California Dreaming: Beck's Visual Artistry

Words: Daniel Chamberlin

Photo: Autumn de Wilde

Nobody walks in LA, as new wavers Missing Persons observed on their 1982 hit single. To some extent, they're still right. The sidewalks running along such famous Los Angeles boulevards as Sunset and Crenshaw are often free of pedestrians, even when the streets overflow with automobiles. Mixed-media artist Lisa Salem has even made the act of walking in Los Angeles into a piece of art, which she records daily on her blog. Beck Hansen has too.

Leave behind the lonely sidewalks of Hollywood and Beverly Hills for MacArthur Park and Pico-Union, the neighborhoods where the 35-year-old musician grew up, and the streets are teeming with life. Angelenos seeking Oaxacan mole at Mama's Hot Tamales Cafe or the city's most coveted pastrami sandwich at Langer's Restaurant will find themselves shoulder-to-shoulder with abuelas and abogados, businessmen and beggars, cowboys and cholos. Vendors of Latin American CDs and counterfeit ID cards compete for customers with discotecas and bodegas. Beck ambles past these busy displays of street life, and as he stops to pick through the detritus of a rummage sale, the scene collapses on itself. Secondhand merchandise disappears into cracks in the sidewalk. A toy pickup and sedan each lose half of their chassis and collide, magically transforming into a full-size El Camino. Beck jumps in and continues the tour of his former stomping grounds.

The scene is from Motion Theory's video for "Girl," the second single off of Guero, Beck's seventh album. It's a bohemian homage to the landscape of LA, a combination of Latino street life and cutting-edge video art inspired by classic Mad magazine artist Al Jaffee. Pharmacy shelves packed with pills dissolve into a giant skull, a piñateria's facade falls into a toothy grin, the text on Beck's map folds together to read "You?re Lost." These mutations mirror Beck's music, which continues to collapse aesthetic traditions: folk music into hip-hop beats, analog keyboards underscoring slide guitar.

"The main character in that video is the neighborhood, the colors and the personality and the characters who live there," says Beck, on the phone from Santa Cruz, the first stop on the West Coast Guero tour. "It's a different world and a different culture in the middle of LA."

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Read the rest of this article about Beck's music video and other visual collaborations, as well as the complete Beck videography, in the latest issue of RES, on newsstands now. You can also see all of Beck's greatest videos, from "Loser" to "Girl" in a very special Beck Retrospective, featured as part of RESFEST 2005.