For as long as we can remember, Beck has been an artist that instantly makes the listener sit up and take note. His attention to detail, at both the songwriting and production stages, has yielded a multi-branched catalogue that many artists would be highly envious of.
After first making a name for himself with 1994's major label debut, Mellow Gold (which featured iconic slacker-anthem Loser), Beck’s most notable commercial success came with his revered 1996 genre-smushing album Odelay. Not only were sales strong, but its hip-hop meets lo-fi indie stylings signalled to the world the type of fearless, audacious artist that Beck truly was.
The success of Odelay secured Beck a considerable following of fans both in the general population and in the upper echelons of the music world. Many notable musicians continue to hold Beck in the highest esteem, such as Paul McCartney, Thom Yorke, Damon Albarn, Jack White and Sonic Youth.
With multiple aesthetic strands to his career so far, (which include his acoustic-and-strings-defined masterpiece Sea Change, an album we covered in detail recently) it’s one particular song, which underlines Beck’s ability to seamlessly dart between musical bases, that we’re focussing on today.
His buoyant 2017 album Colors was preceded almost a year prior by the single Wow, a genre-twisting summons which drew inspiration from the unlikely bedfellows of spaghetti westerns and hip-hop.
“I was working on another song when I had an idea for a flute beat,” Beck told the NME. “I picked up the mic and Wow came out totally spontaneously. I put it away and forgot about it.”
In an interview with KROQ’s Kevin & Bean, Beck indicated the the song’s construction came together intuitively after a serious of further spontaneous improvisations. “Most of this song was completely off the top of my head. I didn't write any of it. It was just us fooling around in the studio”
As Beck relayed to NME, this experimental track happened to be playing out of the studio monitors, when it was decided it would be on Colors. “Wow was on in the studio one day and someone said ‘You should put this on the record.’ I went ‘I don’t think anybody would like this.’”
According to Beck, Wow was delivered alongside some rough, work-in-progress tracks to his record company, and they urgently said, “We’re putting Wow out as a single.” As relayed to the NME, this clearly caught Beck off guard - his response was, ‘Really? ‘Wow’? Huh. Well, OK then.”
“I didn't even mean to release it,” Beck later admitted to KROQ upon Wow’s release as the record’s second single. “I was working on another song and came up with the riff and then I just started freestyling."
Almost a full decade on from its release on June 2nd 2016, and we can still remember hearing it for the first time. From the first few bars, there is a strange sense of harmonic ambiguity, as you're not quite sure where the tonal centre of the track lies.
In fact, it took us several listens to really get our heads around exactly what was going on, harmonically speaking, and that's before we've even picked apart the arrangement’s numerous shades, led by that haunting panpipe sample.
The panpipe motif evolved from the original flute improvisation that Beck hit on in the studio.
It's only once we've got our harmonic bearings that we can correctly ascertain that the first note, Eb, forms the key of the song (Eb major).
The opening panpipe phrase, has been programmed in such a way that it bends and glides between notes, dropping from an Eb to a Bb, before rising up to a D, and dropping again to a Bb.
This movement completely endorses the basic harmonic structure, which is reliant upon just two chords, with the odd passing chord later on in the song, but only during the piano part.
In terms of song-form, there is very little sung lyrical content. Verses are spoken in time, for the most part, but they feel a considerable distance away from what we would typically call rap. However it does feel apiece with Beck’s tried-and-tested (and rap-adjacent) free-flowing wordplay.
Wanna move into a fool's gold room
With my pulse on the animal jewels
Of the rules that you choose to use to get loose
With the luminous moves
The chord structure for the verses and chorus are the same, although exactly when the chords change is open to a small degree of debate, informed by where we are in the song.
Our best suggestion is that we hear a chord of Eb major, for the first 2 and a half beats of bar 1, which then shifts to a chord of Bb major for the last beat and a half.
In the second bar, the rhythm is the same, but we hear a first inversion of Bb (Bb/D) for the first beat and a half, before returning to a root chord of Bb again. The cycle then continues, but with heavy reliance upon the melodic detail that we first heard at the beginning in the panpipe.
Not only does the bass largely follow the direction of the opening panpipe phrase, but huge synthetic horns appear halfway through the song, endorsing the same melodic fragment.
During the chorus section, signified by the exclamation of ‘Wow’, there’s a high vocal part provided by Beck, based around the non-lyric ‘la-la-l-la-la’, to a harmony that enforces our structure. In each second bar of the phrase, the vocal shifts to supply an extension to the chord Bb/D add9, before resolving down to a Bb.
Let's be honest, when pulled apart to its core musicological constituents, it's relatively simple. But that’s not to say the arrangement isn’t incredibly clever.
As we approach the end of the song we hear a piano really emphasising the intrinsic harmonic structure. It’s not until we reach this point that we're completely sure where we are in the harmony, at least on a first listening. Stable ground at last.
Wow undoubtedly draws influence from hip-hop, informed by something of a renaissance that was occurring in Los Angeles at the time. Artists such as Kendrick Lamar and Chance the Rapper had begun to gain wider prominence for their lyrically-dense and intricately produced records. In fact, Beck had hoped that Chance may make a guest appearance on the track, but it wasn’t to be.
There is no more notable example of this hip-hop influence than in the choice of kit for the song’s arrangement - which lean heavily on the use of Roland TR-808 drum machine sounds.
Apart from the trap-style 808 snare and hats, Beck’s co-writer and producer, Cole M.G.N. also opted to use the highly identifiable 808 kick sound as a bass for the track.
Its punchy definition is perfect for accentuating both rhythmically and harmonically, even if full reproduction may be masked if listening on smaller speakers or headphones.
Another very solid influence for the song stems from the soundtracks of westerns, a facet that presents itself in a couple of guises.
Firstly, there are constant references to ‘Giddy up’ in the lyric. This in turn influenced the promotional video for the track, which featured cowboys and horses. There is also a western musical reference; in a clear homage to Ennio Morricone, we occasionally hear Beck whistle a slightly out of tune version of the theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
This musical fragment is very small, which also explains why there is no reference to Morricone as composer on the track (five notes in a setting such as this, do not infringe copyright!) It’s tastefully ambiguous, but a knowing nod.
When Colors finally dropped a year later it became very clear that the rest of the tightly-produced album bore little in common with the more free-flowing nature of Wow. Its absence of guitar and traditional instrumentation also marks Wow as something quite sonically different to its Colors siblings, which included the kooky pop of the title track and the euphoric, hands-in-the-air anthem Up All Night.
Beck might not have realised that he was creating one of his most popular singles on that day of impromptu studio fun, but the story of Wow is another example of how letting your instincts guide you, and following the music, can often lead to the most life-affirming songs.
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