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POP SONGS

Beck is back, and not in any way we would have imagined. For his latest album, Beck teamed up with our favourite publishing house McSweeney’s (founded, of course, by Captain Dave Eggers, gracing the cover of mono.kultur #25), which is due for release in early December. OK, you say, so why would someone like Beck release an album with a literature publisher?

Well, Song Reader is not an actual record, but comes in the form of sheet music (and McSweeney’s being McSweeney’s, beautifully packaged of course) – Beck wrote the music, but he didn’t actually perform it, and that’s where you come in, since he wrote the music for you.

Inviting you and everyone else to upload your own rendering of his tracks to a specially dedicated website, his latest album is actually bridging the divide between musician and audience, reminding us that there were days when we did more than just consume music.

Read his introduction to the project and musings on the difference between pop music and popular music here, enjoy the staff of The New Yorker playing Old Shanghai, or better still, tune your guitar and dust off your piano keys to record your own.