“Mixed Bizness” – Beck
(Words/music: Beck, available on Midnight Vultures, DGC 1999)

Beck rightfully owns the reputation as a songwriter who can manipulate genres.  Sometimes, I’m skeptical of such a scattershot approach to genre, feeling like it’s eclecticism without a purpose.  In some cases, it feels like pandering to people with different taste at the sake of losing one’s own taste – doing a bunch of things in a mediocre manner rather than becoming skilled at a handful.  Beck’s blurred genres feels like the exact opposite – specifically, his eclecticism reveals his taste and skill as a songwriter.  He manages to utilize fragments from different styles and put them to use to create something that sounds distinctly recognizable.  It’s impossible to mistake a Beck song for anyone else, regardless of the point in his career or the evolution of his sound.  Amazingly, Beck’s used scraps from other genres to cook up a signature dish, and the hoard of imitators (think of the number of bad acoustic guitar/drum machine/half-rapped songs were on the radio in the last decade and a half) only underscores Beck’s uniqueness. 

“Mixed Bizness,” for example, clearly sounds different from the Mellow Gold-era Beck, yet it shares the same spirit as the rest of his catalog.  As with most of his best songs, the joy comes in the details.  Even the stripped down confessional folk on Sea Change felt meticulously arranged.  “Mixed Bizness” shares this same attention to detail, only on a more ridiculous level.  Here, Beck surrounds his basic track with these elastic sounding horns and strange electronic bloops yet never to the point of sensory overload.  He creates this frenzied, almost cartoonish aura the same way he built his slacker persona before or his orchestral folk later on.  In this case, it’s Beck surrounding himself with the sounds that best fit this somewhat goofy, carefree song.  It feels like an overt choice too; Beck’s best songs have a freewheeling quality, and “Mixed Bizness” brings that right to the forefront.

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