Beck

It's a perfect match, really. An artist who's made a career out of refashioning musical kitsch to his own inscrutable ends plays a venue refashioned out of a massive, gold-encrusted, Art-Deco movie-palace and former televangelism center in Washington Heights. It's Beck at the United Palace Theatre!

The pop mystic seems to be out of a record deal as his latest album, Modern Guilt, concludes his contract with DGC Records. Of course, Beck is totally chill about it. "I haven't bothered to plan anything," he told the Times Dave Itzkoff earlier this month. "I don't know where the record business is going to be in six months.  read more »

Why should anyone care about Beck? Isn’t he just some 90's holdover gone morose, gone Scientologist, gone lame with the weight of his early successes and the death of irony, that vein he mined so long and so well?

His last two releases, the aimless Guero and the overworked yet hollow The Information were critically shrugged at and popularly buoyed by the artist’s (deserved) reputation, but seemed to have found Beck Hansen short on good ideas or good energy, something for which he was never, ever lacking.

Yet the father of two is nearing 40, at the tail end of his recording contract, undetermined as to his future, and like the rest of us looking at the abyss that is the future of music.  read more »