And Vultures came out right at that Woodstock '99 nadir of rock machismo, still the worst moment for music in my lifetime. In a way, Beck putting out that album when he did was an under-acknowledged act of bravery.

Well, he's not angry, right? Sometimes he's melancholy. But all he's ever rebelled against was the self-seriousness of artists in his generation who were too angry to ever be fun.

I'm definitely not going to try and argue that those albums can match Odelay or Vultures for great songs. They do hang together better as albums than some of his minor "fun" ones, though

To be fair, I probably didn't think that deliberately about it at the time. But the guy did enter the alt-rock mainstream with a self-parodying kitchen-sink grunge pastiche, which probably should have set the expectation that he wasn't going to have a normal relationship to authenticity

Which isn't the worst thing once you escape the authenticity mind trap. Sometimes thinking your way through art yields better results than feeling deeply about it

I don't know that I ever thought of Beck's duality as a real vs. artificial binary—it's always seemed like different parts of 1 brain. But what made him such an outlier in the '90s, I think, was that he never seemed to identify with sounds or aesthetics so much as take an impersonal interest in them

I mean, it's the Midnite Vultures/Sea Change dichotomy, right? Neither Beck works as well without the other

Wow do I envy you. In any case, I do think a weekly release would've been a better way to handle episodes in the 60-90 min range, if we must have them at all.

That said, "The Man Who Sold the World" riff works best as a blunt instrument. The Nirvana/Pat Smear version is definitive.

When I saw Beck on the Odelay tour, he wore a powder-blue suit, had choreography, and scolded kids for moshing bc grunge was over. From my POV as a 13-year-old Nirvana superfan, it read as real sellout stuff. But that was a couple years before I got into Bowie and realized authenticity was a mirage

I certainly didn't just listen to it on repeat for a full hour... Big improvement over the last song stuck in my head, honestly: "When You Were Young"

I mean, the idea of a school built by progressive thinkers in flight from fascism suddenly divesting from history and social science just sounds like a terrible joke

Awful. I'm so sorry

"I hate to say I told you so" —humanity's epitaph

You'd be within your rights to call them on an office line, but after 3 weeks and multiple emails it almost doesn't matter how you respond. Someone who has already shown you that much disrespect is never going to be worth trying to work with. Just write again and say you're submitting elsewhere.

Don’t

Update: child is 12, uses the word “macabre” and needs a babysitter

yes, narcizzizm