The Books: "Beautiful People"

As far as I’m concerned, Eyes Wide Shut is Stanley Kubrick’s best movie. Controversy aside, it seamlessly combines his assured setpieces and surreal sublimity with an honest-to-goodness relationship arc. In that sense, think of “Beautiful People” as a potential first salvo from a Books-ian Eyes Wide Shut, a slick little commercial with famous actors and a Chris Isaak tune declaring an ear-catching new statement. That’s not even to mention how “Beautiful People” starts off a dead ringer for the movie’s backwards chanting theme. And when they start singing forwards? It’s some heady math/poetry/religion shit: “As we genuflect before pure abstraction,” indeed. Sums up the unerotic nature of the movie’s sex cabal pretty well (and don’t forget the monkeys hooting around an obelisk).

The Books have been inching closer to real vocals their entire career, culminating in their relatively largely sample-free last album, Lost & Safe (2005). “Beautiful People” goes a step further: instead of just replacing funny, chopped up archival bits with their own mumbly voices, there’s real singing, expansive and harmonious and the most intentionally melodic thing they’ve sung by far. That feeling of a careful, single step into a new realm is what makes the song exciting; the Books aren’t rushing headlong into anything, an attitude that would go against everything they’re about. They take time in getting the done job, and by dropping only the slightest hints of new sonics into the patiently plodding guitar, they ratchet up the stakes at every turn. There’s the quick drum beat, or the two stabs of guitar noise about halfway through, or the gorgeous string coda: like the parade of unforgettable cameos in Eyes Wide Shut–-Leelee Sobieski’s underage sexpot, or Alan Cummings’ hotel clerk—they give minute glimpses into huge worlds the Books have probably spent a lot of the last five years mulling over.

In the end it’s just any Books song, but rendered bigger, more riskily. For a band as insular and dryly clever as they are, putting their nerdiness under technicolor lights with lyrics like “behold the finite set of thirteen convex figures” is ballsy as fuck—just like how Tom Cruise’s paranoid, desperate odyssey puts Kubrick’s weird fixations in the most vulnerable light possible. In both cases, though, the grace notes are big and more than enough to carry the awkwardness. For the Books it’s the calming, invigorating invocation to “begin again.” For Kubrick, it’s Nicole Kidman telling Tom Cruise what they “need to do as soon as possible.” Which is “fuck.” Both risked self-parody for a more satisfying payoff, and both, against all odds, succeed.