JUNK-YARD ANGEL.("Sea Change")

In 1996, you could walk into almost any bar in downtown New York and, within a few minutes, hear a song from Beck's latest album, "Odelay." Chances were you'd like it. It didn't matter if you were into hip-hop, modern rock, or traditional blues--there was something about Beck's music that was urban and new and made you want to dance. The song "Hotwax" began with a deep blues-guitar lick. A second later, funky beats and distorted guitars kicked in, and then quirky hip-hop-style vocals with a country-and-Western lounge-lizard overlay:

Sawdust songs of the plaid bartenders, Western Unions of the country Westerns, Silver foxes looking for romance, In the chain smoke Kansas flashdance ass pants

When Beck, who resembles a choirboy, with pale skin and a delicate frame, made a "shout out" to "two turntables and a microphone," the irony was clear. This was music for a short-attention-span generation brought up on hip-hop, noisy rock, and channel surfing, as comfortable with street talk as with TV-sitcom references.

"Odelay" proved that "Loser," Beck's anthemic 1993 single (with its plaintively tongue-in-cheek chorus "I'm a loser, baby, /so why don't you kill me?"), was not the product of a one-hit wonder. The album won two Grammys and sold more than two million copies. Geffen Records had found a pop star who could make party music that was marketable yet adventurous--the perfect antidote to the high angst of early-nineties grunge rock, whose popularity was beginning to wane.

Then, two years after "Odelay," Beck released "Mutations." On the album's cover, he poses with a serious expression on his face, draped in a transparent plastic sheath that he seems poised to remove, like a butterfly emerging from his chrysalis. The album itself was sober, sombre, and largely acoustic, drawing on psychedelic American and Brazilian folk-pop of the sixties. The arrangements were almost regal, and the songs had titles like "Nobody's Fault but My Own" and "Dead Melodies." The pop collagist looked as if he wanted to be Dylan. To confuse things more, Beck followed up "Mutations" with "Midnite Vultures," a postmodern minstrel show that borrows liberally from a century of African-American pop, paying tribute to black vernacular music that most white musicians would never dare to touch. His homage was goofy (lyrics like "Hot milk / Mmm . . . tweak my nipple"), and the album got written off as parody, mostly because critics couldn't understand why Beck would want to make it.

Of the musicians active today, few deserve the title recording "artist" more than Beck, although he would not use that term. He has a virtuosic musical talent, and is able to pull off credible impersonations of performers in virtually any musical genre. Born in 1970, Beck is the son of a lower-echelon Warhol Factory girl by the name of Bibbe Hansen and a Hollywood arranger and Scientologist named David Campbell. He was raised in and around the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, which was a kind of racially mixed bohemian ghetto. His maternal grandfather was the artist Al Hansen, who was part of the Fluxus movement, a loosely organized collection of interdisciplinary artists devoted to finding "alternative channels" for art. Members included Yoko Ono and the "mail artist" Ray Johnson. Al Hansen's specialty was turning trash into art. He made thousands of images inspired by a prehistoric fertility icon named the Venus of Willendorf out of Hershey's wrappers and used matchsticks. When Beck was a child, Al enlisted him to walk up and down Sunset Boulevard collecting cigarette butts for use in his collages.

Thanks to this upbringing, Beck has always assumed that low culture and high art could go hand in hand; he must have figured that as a pop star he would be able to root through the detritus of twentieth-century music without having to pick up cigarette butts. But his combination of wide-ranging talent and formal diffidence raises a question: Does a musician have to commit himself to one sound to be taken seriously?