Beck (river)

Beck David Hansen (born Bek David Campbell; July 8, 1970), known mononymously as Beck, is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer. He rose to fame in the early 1990s with his experimental and lo-fi style, and became known for creating musical collages of wide-ranging genres. He has musically encompassed folk, funk, soul, hip hop, electronica, alternative rock, country, and psychedelia. He has released 14 studio albums (three of which were released on indie labels), as well as several non-album singles and a book of sheet music.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Beck gravitated towards hip hop and folk in his teens and began to perform locally at coffeehouses and clubs. He moved to New York City in 1989 and became involved in the city's anti-folk movement. Returning to Los Angeles in the early 1990s, he saw his commercial breakthrough with his 1993 single " Loser." After signing with DGC Records, the song peaked at number ten on the ''Billboard'' Hot 100 and served as lead single for his third album and major label debut, ''Mellow Gold'' (1994). Its follow-up, ''Odelay'' (1996), topped critic polls and won several awards. He released the country-influenced, twangy ''Mutations'' in 1998, and the funk-infused ''Midnite Vultures'' in 1999. The soft-acoustic '' Sea Change'' in 2002 showcased a more serious Beck, and 2005's '' Guero'' returned to ''Odelay''s sample-based production. '' The Information'' in 2006 was inspired by electro-funk, hip hop, and psychedelia; 2008's ''Modern Guilt'' was inspired by 1960s pop; and 2014's folk-infused ''Morning Phase'' won Album of the Year at the 57th Grammy Awards. His 2017 album, ''Colors'', won awards for Best Alternative Music Album and Best Engineered Album, Non-classical at the 61st Annual Grammy Awards. His fourteenth studio album, ''Hyperspace'', was released on November 22, 2019. In 2022, Beck was nominated for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

With a pop art collage of musical styles, oblique and ironic lyrics, and postmodern arrangements incorporating samples, drum machines, live instrumentation and sound effects, Beck has been hailed by critics and the public throughout his musical career as being among the most idiosyncratically creative musicians of 1990s and 2000s alternative rock. Two of Beck's most popular and acclaimed recordings are ''Odelay'' and ''Sea Change'', both of which were ranked on ''Rolling Stone'' list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Beck is a four-time platinum artist; he has collaborated with several artists and has made several contributions to soundtracks.

Early life

Bek David Campbell was born in Los Angeles on July 8, 1970, the son of American visual artist Bibbe Hansen and Canadian arranger, composer, and conductor David Campbell.George-Warren, Holly and Romanowski, Patricia. (2001). ''The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll''. New York: Fireside, 1136 pp. First edition, 2001. Bibbe Hansen grew up amid Andy Warhol's The Factory art scene of the 1960s in New York City and was a Warhol superstar. She moved to California at 17 and met David Campbell. Beck's maternal grandfather, artist Al Hansen, was of Norwegian descent and was a pioneer in the avant-garde Fluxus movement. Beck's maternal grandmother was Jewish; he has said that he considers himself Jewish because he was "raised celebrating Jewish holidays."

Beck was born in a rooming house near downtown Los Angeles. As a child he lived in a declining neighborhood near Hollywood Boulevard. He remembers "By the time we left there, they were ripping out miles of houses en masse and building low-rent, giant apartment blocks." The working-class family struggled financially, moving to Hoover and Ninth Street, a neighborhood populated primarily by Koreans and Salvadorian refugees. He was sent for a time to live with his paternal grandparents in Kansas; he later remarked that he thought "they were kind of concerned" about his "weird" home life. Because his paternal grandfather was a Presbyterian minister, Beck grew up influenced by church music and hymns. He also spent time in Europe with his maternal grandfather.

After his parents separated when he was 10, Beck stayed with his mother and brother Channing in Los Angeles, where he was influenced by the city's diverse musical offerings—everything from hip hop to Latin music and his mother's art scene—all of which would later reappear in his work. Beck obtained his first guitar at 16 and became a street musician, often playing Lead Belly covers at Lafayette Park. During his teens, Beck discovered the music of Sonic Youth, Pussy Galore, and X, but remained uninterested in most music outside the folk genre until many years into his career. The first contemporary music that made a direct connection with Beck was hip hop, which he first heard on Grandmaster Flash records in the early 1980s. Growing up in a predominantly Latin district, he found himself the only white child at his school, and quickly learned how to breakdance. When he was 17, Beck grew fascinated after hearing a Mississippi John Hurt record at a friend's house, and spent hours in his room trying to emulate Hurt's finger-picking techniques. Shortly thereafter Beck explored blues and folk music further, discovering Woody Guthrie and Blind Willie Johnson.

Feeling like "a total outcast", Beck dropped out of school after junior high. He later said that although he felt school was important, he felt unsafe there. When he applied to the new performing arts high school downtown, he was rejected. His brother took him to post-Beat jazz places in Echo Park and Silver Lake. He hung out at Los Angeles City College perusing records, books, and old sheet music in the college's library. He used a fake ID to sit in on classes there, and he also befriended a literature instructor and his poet wife. He worked at a string of odd jobs, including loading trucks and operating a leaf blower.

Career

Early performances and first releases (1988–1993)

Beck began as a folk musician, switching between country blues, Delta blues, and more traditional rural folk music in his teenage years. He began performing on city buses, often covering Mississippi John Hurt alongside original, sometimes improvisational compositions. "I'd get on the bus and start playing Mississippi John Hurt with totally improvised lyrics. Some drunk would start yelling at me, calling me Axl Rose. So I'd start singing about Axl Rose and the levee and bus passes and strychnine, mixing the whole thing up", he later recalled. He was also in a band called Youthless that hosted Dadaist-inspired freeform events at city coffee shops. "We had Radio Shack mics and this homemade speaker and we'd draft people in the audience to recite comic books or do a beatbox

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