Beck
Created | Updated Feb 10, 2002
Every now and again comes a musician who melts between musical styles, who creates new sounds and influences new ways of musical experimentation...... Beck is one of these people.
BECK seemed to spring from nowhere to bring a completely fresh sound to pop music. Influenced by blues and also by rap and punk artists, he has woven the together the strings of musical time to make records that combine folk, blues, and hip-hop in an original and fresh new way. No mater how hard you try you cannot label Beck and his music.
Born Beck David Campbell, he spent his childhood in Kansas City, where he lived with his paternal grandfather, a Presbyterian minister, and also at his mother's home in Los Angeles. Beck's mother, Bibbe Hansen, spent time in Andy Warhol's New York Factory scene in the sixties, appearing in the unreleased film 'Prison' with Edie Sedgwick. In the early eighties, Hansen opened her home to L.A.'s hard-core punk community, whose members only slightly influenced her young son.
Dropping out of school following junior high, Beck began playing music on the streets of Los Angeles. By 1989, he had moved to New York. In the city's East Village clubs like Chameleon and ABC No Rio, an underground "anti-folk" scene — a radical deconstruction of the traditional folk that had dominated the Village in the sixties and seventies — was thriving, and there Beck honed his craft. He gravitated back to the West Coast in 1991, working in a video store and scaring up gigs in punk clubs whenever he could.
Beck is a brilliant musician who crosses the boundries between musical styles quicker than you can say 'Odelay'. After releasing the song 'Loser' and the album 'Mellow Gold' in the mid 90's Beck shot to the top of the charts and has become one of the most respected contemporary musicians around.
More coming soon