Week 9: I Will Kill Christgau with My Big Fat Slow Writing Skills (Eventually)

This is my life in bare reduction right now: cigarettes, crazy pills, computer cord.

Where have I been all week? Like, what the fuck dude? This blog is beginning to look like Jeffrey Beaumont's Slang Editorial ghost-town #2. I don't quite have an excuse for the straight-up online absence, but I've been spending my time working on a writing project that I started in March 2005, in hopes that one week of hard work will finally make me finish something that's been sitting on face for 3 years now.

The project, a treatise on the non-album music of Beck, began in earnest in celebration of the imminent release of Beck's "new" album Guero, his first in years. Most importantly though, it was hailed in PRspeak as the "return to form," the "return to his Odelay roots", the "honestly, he hasn't lost it" album, meant to reign triumphantly after the disastrously vacant Sea Change in 2002.

At one point, Beck had been the towering cultural figure of my life. He spoke to me and my generation in ways no others--including Cobain--seemed to be able (more on this later), and I had hopes, however cynically tempered, that just maybe Guero was where he'd get back on the wagon and show me once again the paths of the future. Or at least some new dreamy wonderlands.

But he didn't, it didn't, and that's that. And my writing project, fully underweigh and with lofty sights set, has lived in sleep on my Blogger Dashboard in "Draft" status for three years.

I once thought of myself as a burgeoning music writer, and the status of this little piece is perhaps the best representation of "where I'm at with that." Ambitious, stalled, bloated, and ultimately incomplete. I try again now to at least finish it so I can see if I ever had anything good, or at least move on to find something else to get stuck in my exhaust pipe. Theoretically this process should be "fun," and it sort of has, but I'm not really sure how it will end.

Lofty promises for the week that I aim to deliver by Sunday afternoon:
- The Full and Weighty Story of Beck Hansen and, Specifically, His Non-album Music
- The Complete Beck Hansen Non-album Music playlist (individual mp3 and zip)
- Bonus: the Jeffrey Beaumont curated "Best of Beck" playlist (mp3 zip)
- Extra non-Beck related bonuses (one admittedly promised last week): Special Rod Stewart/Faces playlist and "Anglophilia mix" (mp3 zips)

So let's see if I deliver or fall on my face. Here's an mp3 teaser for the week (that, admittedly, is almost over):

Beck - Debra (live in Holland) --- After hearing this version, I no longer can listen to the Midnite Vultures album vers and get excited.

"Beck, in topform"