MUSIC

As Nasty as they wanna be

Midwestern siblings Ted and Sara Beck – now based in Austin – take a ribald approach to songwriting

By Michael Hoinski
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Thursday, August 13, 2009

Midway through our interview Ted Beck gets up to go to the nearby bathroom — he purposely leaves the door open while he urinates. It's gross. I feel embarrassed for his sister, Sara Beck, who's still at the kitchen table in their house, telling me how she went to the prestigious Berklee College of Music with St. Vincent, whose music she just doesn't get.

But Sara, a pop singer who goes by Pink Nasty, is used to her older brother's lewdness. They live together, and she's been his main collaborator in a rap career that's pushed boundaries Sam Kinison, Robert Mapplethorpe, and 2 Live Crew didn't even know existed. We're talking excruciating yet hilarious rhymes about feces and bodily fluids, bestiality and other forms of alternative sex, and any number of 'Faces of Death'-type scenarios—basically anything that's 'totally morally repugnant and troublingly self-indulgent,' as one Facebook friend of his recently wrote on his wall.

Wait. Don't stop reading. Don't pass judgment on Ted, otherwise known as Black Nasty. Don't write him off as an attention-starved pervert with a rhyming dictionary. If you do, you're discounting Kinison, Mapplethorpe, and the Crew, not to mention Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, the Geto Boys, N.W.A., John Waters, Harmony Korine ... and the list of 'artists' who've worked like Sisyphus to shake up the status quo, oftentimes through unbearably extreme measures, goes on and on.

Besides, if you stop reading now, you won't learn how Black befriended Noah Lennox (aka Panda Bear, of sound alchemists Animal Collective), Will Oldham (aka avant-folkie Bonnie 'Prince' Billy), and Britt Daniel of Spoon, the band that Black opened for at the Scoot Inn show in April. If you stop reading now, you won't recognize Black's musical brilliance, which is more clearly seen in the behind-the-scenes magic he's wielded to transform Pink from a whiny girlie-girl singer into a candid realist who doesn't take herself too seriously. If you stop reading now, you won't come to realize that Black's really a nice guy.

'THEY'RE REAL SONGS'

Prior to Black relieving himself, we'd been talking about the merits of his craft, and the balance between performance art and actual music-making.

'Do you think people, like, take this seriously?' I ask.

'I don't think anybody really understands what it is I do,' Black says, nervously inhaling Wheat Crisps. 'I don't really know, either. I mean, I've been doing it for a pretty long time, and it seems like I'd like to not do it, but then I'll be driving down the street and I'll start thinking about victims in a burn unit and getting off on burned-up ladies, and stuff like that. And it's like I can't stop now because it's too good.'

En route to an answer to the simple question 'why?' — an answer Black never arrives at — I say I can't imagine anybody driving their car and rapping along to songs on his self-released concept albums, 'AIDS Can't Stop Me'; 'Feed From Me!'; and this year's 'Shark Tank,' wherein Black is the shark and women are his prey.

'Well, you could listen to them as, like, comedy records,' he says. 'Like an Adam Sandler record.'

'So then it's performance, right?'

'Well, there are still a lot of melodies. Like, they're real songs. There are choruses. There are even breakdowns.'

Indeed, if you don't pay attention to what Black's saying, what you hear is saleable hip-hop. Even when you do pay attention to his criminal verse — what he calls 'anti-flow' — it comes across more like 'Weird Al' Yankovic in its biting absurdity, than it does like a composite of John Holmes, Divine and Jeffrey Dahmer biting into song.

'I like the music,' Britt Daniel writes in an e-mail to me. 'And I like that he's interested in saying things that few other people would put into song.' Daniel got turned on to Black after Trail of Dead left a copy of the 'AIDS' album at producer Mike McCarthy's recording studio. 'The cover and title intrigued me,' Daniel continues. 'Well, they made me laugh' (the cover shows Black naked in bed, with strategically placed text).

Black's opening set for that Scoot Inn show — the only show he's played all year, besides the Houston date with Spoon the following night — went off without anyone suing Black or throwing beer on him. People were talking too loudly for anyone to hear what he was saying, anyway, and he toned down his set so as not to ruin anyone's night, he said. The four-piece backing band, including Pink on bass, also helped obscure his vulgarity.

THE BOSTON YEARS

Pink, 27, and Black, 31, have been playing music together from the get-go, and they continue to channel each other's polar-opposite personas into their respective projects. They grew up in Wichita, Kan., and started off in a band called Satan's Undercover, with their middle brother Jon (there's also an oldest sister and a youngest brother). From there, Black went to Emerson College in Boston, where he hung out with Noah Lennox, who was attending Boston University. They made student films; they took Ecstasy and went to dance clubs; and they stalked Natalie Portman, then a student at Harvard University.

Meanwhile, Pink was about to embark on a classically trained musical education across town at Berklee. That knowledge enabled her to record her debut, an unrealized alt-country album that she now disowns called 'Mule School.' That was all she had when she moved to Austin five years ago, along with Black, who likewise only had his 'AIDS' debut. But that's when the going got good for Pink.

Black put his shtick on hold and focused on being her Phil Spector. He produced and wrote most of the lyrics for her second self-released album, the endlessly catchy 'Mold the Gold.' Black's sarcasm is evident in Pink's sincerity. Take 'BTK Blues,' with its wry, drawn-out line about hipster malaise, 'We could go to Starbucks/and talk a lot of (expletive)/about people we don't know now/who probably live in New York.' Or 'Danny,' a duet with Bonnie 'Prince' Billy about a guy in Kansas whom Pink had been pining after for years, who finally made out with her one night when he was drunk.

Black first attracted Billy when he randomly sent out copies of 'AIDS.' 'I guess he got a hold of it,' Black says, 'and he was very encouraging.' Billy is also on Black's 'Shark Tank,' along with other indie-rock outsiders Ariel Pink and Jana Hunter. The song is 'Eazy,' a loving jam about deceased N.W.A. rapper Eazy-E that's set against the Commodores' 'Easy.' Billy and Daniel have certainly helped legitimize Black, but Black has legitimized himself through his work with Pink.

'I feel like we kind of need each other,' Pink says, even though she's the sounding board for Black's incessant quips and snipes, and even though she's prepping her third album — songs from which she'll preview Aug. 20 at Mohawk — with less help from her brother and more help from her boyfriend, who plays guitar in her band. 'Even though we don't get along sometimes,' Pink continues, 'I feel like we can influence each other very well.'

ONE MORE ALBUM

So, are you sold on Black yet?

Consider this, then: He says he's donated all of the proceeds from 'Shark Tank' to Austin women's shelters, because women absorb the brunt of his humor on the album. 'I don't exactly practice what I preach,' he says. 'This is how I atone for my music. Twenty bucks here and there.'

Still no love? Don't worry. Black says he's got only one more album in him. He's working on it now.

'These are the worst songs I've ever written,' he says. 'There's one song about how I like to push people off buildings, and I get off on seeing their bodies explode on the pavement.'

'Yeah,' Pink adds, about to imitate Black's anti-flow, 'he goes, "When they hit the pavement," and then he goes, "splat, splat, splat, splat." That's a good song.'