BECK Maximum Beck-Biography (2000) CD

Before the algorithm told you what to listen to, there were spoken word biography discs, and somehow Beck, the man who made slacker absurdism sound like a genuine artistic movement, got the treatment in 2000, right at the peak of his critical run from Mellow Gold through Midnite Vultures.

Maximum Beck is a narrated biography release from the era when music journalism still had some teeth and alternative rock was a genuine commercial force rather than a nostalgia category. It's a document of a moment, a portrait of one of the most genuinely strange and singular figures to come out of the American alternative scene, a guy who absorbed folk, hip hop, psychedelia and noise and made something that resisted every easy label people threw at it.

CD, 2000. USA release. Spoken word biography format. Alternative rock, experimental.