Beck - The New Pollution

What this video is

Released in February 1997 as the third single from Odelay, 'The New Pollution' arrived during the peak commercial and creative height of 1990s MTV alternative culture. The video exemplifies a mid-decade shift toward artist-controlled, conceptually ambitious music video production. Beck's self-direction channels a deliberately anachronistic 1960s pop-art aesthetic, drawing on Serge Gainsbourg's visual vocabulary and…

Why it matters

A landmark of mid-1990s alternative art-pop video production. As a self-directed work, it exemplifies the era's expansion of the auteur concept into music video, where musicians assumed full creative control. Its 1960s pastiche visual language prefigures the retro-revival aesthetics dominant in…

The director

Beck David Hansen (born July 8, 1970, Los Angeles) is an American musician, singer-songwriter, record producer, and occasional music video director. He rose to fame in the early 1990s with an experimental, lo-fi style and became known for genre-collage…