Beck was always in on whatever joke ’90s critics sometimes accused him of missing — which, when it came to the question of cultural appropriation, resulted in the absurdist microplastic soul of Midnite Vultures. Less Beck’s version of Young Americans or Emotional Rescue than a self-aware, second-gen refraction of the White R&B Move those albums represented, this one is where you go if you want Beck at his most unhinged — a paean to horniness, the contortions people go through to sate it, and why it’s probably for the best if we drop all pretense and lean into the sleaze. But Midnite Vultures is way more John Waters snarky than Terry Richardson scuzzy; take it that way and it starts to sound like an exercise in asking what if straight was queer and finding all the unlikely turn-ons in its moves towards desire. Sometimes this approaches farce to the point of borderline insufferability — “Peaches & Cream” gets real infatuated with wringing every last bit of bombast out of his falsetto — only to snag you with one of his characteristically oblique phrase-twists or the tendency for his musical bricolage to waylay you at every turn. The classic R&B pastiches extend from the slyly stoned, brassy go-go-dancer pop-soul circa-’69 (nice) of “Sexx Laws” well into the sexy-synthetic boogie/electro ’80s (“Get Real Paid”), but hardly settles there. Since he can’t help dosing his music with cross-pollinating hybrids — the country breakdown in “Sexx Laws,” the orchestral crescendo to “Nicotine & Gravy,” the collision of arena-rock priapism,  art-pop glitch and half-speed Italo disco in the Johnny Marr-featuring “Milk & Honey,” the countrypolitan ether frolic that is “Beautiful Way” — it eventually coheres as a move that’d gotten lost somewhere in the ’70s: a rock album that explores soul without necessarily bending over backwards trying to embody it. How could he? He’s too busy embodying himself, or what unpredictable composite of a musical hybridizer passes as a “himself.” Since the gag is not that this guy is doing R&B but that this guy is doing R&B, the mirror ball reflects his characteristic quirks more brightly than his imitative affectations. As much as the $20 million fantasy of “Hollywood Freaks” and its bootleg bling threatens to evoke an askew bastardization of Tim-and-Missy future-funk on the surface (“we drop lobotomy beats/evaporated meats on hi-tech streets”), it’s not sloppy enough to feel like an insult; his sharp-nasal rap flow is engagingly rhythm-dekeing and his loverman hook is sung with an alarmingly suave smoothness for someone who dropped Stereopathetic Soulmanure five years earlier. And “Debra” isn’t funny simply because it’s a self-conscious slow-jam, but because it takes grandiosity-deflating come-ons like “Lady, step into my Hyundai/I’m gonna take you up to Glendale” and makes them sound like a legit good time, no irony attached. The tears he makes gentlemen cry might not always seem genuine, but in this world “realistic” is close enough — especially when he finds power in admitting that he himself is a full-grown man who’s unafraid to do so.