The movie that inspired Beck to write ‘Novacane’
What genre does Beck even belong to? While it’s tempting to say that the alternative rock icon fits snuggly in that category, some of the biggest moments of his career come when he’s working outside the conventional structure of any music, using acoustic guitars, hip-hop production, and earnest songwriting to create some of the most gripping performances of his career. Beck still knew how to make something goofy, though, and he got the perfect excuse when his video director wanted him to make a song like the movie Convoy.
Compared to the kind of hip-hop adjacent production of his breakthrough work ‘Loser’, Beck had never been that far away from country music. During his first few years playing in dive bars around California, Beck was falling in love with the sounds of musicians like Hank Williams, playing the kind of rootsy music that would warrant a lot of ‘Yee-Haws’ from drunken patrons.
After trying his hand at making the kind of lo-fi folk records with no production to speak of, Mellow Gold introduced him as the most singularly weird artist in the world. Even in an era when no one was expecting anything normal, a song like ‘Beercan’ and ‘Fuckin’ With My Head’ was a bit too strange for someone who had a cosign from one of the biggest labels in the world.
Although Beck could do his style of anti-folk to a tee, Odelay was the moment he began spreading out a bit more. He still may have had that trademark monotone voice when singing songs like ‘The New Pollution’, but everything going on around him was much more adventurous, practically serving as the post-ironic version of Talking Heads for the 1990s.
Outside of songs like ‘Devil’s Haircut’ and ‘Where It’s At’, ‘Novacane’ was the kind of track that fell more in line with the sounds of aggro rock and roll à la Beastie Boys. Having a greater punch behind it, Beck created a piece that served as a mockery of heavy rock while still doing it justice. Since this is still Beck, there was always room to get weird, including a disco horn section throughout the back half.
While the song itself serves as a decent retort to the sounds of grunge, Beck actually was inspired by Convoy’s approach to film, saying, “Spike [Jonze] and I talked about doing a video together for ten years before we actually ever did one. One of our first conversations was about the movie Convoy – he was obsessed with it. He wanted to do a video where I was in a convoy, so I wrote all this truckers-going-into-oblivion imagery.”
Even though the 1970s movie itself feels more like a self-parody of the trucker craze going on around that time, Beck’s version of it is the kind of lighthearted good time that anyone could get lost in. Compared to Pearl Jam discussing their problems or Soundgarden putting people’s heads in a blender, ‘Novacane’ was the kind of video that you could both laugh at and unironically study at the exact same time.
Like most of his heroes, though, Beck wasn’t looking to stay in one space for long. Across his later albums like Sea Change, he would take that earnest style of songwriting and put it in the context of his broken relationships, doing justice to the kind of heartbreaking ballads he heard when he was a kid. Beck was never looking to impress anyone throughout his career, but the fact that he could go from a track like ‘Novacane’ to ripping someone’s heart out of their chest is no mean feat.
