Tuesday, May 6, 2014

"The New Pollution" (Beck)

I won't say the lyrics to "The New Pollution" mean nothing, but they're pretty nonsensical.  (Ex: She's got a carburetor tied to the moon.)  
According to Beck, he was just tossing out random word pictures in an attempt to "evoke the 60s glamour of femme fatales" to match the hippy-shake vibe of the song.  As he told Gavin Edwards of Rolling Stone in 2008, "A lot of these tracks, we made the music really quick, and there would be an atmosphere to it, and then lyrically, I would try to convey the pictures that it gave me."
Speaking of the music, the backing track is just another great example of The Dust Brothers' prowess in unearthing/weaving together random samples to create something bigger than the sum of its parts.  
So, what's in the mix?  
  • The drum sample comes from the track "Hallelujah, Alright, Amen!" from an obscure soul-jazz record called Soul Revolution (1970) by organist Gus Poole.  
  • The sax line comes from the baby makin'/smooth jazz song "Venus" from the 1976 album Feelin's from Within by saxophonist Joe Thomas.
  • And that über square, Wonder Bread 'n' mayo intro comes from a still-unidentified recording that Dust Brother Mike Simpson stumbled upon at a used record shop in Florida.  Says Simpson on MusicRadar.com, "This family of religious singers had pressed their own record, and one of the songs started with that sound...It had nothing to do with the musical notes of 'The New Pollution,' but it just seemed like a crazy way to start a song."


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