COVER YOUR TRACKS: Beck Covers David Bowie’s “Sound and Vision”
David Bowie was a transcendent artist in every way. He’s the lad insane; the visitor from another planet to come to save us and love us and tell us to live as many lives as we can before this all vanishes. He was a man of many lives, of unimaginable cool and uncompromising vision, an actor who blurred the line between art and reality. He, along with Dylan and Waits and Keef, seemed to be immortal. He was an artist too big, too vital, too omnipresent to be anything but a cosmic force incarnate, the Stardust of which we are all made.
Besides being a legendary and unequaled visionary, his music, art, and even image could communicate humanity with nuance, style, and empathy. He was a trained mime whose personas spoke stronger and clearer than nearly any other artist of his generation. When critics say that a band “made a Bowie song their own,” it’s not too much of a surprise: Bowie, ever adaptive, has crafted songs that share his foremost characteristic. Go back and listen to “The Man Who Sold the World” from Nirvana’s Unplugged performance and try to separate Bowie’s words from Kurt’s performance. No one “makes Bowie their own,” they simply express his art with their own hands and mouth. He’s one of the unique artists whose works seem to grow in the hands of others; a musician who made music that infects those who listen, growing stronger and deeper and more beautiful with every soul that sings their words. Along with Dylan, his music feels like it has been inside you the whole time; he just pried it out, crafted it into form, and gave it back. His music becomes a part of you, inseparable and precious. There’s an incredible richness to Bowie covers, from the gorgeous acoustic covers of Seu Jorge in The Life Aquatic to the buzzy, paroxysmal “Heroes” by TV on the Radio, simply because of the immense talent and magnificence of the man himself.
My personal favorite cover of Bowie comes from Beck from his one-off performance for Lincoln Motor Company’s “Hello, Again” campaign. Beck performed “Sound and Vision” with an 157-piece orchestra that included traditional symphony orchestration, two full choirs, a yodeler, a man playing a saw, a fleet of heavy metal guitarists, and more oddities on a round stage that slowly revolved around the seated audience. It’s a stupendous, insane setup to showcase an innovative 360-degree audio recording technique, which uses a plastic human-head covered in ears, to capture Beck’s opportunity to perform a classic song with “no limitations or restrictions.” And all this to pitch a car company. It’s a surreal vision.
When Beck starts waving his hands to send the whole orchestra into a wave of noise, crawling whispers, or blast of horns, it’s all nonsense.. In the beginning, it sounds chaotic, as if Beck is just blowing up different parts of the orchestra - a burst of strings, a pop of choral hums, a detonation of drums. Then, everything starts coming together, syncing up, sliding together, and Beck counts down, and like magic, the “doo-doo-doo” of “Sound and Vision” swims out of noise. It’s one of the most natural, magical things I’ve ever heard - like from formless, Bowie’s cover simply crawled out. Like the song was always there, like all Beck had to do was touch it and everyone, all 157 people, would understand and come together not from practice but because they, too, recognize this song as a shared truth, simply something that is and always will be. It sounds effortless, beautiful, and eternal. As the song goes on, yodelers accompany metal guitars and chirruping xylophones before sliding into the instrumental breakdown, and it’s as if the whole venue, audience and orchestra, is united into one voice - one voice breaking across lines that divide art and audience; one voice speaking from a place deep inside. It’s a perfect cover, a performance of Bowie’s song that shows the audience what Bowie accomplished and what new, beautiful art he continues to inspire.
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