Hype Hype Hooray is a biweekly “critique” of the music scene and the blogosphere that feeds it, told through the lens of Jamie Hale, a journalist who likes music about as much as he likes scotch and a firm leather chair. Please enjoy with a grain of salt.

There’s been a lot of interesting buzz lately about our old friend Beck Hansen. Nearly two decades after making stoners swoon with genre-bender “Loser,” he’s releasing a new album that defies expectations once again. He’s not experimenting with genre or style, as the man is wont to do, but with the concept of the album. As you might well know, Beck isn’t releasing a recording, he’s releasing sheet music.

The idea is invoking a lot of praise from business-minded critics who argue the move will circumvent pirates, will generate more interest for his inevitable tour and will be a generally interesting experiment.

But the sheet-music album, appropriately called Beck Hansen’s Song Reader, goes much deeper than music revenues and crowd sourcing – it takes America, and the world, back to a long-forgotten era of music. It takes us to the era in which songs didn’t belong to the people who wrote them, but to the people who learned them, played them, and passed them along.

Continue reading [Hype Hype Hooray] Beck Hansen and the Reprise of True Folk Music →