill-feeling toward the Germans, and if anything emphasize the
cataclysmic destruction unleashed on the country by the Allies. “The
devastation in Frankfurt, Köln and Berlin from aerial bombing was awesome; a
surreal, lunar landscape of skeletal buildings, ruins, bomb craters and mounds
of rubble,” he wrote in Notes on a Mini-Retrospective [78].
Complementing his characterization of US paratroopers as “super soldaten”,
moreover, Hansen highlights what seems to be the essential sameness of German
and American servicemen in the following anecdote:
In a Little Rock,
Arkansas night club a veteran soldier asked us young recruits how long we
had been in the army. When we said three months he said he had been in the
front lines of combat longer than that. In a bar in Erlangen a German
war veteran with a wooden leg asked us how long we had been in the army.
When we said four months he said he had been in battles in
the Afrika Korp [sic] with Rommel for longer than that. I
got a feeling of the International condescension of older soldiers for younger
soldiers. [79]
In another text, he refers to people “crouched
attentively over radios and TV sets like characters in old news photos
listening to radio speeches by Churchill or Hitler or Mussolini (depending on
what side the people who run the world decided you would get your news from),”
with Hansen casting the Axis and Allied leaderships as equivalent [80]. In the
course of still another late-career piece of writing, Hansen observes with some
ambiguity that “WWII could be seen to occur because of the threat to
conservatism of information’s increasing ability to disseminate itself – i.e.:
Broadcasting.” [81]
 |
| Al Hansen, proud Viking |
Interestingly, more than one of Hansen’s Fluxus
contemporaries of the sixties were figures whose experiences of the Second
World War were at odds with the Allies’ self-serving mythos of having saved the
world. Following a privileged childhood, Yoko Ono, for one example, first
experienced hardship as a result of the Allied assault on Japan “when her
father was away and her mother fled Tokyo with Yoko and her younger brother
just before the city was firebombed in May 1945. They hid in a farmhouse, where
Yoko remembers gazing at the sky through a roof opening and inventing imaginary
menus to amuse her hungry brother.” [82] Fluxus impresario George Maciunas, a
pervert of vaguely socialistic and authoritarian tendencies, was born in
Lithuania and sought refuge with his mother in Hitler’s collapsing Germany as
the Red Army advanced during the war’s denouement. Maciunas “was a fascist
conservative” in Hansen’s assessment. “That the ideator-founder of such a
curious little art movement (and a very radical one at that) could be a fascist
who cheered when Rockefeller’s National Guardsmen shot down the Attica convicts
in revolutionary cold blood – well, it’s fascinating,” Hansen reflected,
nevertheless deeming Maciunas a “beautiful” person [83]. The deconstructionist and
irreverent Fluxus scene was far from a nationalistic or racialist enterprise,
however, and was given to overtly anti-European as well as anti-American pronouncements.
An influential German artist connected with the scene, Joseph Beuys, had
volunteered for the Luftwaffe during the Second World War and served as an
aircraft radio operator. Evidencing the fascination the German held for Hansen,
the latter opened a retrospective text on Fluxus with this idealized account:
Josef Beuys flew high in
the sky, bombing and strafing in Stukas and Heinkels. He crashed in the
wilderness, was rescued from the wrecked plane and wrapped in felt by a
Siberian shaman. Beuys rose up from the dead as the democratic aesthetic
conscience spirit of modern Germany. [84]
“Beuys, with his felt hat, fishing jacket and personal
mythology is the closest Germany has ever got to producing a rock star,”
Jonathan Jones wrote in a 1999 Guardian profile:
“Everyone an artist” was
Beuys’s most famous saying. Its vagueness (if we are all artists, what is art?)
is exactly the kind of thing that riled his critics. He was accused of spewing
mystical psychobabble, creating an unhealthy personality cult and failing to
face up to Germany’s Nazi past. Once, when he was lecturing in Germany, the
auto-destructive artist Gustav Metzger interrupted to ask: “Every man an
artist, what – Himmler too?” But then Beuys believed in the power of
story-telling and symbol, and his reclamation of German romanticism and German
myth, from woody spirits to Norse gods, made some distinctly queasy.
Most men in their 40s
trying to make a career as an artist in 1960s Germany might have played down
their war experience. Beuys exaggerated his – promoting himself from radio
operator to pilot. “I suppose what he was very open about,” says [Caroline] Tisdall,
“was his feeling that the war for a young man of 19 was a great adventure.”
Beuys never concealed the fact that he had joined the Hitler Youth and enjoyed
the lessons in German myth he got from his Nazi teacher. [85]
A recording also exists of Hansen performing a rather
silly “Joseph Beuys Stuka Dive Bomber Piece” in 1989 [86]. Apart from a certain
vitalistic machismo and pride in his Nordic heritage, there is little about Beck’s
grandfather that could be characterized as fascistic. If anything, Hansen was
of an anarchistic bent and evinced a a philo-Semitic streak. He later married
another Jewish woman, Marvyne Levy Glaser, and his friends and associates
included Auschwitz survivor Ryszard Horowitz [87] and a German artist, Wolf
Vostell, who “took on a rabbinical appearance in his later years, complete with
beard, sidelocks, and a Hasidic wardrobe – an act of solidarity and provocation
in a Germany that had exiled or murdered nearly every Jew within its borders.”
[88] “My major idea, the kind of kid I was in the Army, my major idea was to
somehow or other go into crime,” Hansen confessed in a 1973 interview, “and
maybe go to the Mediterranean or China or Israel and run – this was December
1948 – run guns and smuggle, and have a ball, like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca.”
[89]
What is undeniable, however, is that Hansen harbored
reservations about the American experiment and maintained a nuanced view of his
country’s role in the world before and after the Second World War. A 1984 text
titled Why Shoot Andy Warhol? reveals Hansen to have held certain
boilerplate anti-American sentiments. “Americans and foreign guests were busy
killing all those beautiful Indians who didn’t want their land raped,” he wrote
of the nineteenth century, for example [90]. For Hansen, democracy was a
“pachinko game” in which “all is for private profit rather than for the good of
everybody” [91], and he also approached corporate and government media with
some degree of skepticism: “On the radio we listened for awhile to how Sirhan
Sirhan supposedly shot Bobby Kennedy dead dead in the head head,” he remembered
in 1984: “Polanski and Sharon Tate had been […] discussing witchcraft with
Bobby Kennedy and his wife on a California beach the week before.” [92] Writing
in 1990, Hansen would enigmatically declare that the “people who actually
control the world are phantoms” [93]. The degree to which Hansen influenced not
just his grandson’s artistic sensibility but his political-historical worldview
is a matter of speculation, but it is likely not to have been insignificant
given the “vast network of ‘stuff’” on which Beck remembers his grandfather
holding forth.
The other major force that would sculpt Beck’s racial
consciousness is the hostile environment of a demographically rotting Los
Angeles, obliging him to experience life as a member of a hated white minority.
The “absurdist stream-of-consciousness lyrics” of Beck’s breakthrough hit
“seemed to address the disjointed ragtag aesthetic that characterizes Los
Angeles’ homes, freeways, winding hills, bodegas, barrios, buses, beaches and
hundred and one racial recombinants,” writes Palacios [94]. The future futurist
“grew up around the Pico Union area […] then later down by MacArthur Park
before moving to Hollywood.” [95] “It wasn’t a privileged situation [in
Hollywood],” Beck revealed in 1997: “What I’m doing now is pretty sweet for my
family, because there’s been a lot of struggle for a long, long time.” [96]
 |
| This detail from the Odelay artwork depicts an unusually large-nosed sleeper whose riches, hoarded in bags by his bed, do not prevent visions of death from haunting his dreams. |
Ruben Martinez, writing for The San Francisco
Examiner, pointed out Odelay as one of a number of then-recent
releases that “celebrate” the fact “that living in the big cities of the United
States is increasingly a Latin experience” [97]. Referring to the Pico Union
district of Los Angeles for a 1996 Los Angeles Times profile, Beck cites
the influence of the cultural incoherence of “walking on the street and hearing
hip-hop coming out of one car and ranchera music coming out of another”
[98], and Beck’s love of both rap and Latin music is indisputably sincere, but the
record of his assessments of Los Angeles and his recollections of his youth
there are mixed. “Beck’s experience of school in California was a frustrating
one,” writes Palacios:
He had few friends, and
frequently wandered the halls of his school in a daze, feeling out of place and
bored with the repetitious and unimaginative lessons. Moreover, the threat of
being beaten up in the high stakes of violence endemic in American high school
education was a very real worry. “The local high school was one of the worst in
the country,” he later reflected. “It had a gun security check, metal detectors
at the entrances – this was in the 1980s. Besides, walking the three blocks to
the bus stop just to go anywhere was already [a] little sketchy. I was pretty
much chased all the time.” Beck left school at fourteen, completing junior
high, and never returned […]” [99]
“Beck lived most of his younger life up in Hollywood
Hills, but then his mother decided to make the move down to the lower class
area around 10th and Hoover [in Pico Union] upon her divorce,” writes Martell [100].
When Beck was fourteen, Bibbe met her second husband, a Mexican-American art
scenester named Sean Carrillo. Biographies make no mention of tension between
Beck and his young stepfather. “Even now I feel more comfortable being around
Mexican people than anyone else,” Beck has claimed: “I can feel out of place
with other people, but not with them.” [101] His father’s replacement by a
Mexican in his mother’s bed must, however, have reinforced a sense of white
displacement and defeat. Living in a one-room apartment in a Salvadoran
neighborhood, near Koreatown, “the lack of space meant that Beck slept in a
sleeping bag under the kitchen table sometimes,” Palacios reveals [102].
Interestingly, a sleeping bag shows up in the lyrics of “Blackhole”, which
closes Mellow Gold and introduces a “Stranger” into the world of a
“little boy / Layin’ in a sleeping bag / Watching, watching / Through the
cracks in his eyelids.” Two songs from Stereopathetic Soulmanure,
moreover, attach decidedly negative associations to Mexican cuisine, as in
“Satan Gave Me a Taco”:
Satan gave me a taco and
it made me really sick
The chicken was all raw and the grease was mighty thick
The rice was all rancid and the beans were so hard
I was getting kinda dizzy eating all the lard
There was aphids on the lettuce and I ate every one
And after I was done, the salsa melted off my tongue
Pieces of tortilla got stuck in my throat
And the stains on my clothes burned a hole through my coat
My stomach was a-trembling and I broke out in a rash
I was so dry and thirsty, and I didn’t have no cash
“Thunder Peel”, meanwhile, links Mexican food with
disorientation, illness, and sexual humiliation: “Now I’m rolling in sweat with
a loaf of cold bread / And a taco in my jeans.”
Sophie Rachmuhl’s 1988 documentary Innerscapes: Ten
Portraits of Los Angeles Poets includes a segment featuring a teenage Beck
alongside his younger brother Channing, who during the mid-eighties
collaborated on an art and poetry zine called Youthless. The segment
reveals two serious-minded young men inhabiting a politicized and decidedly
leftist milieu, with Channing reading a 1986 poem, “Let’s Leave”, decrying wars
and “fuckin’ racist games”. Unfortunately for the two boys, their social
environment fell short of embodying the anti-racist ideals with which they had
been inculcated.
Beck “was one of the two white teenagers (the other
being his brother) in a neighborhood which resounded to the sounds of ranchera
music and hip-hop, and as a result felt little in common with the white culture
of America’s suburbs,” Palacios writes:
By the same token, he
couldn’t fit in with the Salvadoran or Korean gangs in the area: “to them I was
the guero, the weird white kid.” […] “A lot of drugs, a lot of refugees
from the Central American wars. It wasn’t the safest place […] I remember
walking to the bus in the morning to go to school and there’d be roosters and
chickens running through the street and mariachis passed out on the sidewalk.”
[103]
Beck would give the title Guero to his 2005
album, indicating that the experience of being “the weird white kid” in a sea
of foreigners was impactful in forming his identity. One is also tempted to
wonder whether “perdedor”, the Spanish term he uses to describe himself
in “Loser”, was vocabulary he picked up on the receiving end of verbal abuse
from peers. An interview that appeared in the Calgary Herald in
September of 1997 finds Beck speaking defensively on the subject of his race
and the matter of cultural appropriation:
It upsets me that people
see me as a colonizer. Who’s to judge? I grew up in a Salvadoran-Korean ghetto.
To me, this is the street culture I grew up in. If I’d grown up in white
suburbia, I could understand it, but that’s not my background. [104]
The area was genuinely dangerous. “One night when
Bibbe was home alone, a gangster tried to break in through the front door with
a crowbar,” Palacios relates: “Later, during the LA riots the whole
neighbourhood got torched except for the houses on their block.” [105] As
adolescents, “Beck, his younger brother Channing and sundry friends would risk
getting beaten up to attend block parties in East Los Angeles where rap music
blasted out of makeshift speakers” [106]. Simultaneously, however, Beck found
himself drawn toward the European-American past. “Beck would try to get out of
the house as much as possible, heading to the library,” Palacios notes: “He
loved reading about the history of the Old West” [107] – a period of
unapologetic European expansiveness, struggle, and conquest that presents a
stark contrast to the decaying California in which Beck found himself.
“It’s such a blank slate, a generic city: you can make
it whatever you want,” Beck said in one of his more charitable soundbites on
Los Angeles: “Neighborhoods are transformed overnight. You’ll have some white
middle-class suburb, and within seven years it’s the biggest Chinese population
outside of China. I dig that.” [108] One wonders, however, if such statements
are more reflective of Beck’s actual feelings or what he assumed his
interviewer wanted to hear. “I grew up hating [LA],” he confessed his
alienation on another occasion:
Sometimes it has this
feeling of a deserted place; there’s millions and millions of people but they
are all in their cars and houses. […] As an adult, I came to realize it was a
part of me. If you hate it, you end up hating a part of yourself. So eventually
I was reconciled with the fact that this is me whether I like it or not. [109]
“Los Angeles is full of foolish, tragic and scary
people,” he said in a grimmer evaluation: “Especially the rich people, living
in their glass bubble. The city has disgusting sides […] Los Angeles is in many
ways a pathetic city without a soul.” [110] Beck, in contrast to the
ostentatious lifestyles of the city’s elites, ran through a wild succession of
uninspiring low-wage jobs as his “misfit presence repeatedly got in the way of
holding down steady employment.” Among other stints, he “mowed lawns for Los
Angeles’ wealthier citizens, whose houses ascend the hills, in a vertical scale
of relative earnings,” and “was also a hot dog man at children’s birthday
parties,” Palacios details:
Beck remembered one hot
dog gig in particular: “The party was at a rich spread in Brentwood, on a big
tennis court turned into a roller skating rink. It was a lot of work carrying
the hot dogs and the cart with the umbrella up the endless stairs. The girls
were seven or eight years old and real snooty – too snooty to even eat hot
dogs. We got stiffed on the fifteen dollar pay and stuck with two hundred hot
dogs.” [111]
He was working in a garment factory in South Central when
he decided to strike out and try his luck in New York before resigning himself and
settling down to what looked to be a life of menial labor [112]. “Maybe it was
all those years of reading Kerouac and Bukowski, or the stories of my
grandfather, or being descended from nomads, but I wanted to get out there and
see what was going on,” Beck said of the adventure that would forge his
songwriting abilities [113]. Here, in another of the world’s wealth capitals,
Beck would have to scrounge to survive, bumming lodgings and staying in an
“awful rooming house” full of “welfare case families” [114]. “The lack of
regular food or shelter paled in comparison to the riches on offer” in the Lower
East Side’s anti-folk scene, however, writes Palacios [115]. Following a
sojourn in Europe to visit his grandfather, Beck was back in New York, ended up
homeless after being cheated out of several hundred dollars, and early in 1991
decided to head home to California [116].
Beck can hardly have remained unaware of the stark
disparities in wealth and power between Jew and gentile that define the
entertainment anus of the world. “I was living in a shed behind a house with a
bunch of rats, next to an alley downtown,” Beck recalled of the lean period
following his return to Los Angeles: “I had zero money and zero possibilities.
I was working in a video store doing things like alphabetizing the pornography
section for the minimum wage.” [117] “And Beck actually used to live in a
shack,” recalls Ross Harris, co-screenwriter of Southlander (2001), one
sequence of which recreates Beck’s early shed-bound recording process. “When I
first met him, I couldn’t believe it, it was like a tiny little shack.” “I
remember one shack I went to, that Beck was in,” Steve Hanft adds, “and he was
all gettin’ sick because there was dudes tagging the back of the shack,
spray-painting, and all these fumes were coming in […] He’s like, ‘We can’t
tell ‘em to stop, they’re gangbangers, they’ll kill us.’” [118] This,
presumably, is the “suicide shack” referenced in “Hotwax”.
“Beck’s songs of this [early nineties] period refer
again and again to being pulled apart by predatory forces, though whether from
within or without is ambiguous at best,” observes Palacios [119]. These harsh
but productive years also find him incorporating the themes of vermin and
parasitism, as in “Pay No Mind”, “Put It in Neutral”, and “Loser”, an
interesting development given the artist’s somewhat nebulous relationship with
Scientology through his father. The Church of Scientology is usually
characterized as a cult, but has also been described as a system of
specifically goyish networking within the Jewish-dominated entertainment
industry, with notable celebrity converts like Kirstie Alley, Tom Cruise, and
John Travolta being gentiles. Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard
seems to have harbored anti-Semitic sentiments [120], was an open defender of
the Apartheid government of Hendrik Verwoerd, and even invited former Nazi
propagandist Leni Riefenstahl to South Africa to make a film about the country
– a project that never materialized – and Hubbard and Riefenstahl also collaborated
on a screenplay for a remake of The Blue Light that was never filmed [121].
The German government of today keeps the Church of Scientology under
surveillance as an “extremist political organization”, regarding with suspicion
Scientology’s criticisms of “parasites” standing in the way of world peace [122].
Beck has made conflicting statements regarding his
relationship with Scientology, ultimately distancing himself from the Church –
at least publicly [123] – but Odelay’s “
Music critic David Yaffe recognized Beck in the
nineties as “a funny Jew” who “could rap, sample, and kind of dance, but with
borscht belt timing” as in “High 5 (Rock the Catskills)”. However:
Soon he would be neither
funny nor a Jew. Early on, he would emphasize his Jewish heritage with
interviewers – and, just like he was enough of a rebel to drop out of ninth
grade, he missed his bar mitzvah, too, but who cared? He was, apparently, in
the tradition of Dylan and Cohen and Reed and The Beastie Boys. Before
“hipster” became a dirty word, he was hipster royalty. […]
By the new millennium,
Beck would begin to lose things for real, and even if it wasn’t fatal, his pain
was unmistakable. His girlfriend of nine years [Leigh Limon] left him, and he
ended up marrying Marissa Ribisi, who was not only a Scientologist, but who was
actually delivered by Beck’s mother, also a Scientologist.
(Followers of L. Ron Hubbard do home births.) It turned out that Beck was barely a
funny Jew […]
The second half of The
Information (2006) has an awful lot about spaceships and aliens, and
unlike Radiohead’s OK Computer, it’s not intentionally about
paranoia; in its L. Ron Hubbard version of reality, it’s serious.
“That funny Jew of Odelay might be in
remission for now, but he’s not quite dead,” Yaffe concludes: “He’s been in
pain, but will not go the Kurt Cobain route. He might come back, but with a
humor as dark as Kafka or Philip Roth or even good old Leonard Cohen.” [126] It
may be that Beck has long been of a divided mind and afflicted with the “Cut in Half Blues”, to borrow the title of one of his earliest songs. In 1997, when he
accepted the VH1 Fashion Awards honor for Most Fashionable Artist, Beck thanked
“Leigh Limon for her impeccable guidance whether I am attired in uniform or
civilian clothes, […] jackboots or skullcap” [127] – as if Nazi and Jew are two
poles of an identity spectrum on which Beck had been operating.
A 2019 article in The Independent noted that
Beck had been “reticent on the subject of Donald Trump” [131] – a conspicuous
observation given the general vociferousness with which the entertainment
industry lent its clout to “The Resistance”. The reticence perhaps becomes more
noteworthy when one considers merchandise recently added to the wares at Beck’s
official online shop. Fans can, for example, purchase t-shirts with cartoon
frogs or an “eyetning bolt” design. The circled bolt of the iris may recall the
famous insignia of the Grateful Dead or the lightning-bolt artwork previously packaged
with The Information, but it is not entirely dissimilar from the emblem
of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Also offered are a hat or a patch
with a “bolt skull” design, which arguably approximates a fusion of the doppelte
Siegrune and Totenkopf symbols used by Himmler’s Schutzstaffel.
“Smart pop is rare enough to be exceptional, but
anything truly intelligent, elusive and subversive in pop music that can play
on the debased stage of media spectacle is truly an anomaly,” writes Carlo McCormick,
who concludes, “By these terms alone, Beck Hansen is remarkable.” [132] “Beck
operates as the inside outsider, creating his own rules and living his own
game,” opines Martell [133]. Most impressively, Beck fashioned a ditty so
original and so inescapably catchy that even Viacom was obliged to put this casual,
barely encrypted instance of Holocaust denial into heavy rotation as an MTV
“Buzz Clip”. Far from losing, as Mark Brown put it in the opening line of his
1996 profile, “Beck won.” [134]
Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.
Endnotes
[1] Baerwaldt, Wayne, et al. Beck and Al Hansen:
Playing with Matches. Santa Monica, CA: Smart Art Press, 1998, p. 138.
[2] Palacios, Julian. Beck: Beautiful Monstrosity.
London: Macmillan, 2000, p. 71.
[3] Martell, Nevin. Beck: The Art of Mutation.
New York, NY: Pocket Books, 2001, p. 14.
[4] Gilbreath, Aaron. “Chokin’ on a Breath Mint: The
Sound of Early Beck”. Alive in the Nineties (June 26, 2021): https://aarongilbreath.substack.com/p/chokin-on-a-breath-mint-the-sound
[5] Hansen, Al. “Art” in Baerwaldt, Wayne, et al. Beck
and Al Hansen: Playing with Matches. Santa Monica, CA: Smart Art Press,
1998, p. 132.
[6] Martell, Nevin. Beck: The Art of Mutation.
New York, NY: Pocket Books, 2001, p. vii.
[7] Baerwaldt, Wayne. “On My Head I Take the Risk” in
Baerwaldt, Wayne, et al. Beck and Al Hansen: Playing with Matches. Santa
Monica, CA: Smart Art Press, 1998, p. 34.
[8] Palacios, Julian. Beck: Beautiful Monstrosity.
London: Macmillan, 2000, p. 64.
[9] Martell, Nevin. Beck: The Art of Mutation.
New York, NY: Pocket Books, 2001, p. 89.
[10] Ibid., p. 38.
[11] Ibid., p. 24.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Brown, Mark. “Beck’s Not Your Everyday Loser”.
[York County, ME] Journal Tribune Weekend (October 12, 1996), p. B3.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Martell, Nevin. Beck: The Art of Mutation.
New York, NY: Pocket Books, 2001, p. 105.
[16] Ibid., p. 66.
[17] Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Boston, MA:
Mariner, 1999, p. 57.
[18] Uitti, Jacob. “Meaning Behind the Suburban Rap
Hit ‘Loser’ by Beck”. American Songwriter (2023): https://americansongwriter.com/meaning-behind-the-suburban-rap-hit-loser-by-beck/
[19] Hochman, Steve. “Public Enemy Lyrics Rekindle
Controversy”. Los Angeles Times (December 30, 1989): https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-12-30-ca-874-story.html
[20] Palacios, Julian. Beck: Beautiful Monstrosity.
London: Macmillan, 2000, p. 55.
[21] Klein, Christopher. “Did Benjamin Franklin Really
Propose the Turkey as the National Symbol?” History (November 21, 2016):
https://www.history.com/news/did-benjamin-franklin-propose-the-turkey-as-the-national-symbol
[22] McDonald, Hannah. “What’s the Difference Between
Pigeons and Doves?” Mental Floss (August 17, 2018): https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/554182/what-is-difference-between-pigeons-and-doves
[23] Posner, Menachem. “What Is the Symbolism Behind
the Dove in Jewish Literature?” Chabad.org: https://archive.is/ssSqr
[24] Weiss, Shoshanah. “The Jewish People and the
Dove: A Symbol of Peace, Healing, and Hope”. NY Jewish Week (May 18,
2020): https://archive.is/E5blr
[25] Palacios, Julian. Beck: Beautiful Monstrosity.
London: Macmillan, 2000, p. 71.
[26] Martell, Nevin. Beck: The Art of Mutation.
New York, NY: Pocket Books, 2001, p. 14.
[27] Baker, Russ. “Classic Who: GHW Bush and the JFK
Assassination”. Who What Why (October 24, 2017): https://archive.is/qdQcO
[28] Hilburn, Robert. “‘Dream’ Deferred No More”. Los
Angeles Times (November 16, 1997) [Calendar section], p. 75.
[29] Palacios, Julian. Beck: Beautiful Monstrosity.
London: Macmillan, 2000, p. 78.
[30] Klein, Christopher. “The Real History That
Inspired Star Wars”. History (December 17, 2015): https://www.history.com/news/the-real-history-that-inspired-star-wars
[31] Martell, Nevin. Beck: The Art of Mutation.
New York, NY: Pocket Books, 2001, p. 10.
[32] Ibid.
[33] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5iJLNT59VE
[34] Palacios, Julian. Beck: Beautiful Monstrosity.
London: Macmillan, 2000, p. 83.
[35] Ibid., p. 74.
[36] Martell, Nevin. Beck: The Art of Mutation.
New York, NY: Pocket Books, 2001, p. 15.
[37] Palacios, Julian. Beck: Beautiful Monstrosity.
London: Macmillan, 2000, p. 80.
[38] Ibid., p. 77.
[39] Martell, Nevin. Beck: The Art of Mutation.
New York, NY: Pocket Books, 2001, p. 23.
[40] Ibid., p. 21.
[41] Ibid., pp. 21-22.
[42] Ibid., p. 22.
[43] Palacios, Julian. Beck: Beautiful Monstrosity.
London: Macmillan, 2000, p. 78.
[44] Ibid., p. 73.
[45] Ibid., p. 64.
[46] https://whiskeyclone.net/ghost/songinfo.php?songID=62
[47] Palacios, Julian. Beck: Beautiful Monstrosity.
London: Macmillan, 2000, p. 80.
[48] Martell, Nevin. Beck: The Art of Mutation.
New York, NY: Pocket Books, 2001, p. 41.
[49] Ibid., p. 50.
[50] Ibid., pp. 60-61.
[51] Baerwaldt, Wayne, et al. Beck and Al Hansen:
Playing with Matches. Santa Monica, CA: Smart Art Press, 1998, p. 44.
[52] Martell, Nevin. Beck: The Art of Mutation.
New York, NY: Pocket Books, 2001, p. 81.
[53] McCormick, Carlo. “Interview with Beck Hansen” in
Baerwaldt, Wayne, et al. Beck and Al Hansen: Playing with Matches. Santa
Monica, CA: Smart Art Press, 1998, p. 68.
[54] Palacios, Julian. Beck: Beautiful Monstrosity.
London: Macmillan, 2000, p. 75.
[55] Ibid., p. 14.
[57] Palacios, Julian. Beck: Beautiful Monstrosity.
London: Macmillan, 2000, p. 18.
[58] McLeod, Kembrew. “Prairie Pop: Bibbe Hansen’s
Rebellious History and Dynamic Legacy”. Little Village (January 17,
2017): https://archive.is/hvMRM
[59] Jovanovic, Rob. Beck! On a Backwards River:
The Story of Beck. New York, NY: Fromm International, 2001, p. 10.
[60] Palacios, Julian. Beck: Beautiful Monstrosity.
London: Macmillan, 2000, p. 31.
[61] Ibid., p. 32.
[62] Martell, Nevin. Beck: The Art of Mutation.
New York, NY: Pocket Books, 2001, p. 5.
[63] Ibid.
[64] McAlley, John. “Reverberation: The Beck
Sessions”. Spin (July 8, 2014): https://www.spin.com/2014/07/reverberation-beck-sessions-cover-story-september-2008/
[65] Palacios, Julian. Beck: Beautiful Monstrosity.
London: Macmillan, 2000, p. 50.
[66] Jovanovic, Rob. Beck! On a Backwards River:
The Story of Beck. New York, NY: Fromm International, 2001, p. 13.
[67] Ibid., p. 10.
[68] McCormick, Carlo. “Interview with Beck Hansen” in
Baerwaldt, Wayne, et al. Beck and Al Hansen: Playing with Matches. Santa
Monica, CA: Smart Art Press, 1998, p. 57.
[69] Baerwaldt, Wayne. “On My Head I Take the Risk” in
Baerwaldt, Wayne, et al. Beck and Al Hansen: Playing with Matches. Santa
Monica, CA: Smart Art Press, 1998, p. 36.
[70] Martell, Nevin. Beck: The Art of Mutation.
New York, NY: Pocket Books, 2001, p. 5.
[71] Baerwaldt, Wayne. “On My Head I Take the Risk” in
Baerwaldt, Wayne, et al. Beck and Al Hansen: Playing with Matches. Santa
Monica, CA: Smart Art Press, 1998, p. 42.
[72] Ibid., p. 12.
[73] Hansen, Beck. “Masai Ticket for Al” in Baerwaldt,
Wayne, et al. Beck and Al Hansen: Playing with Matches. Santa Monica,
CA: Smart Art Press, 1998, p. 20.
[74] Baerwaldt, Wayne. “On My Head I Take the Risk” in
Baerwaldt, Wayne, et al. Beck and Al Hansen: Playing with Matches. Santa
Monica, CA: Smart Art Press, 1998, p. 30.
[75] Ibid., p. 38.
[76] Ibid., p. 34.
[77] Hansen, Al. “Al Hansen on Fluxus” in Baerwaldt,
Wayne, et al. Beck and Al Hansen: Playing with Matches. Santa Monica,
CA: Smart Art Press, 1998, pp. 83-84.
[79] Ibid.
[80] Baerwaldt, Wayne, et al. Beck and Al Hansen:
Playing with Matches. Santa Monica, CA: Smart Art Press, 1998, p. 63.
[81] Hansen, Al. “Al Hansen on Fluxus” in Baerwaldt,
Wayne, et al. Beck and Al Hansen: Playing with Matches. Santa Monica,
CA: Smart Art Press, 1998, p. 81.
[82] Abbe, Mary. “Looking Up”. [Minneapolis] Star
Tribune (March 9, 2001), p. F24.
[83] Hansen, Al. “Al Hansen on Fluxus” in Baerwaldt,
Wayne, et al. Beck and Al Hansen: Playing with Matches. Santa Monica,
CA: Smart Art Press, 1998, pp. 82-83.
[84] Ibid., p. 81.
[85] Jones, Jonathan. “The Man Who Fell to Earth”. The
Guardian (July 18, 1999): https://www.theguardian.com/culture/1999/jul/19/artsfeatures2
[86] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdN3BaEP7vs
[88] O’Brien, Glenn. “TV Guide: Wolf Vostell
Reconsidered”. Artforum (April 2001): https://www.artforum.com/features/tv-guide-wolf-vostell-reconsidered-162507/
[89] Cummings, Paul. “Oral History Interview with Al
Hansen”. Archives of American Art (November 6-13, 1973): https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-al-hansen-12668
[90] Baerwaldt, Wayne, et al. Beck and Al Hansen:
Playing with Matches. Santa Monica, CA: Smart Art Press, 1998, p. 63.
[91] Baerwaldt, Wayne. “On My Head I Take the Risk” in
Baerwaldt, Wayne, et al. Beck and Al Hansen: Playing with Matches. Santa
Monica, CA: Smart Art Press, 1998, p. 18.
[92] Baerwaldt, Wayne, et al. Beck and Al Hansen:
Playing with Matches. Santa Monica, CA: Smart Art Press, 1998, p. 63.
[93] Ibid., p. 123.
[94] Palacios, Julian. Beck: Beautiful Monstrosity.
London: Macmillan, 2000, p. 74.
[95] Ibid., p. 33.
[96] Ibid., p. 32.
[97] Martinez, Ruben. “The New American City – Black
and Brown”. The San Francisco Examiner (February 10, 1997), p. A-19.
[98] Cromelin, Richard. “Nobody’s Fool”. Los
Angeles Times [Calendar section] (July 21, 1996), p. 78.
[99] Palacios, Julian. Beck: Beautiful Monstrosity.
London: Macmillan, 2000, p. 36.
[100] Martell, Nevin. Beck: The Art of Mutation.
New York, NY: Pocket Books, 2001, p. 6.
[101] Palacios, Julian. Beck: Beautiful Monstrosity.
London: Macmillan, 2000, p. 41.
[102] Ibid.
[103] Ibid., p. 50.
[104] Monk, Katherine. “Pop Icon Makes His Own Music”.
Calgary Herald (September 28, 1997), p. E2.
[105] Palacios, Julian. Beck: Beautiful Monstrosity.
London: Macmillan, 2000, p. 41.
[106] Ibid., p. 49.
[107] Ibid., p. 37.
[108] Ibid.
[109] Martell, Nevin. Beck: The Art of Mutation.
New York, NY: Pocket Books, 2001, p. 7.
[110] Palacios, Julian. Beck: Beautiful Monstrosity.
London: Macmillan, 2000, p. 38.
[111] Ibid., p. 57.
[112] Ibid., p. 60.
[113] Martell, Nevin. Beck: The Art of Mutation.
New York, NY: Pocket Books, 2001, p. 8.
[114] Palacios, Julian. Beck: Beautiful Monstrosity.
London: Macmillan, 2000, p. 66.
[115] Ibid., p. 64.
[116] Ibid., p. 67.
[117] Ibid., pp. 69-70.
[118] Hanft, Steve; and Ross Harris. “Commentary
Track”. Southlander [DVD]. Pottstown, PA: MVD, 2016.
[119] Palacios, Julian. Beck: Beautiful Monstrosity.
London: Macmillan, 2000, pp. 75-76.
[120] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghz5a-bqrAM
[121] Ortega, Tony. “The Untold Story of Scientology
Founder L. Ron Hubbard’s Secret Pact with Nazi Propagandist Leni Riefenstahl”. The
Daily Beast (May 30, 2021): https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-untold-story-of-scientology-founder-l-ron-hubbards-secret-pact-with-nazi-propagandist-leni-riefenstahl
[122] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_in_Germany
[123] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beck#Personal_life
[124] Palacios, Julian. Beck: Beautiful Monstrosity.
London: Macmillan, 2000, p. 130.
[125] Amsden, David. “Conspiracy of Two”. New York
(August 16, 2007): https://nymag.com/news/features/36091/
[126] Yaffe, David. “It Takes a Lot to Laugh: The
Parody and Pain of Beck”. Tablet (February 17, 2014): https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/beck-morning-phase
[127] Jovanovic, Rob. Beck! On a Backwards River:
The Story of Beck. New York, NY: Fromm International, 2001, p. 111.
[128] Palacios, Julian. Beck: Beautiful Monstrosity.
London: Macmillan, 2000, p. 15.
[129]. Peinovich, Mike. Prep in Yet Another Snow Day”.
The Right Stuff (January 19, 2024): https://therightstuff.biz/2024/01/19/prep-in-yet-another-snow-day/
[130] https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-ebdd-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
[131] Beaumont, Mark. “Beck: ‘Working with Pharrell
Was a Leap of Faith and Curiosity’”. The Independent (November 18,
2019): https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/beck-interview-hyperspace-album-release-date-pharrell-scientology-a9203356.html
[132] McCormick, Carlo. “Interview with Beck Hansen”
in Baerwaldt, Wayne, et al. Beck and Al Hansen: Playing with Matches.
Santa Monica, CA: Smart Art Press, 1998, p. 57.
[133] Martell, Nevin. Beck: The Art of Mutation.
New York, NY: Pocket Books, 2001, pp. 104-105.
[134] Brown, Mark. “Beck’s Not Your Everyday Loser”.
[York County, ME] Journal Tribune Weekend (October 12, 1996), p. B3.
Remember that mock interview that Beck did on MTV when one of the Beastie Boys was interviewing him? The question was "what are your influences?" and Beck just looked at the interviewer, took off his shoe, and threw it in the corner. It was pretty good.
ReplyDeleteIt was Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth:
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdzY49xlvdY
You sure love pitching us those curveballs!
ReplyDeleteSo, assuming I read that right, you're making the case that Beck is a Jewish "holocaust denier"?
Sehr interessant, aber seltsam.
Ha ha!
Shine on you crazy diamond!
The thing is, he isn't a very Jewish "Jew", being only 1/8 Ashkenazi as far as I can ascertain. I think he's probably been conflicted for a lot of his life.
DeleteI bet he got bullied a lot in Hebrew school.
DeleteLOL!