There’s no competition really. Beck takes the prize for Most Perverse Offering by an Artist in 2012. OK, there is that giant bathtub adjunct to Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. So maybe Beck should win for Most Delightfully Perverse Offering for Song Reader, his new album, which is indeed an album but one containing no CD, LP, or MP3 download code. Instead, in a format more at home in 1912 than 2012, Beck has given us 20 new songs on sheet music.
If you want to hear this music, you’ll have to play it yourself: on piano, guitar, ukulele, ocarina, whatever. If you don’t know how to read standard notation, you’ll have to find someone to play it for you.
So much for the who, what, when, and where. As for the why, Beck understands that he has some explaining to do, and includes a self-penned preface and an introduction by Slate’s Jody Rosen. For his part, Beck acknowledges that some people encountering Song Reader “will dismiss it as a stylistic indulgence, a gimmick,” and further that a project such as this risks “neutralizing the past” by “encasing it in a quaint, retro irrelevancy and designating it as something only fit for curiosity-seekers or revivalists.” I hope he’s wrong about that.
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