60 Songs That Explain the '90s - “Loser”—Beck

Episode Date: May 31, 2023

Rob looks back at his journalism origin story while diving into the artistry of Beck and the absurdity of “Loser.” Later, Rob is joined by author Alex Pappademas, who may or may not have come prepared to recite both “Loser” and “The Humpty Dance” (55:00). Host: Rob Harvilla Guest: Alex Pappademas Producers: Jonathan Kermah and Justin Sayles Additional Production Support: Chloe Clark Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Joanna Robinson. Join us every week on the Prestige TV podcast feed is your favorite ringer hosts like Bill Simmons, Van Lathen, Mallory Rubin, Sean Fentasy, Chris Ryan, Julia Limon, and many more cover the latest episodes of your favorite TV obsessions. From boardrooms to throne rooms to courtside

and through the mushroom apocalypse, we'll be here throughout the week breaking it all down. Subscribe to the Prestige TV podcast feed on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. I believe I have mentioned far too many times that my gritty origin story, my spiritual inception, the day I heeded the sacred call of a lucrative career in rock criticism, the moment I became the Joker was when I was 13 or so, and I was reading back issues of Rolling Stone in my orthodontist's office. Dr. Fister, P-F-I-S-T-E-R, Fister, thank you.

I had the braces with the rubber bands going from the top teeth to the... the bottom teeth. That shit is terrible. I'm in Dr. Fister's lobby and I'm reading an ostensibly positive review. Three and a half stars of the God Tier 1992, They Might Be Giants album, Apollo 18. More like four and a half stars. Finger tips. This song is called fingertips. Rolling Stone described they might be giants, two guys from Brooklyn named John, as superb-popped craftsmen with a hyperactive sense of caprice. Indeed, but as a grouchy and hormonal 13-year-old, unable to open his mouth very wide on account of the fucking rubber bands, I found this review's tone to be a bit condescending. Rolling Stone condescendingly described the revolutionary, postmodern shuffle feature employing TMBG classic fingertips as a maddening mix-in-match

indulgence. No, you're a maddening mix-and-match indulgence, dude. Actually, this record is five stars. I don't understand you. I just don't understand you. I don't understand you. I cannot understand you. That's also fingertips. And that day I vowed revenge. I dedicated my life to rock criticism. For like 10 years, I told anyone who would listen, and also many other people who weren't listening, that when I grew up, I was going to write for Rolling Stone.

I got my own subscription, so I wouldn't have to steal Dr. Fister's stash. I only applied to one college because it allegedly had the best journalism program in the state, And once there, I majored in magazine journalism back when you could do that. Did I grow up to write for Rolling Stone? No, but that's not the point. The point is that I heard the call of a lucrative career in a rock criticism, and I answered.

I heard a sow. Still fingertips. So now I'm 14, 15 years old, and I'm going to grow up to write for. for Rolling Stone. And one day my mom tosses me another magazine. And she's like, this is your whole deal, I guess. It was either Time or Newsweek or the third one. There used to be a third one.

There used to be three magazines. U.S. News and World Report, I believe, was the third one. It's catchy name. It wasn't that one. It was Newsweek, I think. A lengthy, probably Newsweek investigation into the phenomenon of alternative rock, a trend piece about what all the kids with a business. races are into. I don't think this is the Time magazine Eddie Vedder cover story of mild infamy.

Whatever this is, I can't find it now, and I've passed the threshold where if I keep looking for it, I'm technically procrastinating. You know what I mean? And I don't remember much about this magazine package other than that. The first band, the first album that comes up is the foundation of this fascinating new teen phenomenon of alternative rock is the also Godtier 1991 album, Loveless by My Bloody Valentine. And I read all about how revolutionary and postmodern and cataclysmic Lovelace is. And of course, I march right out and buy it and listen to Loveless for the first time. Five to seven years later, sorry, don't make me remind you how much CDs cost in 1992.

I got a budget, man. I got limited resources. Fucking, I live in Ohio. I'll get around to it. That's the first thing I remember about the probably Newsweek guide to alternative rock. The second and last thing I remember

is that they had a list of alternative rock subgenres, a taxonomy, a consumer guide, with four or five bands for each subgenre. So like grunge, right? And then five grunge bands. Five jangly counting crows type bands, probably.

I don't remember the details at all, so maybe they didn't have a women in rock subgenre, but I bet they did. did. And then the funny category, the goofballs, the jokesters, the nerds. I forget the exact term they used, but I recognized my people when I saw my people, because the first band listed in this category was They Might Be Giants. That's not from fingertips. That song's called They Might Be Giants from their even higher than God tier 1990 album, Flood. Flit.

Flood is as five stars as it gets. Flood is Mick Jagger's solo album, five stars. Flood is a better and more revolutionary album than Loveless. Flood, colon, better than loveless. FYI, but then the second band listed in the funny goofball jokester nerd category was a band I'd never heard of with a band name I'd never forget. That song is called Butthole Surfer, singular, from the plural Butthole Surfer's 1985 debut album that for whatever reason is called

Psychic Dot Dot, Dot, Powerless, Dot, Dot, That Another Man's Sack. I'd stay out of it if I were you, but I'm super intrigued, right? By the Butthole Surfers. That's an awfully intriguing band name for a 14-year-old. And if they sound like they might be giants and I'm down, man. Let's do it. Let me check my budget. Somebody give me a ride to the mall so I can hit up Camelot records.

And my uncle's sitting there. My cool Uncle Nick, a formative influence. He's in all the cool shit. He takes me to shows. He'd pass me tapes. He's a guy who got me into They Might Be Giants in the first place. He's rad as hell. And so I'm like, hey, Uncle Nick, you heard of this band, the butthole surfers?

And cool Uncle Nick turns to me and he winses a little bit. And he leans in close to me. And he says just two words. They're filthy. The butthole surfers are an impressively upsetting psych punk band from San Antonio, Texas. This song, entitled The Shah Sleeps in Lee Harvey's Grave, is track one on the very first Butthole Surfers EP from 1983, self-titled, though it's also known as either Brown Reason to Live or P.P. The Sailor.

I'd tell you to stay out of this one as well, but it's too late. Now, this can go one of two ways. when you are 14 and you ask your cool Uncle Nick about a band and your cool Uncle Nick just says, they're filthy. The first way I can go is that you sprint to the mall

so you can boost all the Butthole Surfer's albums from Camelot Records because they're filthy. Delivered in a sincere, disgusted, don't listen to them cool uncle tone, they're filthy is in fact the strongest possible recommendation

that a scandalized adult can make to an impressionable teenager. Sign me the fuck up. Or, less cool, but whatever. The second way I can go is that you hear, they're filthy, and you go, oh, okay, never mind then.

And then you forget about it. Because who has time for filthiness? You know? Seriously, it may shock you to learn which way it went for me. Yeah, so I forgot about it. They're filthy is all I needed to hear. I'm out of it.

on the butthole surfers. No thank you. Too filthy, too scary. Butthole surfers are on the first Lala Palooza Tour in 91 with James Addiction and Nineish Nails and Ice Tea and Susie and the Banshees and so forth, which at 14, I thought that was the scariest concert lineup in world history. I read once in Rolling Stone, to which I subscribe, that the butthole surfers during their shows, they got a giant video screen backdrop and they play a medical school training video of a farmer getting surgery after his penis got mangled in a farming accident. And also, sometimes the band plays the video in reverse. But then they had to stop showing that video altogether because too many people in the crowd

vomited. Rolling Stone once asked Butthole surfer frontman Gibi Haynes, What's something you would never do? And he says, oh man, I've done so much weird shit that the mind just goes. I'd never eat an entire scab. although it's okay to eat half a scab. End quote. But old surfers give their albums titles like Locust Abortion Technician and Rembrandt pussy horse.

This ain't my thing. Though I respect the people whose thing is this. Kirk Cobain, for example. And these two fellas, for example. The butthole surfers. Yeah. The butthole surfers rule. Beavis and Butthead are on board.

That makes sense. Here we have Beavis and Butthead enjoying the video for the Butthole Surfers Semi Hit, Who Was in My Room Last Night? From their 1993 album, Independent Worm Saloon, which came out on a major label and it was produced by John Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin. 1993 was nuts. Man, three things I need you to know about who was in my room last night. Three fact.

Fact number one, I played this song on headphones yesterday while walking my two-year-old daughter to the park. And this is spectacularly inappropriate walking your two-year-old daughter to the park music. Fact number two, this guitar riff kicks all kinds of ass. Fact number three, who was in my room last night is an uncommonly satisfying guitar hero two song. You know, Guitar Hero, the video game series with a plastic guitar with the, the, the, buttons. Phenomenal Guitar Hero 2 song. I have never felt cooler while looking uncooler than I did while playing this part specifically. 100%. Paul Leary on guitar. So alternative rock, right? Scare quotes, alternative rock. As oblivious and generally dim as I was at 14, I'd like to think I was

at least subconsciously aware that alternative rock, as probably Newsweek presented it to me, was not a scam, but a marketing scheme, a shrewd repackaging, a calculated delineation, a Walmart N-cap disguised as a revolution, and a hot new genre slash marketing scheme, whether it's alt rock, neo-soul, backpack rap, alt-country, whatever, you got to pay attention to what's excluded, what this hot new genre is explicitly defined against. And thanks to Nirvana and Pearl Jam and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 1993 is indeed nuts. And a band from Texas called Butthole Surfers can sign to a major label and work with a guy from literally Led Zeppelin and sneak on MTV just enough to get Beavis and Butthead on board. But this band can't really be famous, right? There's a ceiling, a filthiness ceiling. I had a vague, known, unknown sense, even at 14 of what real alternative rock might be.

real punk, real underground, real danger, real risk, real confrontation, real filthiness, real people, really vomiting at really wild shows. And probably Newsweek could drop the butthole surfer's name for credor whatever, but these fellas are no real threat to make the big time. No threat to have a song on the radio. No threat to invade the non-Bevis and butthead parts of MTV, right? right? And then they fucking did. I don't like this song very much. I don't mean that ugly. It just makes me uncomfortable. It makes me more uncomfortable that I'm aware that it's trying to make me uncomfortable.

Here we've got Pepper, a legit sort of hit song from the 1996 Butthole Surfer's album, Electric Larryland. It was number one for three weeks on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart, which is, that's a chart. Sure. And for some context on that chart, the previous Modern Rock Tracks number one was Dishwallas counting blue cars. And the next number one was standing outside a phone booth with money in my hand by primitive radio gods. Now, that's funny. The electric Larry Land covers got the cartoon guy's head with a pencil. jammed in his ear. There's a little cartoon blood. They did an alternate album cover for your

Lirier Walmart type outlets and the band name is mostly asterisks. It's listed as B. Pshbh, H, surfers. And it's just a picture of a prairie dog. That's also funny. I really dig the deliberate shoddiness of the censored alternate electric Larryland album cover. Here you go, Kmart. Try to sell this shit. I heard Pepper constantly. on the radio. I saw this video constantly on MTV. Butthole surfers are dressed in suits. They look mostly harmless and semi-professional and super contemptuous, like when Nirvana would wear suits, the In Bloom video, etc. Even if you didn't know the butthole surfers catalog at all, I think you could still tell that they were, let's say, taking another approach here sonically. They didn't

sound convinced this song is a good idea. There is something about the sonorousness of the phrase they were all in love with Diane that resonates with me. Though, I will say that. Marky got with Sharon and Sharon got Cherie as she was sharing Sharon's outlook on the topic of disease. Mikey had a facial scar and Bobby was a racist. They were all in love with Diane. They were doing it. The eerie blowing wind is cool too. I'm talking myself into Pepper. actually. So Nirvana, blah, blah, blah, help bands like butthole surfers get modestly popular. But who is responsible for briefly making butthole surfers

actually random chart-topping heavy MTV rotation popular? Nirvana introduced the underground to the mainstream. But who inspired factions of the underground to change their sound just enough to actually go briefly mainstream? And there's a difference. Right? Between the mainstream coming to you and do you coming to the mainstream. And to my mind, there's one song by one guy that embodies that difference. My name is Rob Harvilla. This is the 93rd episode of 60 songs that explain the 90s. And this week we are discussing a loser by Beck, originally released in 1993 and appearing on his 1994 major label debut album, Mellow Gold. Just to clarify immediately. because I don't want the butthole surfers defecating on my lawn

or however they normally handle disputes of this type. Pepper and Beck's loser do have very explicit similarities. The drum loop the slurry stream of consciousness not not rapping vocal style. You know, the vaguely psychedelic

medium drugginess. Despite all that, pepper is not a Beck ripoff or a Beck parody or what have you. The butthole surfers, aggressively downplayed the back of it all. And they taught instead about digging trip hop and digging, quote, that DJ culture stuff. And digging that 1989 soul to soul song, keep on moving. That's a great song.

I buy that. I do. But nonetheless, there's a lot of loser in Pepper. But then again, there's a lot of loser in everything. Now isn't there. Beck has been on the cover of Spin Magazine four times. The third time in 1999, it says Beck's early professional years were definitely not micromanaged. His half-hazard first tour was launched with local freaks making up his band.

Their concerts seemingly designed to offend, end quote. This is early 90s. And then Beck says, I remember we play the music industry conference South by Southwest. I was playing to a tape machine and the band started doing free jazz shes. over it, and I was screaming into this cheap mic. I broke a bunch of stuff and started humping the bass player and knocked my mic over and hit this poor girl in the head.

I remember watching the room just clear out. Afterward, this hippie guy came backstage saying, man, that was the best fucking thing I've ever seen. And then he handed me a Mason's medallion. End quote. The hippie guy was Gibby Haynes from the butthole surfers. That was quite a jarring Butthole Surfer's cameo

to me. Beck meeting the lead singer of the Butthole Surfers and the lead singer of the Butthole Surfers liking Beck. It's like finding out that the Muppets universe coexists with the Texas Chainsaw Massacre Universe.

My first thought was Beck and Gibby Haynes don't live on the same planet. And my second thought was, of course they fucking do. This song is also a Beckham song and is also on mellow gold and is called motherfucker with a U, M-U-T-H-E-R

fucker. Real quick, I don't think this song is an Allison Chains rip-off or parody or what have you, but whatever Beck's doing here, he ain't rapping and he ain't not not rapping. All right. All right. Let's try something, shall we? I feel like

linear time, a stray chronology, any sort of studious, logical discogre type action is of limited utility to us today in attempting to make any sense of this person's whole deal. So let's try to hear Beck the way a dimmed 16-year-old in 1994 in fucking Ohio might hypothetically have heard Beck. Now let's try to hear Beck in the rough song and album order in which I might have heard Beck hypothetically. You get me. All right. So one day this person just drops out of the sky In a town of chimpanzees, he was a monkey.

Or in a time of chimpanzees, he was a monkey. I prefer town myself. Either way, Beck was a monkey amid chimpanzees. Congratulations to you. Truly, if you were cool enough back then, that loser wasn't the first Beck song you ever heard. Good for you. kudos. Beck Hansen was born in Los Angeles, California in 1970. His mother,

B.B. Hansen, is a musician and poet and actress, with several Andy Warhol films to her credit. His father, David Campbell, is a Big Shock composer and conductor and arranger, who's worked with everybody, including post-motherfucker-era Beck. Beck's maternal grandfather, Al Hansen, Bibi's father, was a visual artist and a performance artist who was a part of Fluxus, the famed radical 60s art movement. There's a pedigree. Beck comes from a long line of capital A artists, a long line of monkeys amid chimpanzees.

But nope, at 16, I ain't privy to any of that. All as I know is, in 1994, he just drops out of the sky and starts quasi-wrapping the wackiest shit you ever even heard of. Shave your face with some mace in the dark, I found quite amusing in real time. Same deal with that yo, actually.

The deadpan, the dispassionate, the desultory yo. A lot of latent think pieces hiding out in that yo. A lot of anxiety about appropriation. Yeah. Yeah. So a loser comes on the radio. Better yet, loser comes on MTV. You got death squeegeeing blood onto car windshields.

You got a coffin rumbling through the parking lot of the check cashing joint. You got the two girls doing aerobics in the graveyard and photo negative. Very smells like teen spirit. Very nice. You got the onstage leaf blower and brandishing the onstage leaf blower. All right. Who is this guy? Get Crazy with the Cheese Whiz is the funniest line in this song.

According to an informal poll that at the time I didn't even realize I was taking of dudes I went to high school with in 1994. with drive-by body Pierce somewhere in the top five. Beck Hanson is frankly a beautiful, a beatific, a luminous, a quite dazed-looking human being. You got the blonde hair and the blue eyes. He's the goofus to Kirk Cobain's gallant. He is the Bob Dylan our generation deserves, according to the previous generation, whose Bob Dylan was the actual Bob Dylan.

And Beck, despite being in his mid-20s, when, loser hits is quite a youthful looking human being as well. And perhaps, thus, the two words most often used to describe Beck in 1994 are manchild and slacker. So listen, I can take 20 minutes here and attempt to explain to you what this word slacker meant back then as a cultural term, as a compliment, as a pejorative, as a generational descriptor. But unless you're in a Richard link later movie slacker is not a word anybody wants to be called even as a compliment and it's true that on a loser and on many of his other songs beck radiates the exhaustion and groginess and disorientation of a guy who just had that sleepover prank played on him where he passed out on the couch and everyone carried the couch he was still

passed out on to the middle of the high school football field and left him there but that's not quite the same thing as dismissing Beck as a slacker, and thus implying that making and performing a loser took no effort or skill or enthusiasm. Beck was on the cover of spin for the first time in 1994. The headline was subterranean homeboy blues. That's pretty good. But this article says,

The Dylan comparisons are dangerous enough, and this spokesperson stuff just doesn't wash with him. Jesus exclaims Beck at the very notion, of being a mouthpiece for millions. You'd have to be a total idiot to say, I'm the slacker generation guy. This is my generation. We're not going to fucking show up.

I'd be laughed out of the room in an instant. I've always tried to get money to eat and pay my rent and shit. And it's always been real hard for me. I've never had the money or time to slack. I ain't got the foggiest idea what any of that means. And maybe he knows what it means and maybe he doesn't. But even if he doesn't, that don't make it meaningless. And that don't mean he didn't work hard on it.

You know? Loser was originally released on an LA independent label called Bongeload Records. And I feel like that's all the description loser really requires musically or temperamentally. Beck worked on it with a logo producer named Carl Steven. and Beck laid down the slide guitar riff. Carl put a drum loop from a blues cover of a Dr. John song behind it, and Beck quickly whipped up the lyrics and then tried to rap them like Chuck D from Public Enemy.

That's what Beck told Spin. Loser is Beck trying to rap like Chuck D, like this guy. Base, how low can you go? Death roll. What a brother no one. Once again back is the incredible, or I'm animal, be unkindable. That guy, Chuck D. rapping, get crazy with the cheese whiz.

Beck don't sound like Chuck D. Beck listens back to his attempt to sound like Chuck D and decides this song he's trying to rap like Chuck D on should be called Loser because he's a loser. So that's what the chorus is. And that's what the song's called. And Bongload puts it out on vinyl. and loser inexplicably blows up on the radio, first in L.A., then literally everywhere else.

And everyone just naturally assumes that I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill me? Is Beck attempting to summarize the ethos of his generation? But Beck tells Spin, he says, I didn't even connect it at all to that kind of message until they were playing it on the radio, and I heard it. And they said, this is the slacker anthem. And immediately it just clicked and I thought, oh shit, that sucks. End quote. Cheer up though, Beck.

You know what I was really into it? Mike D from the Beastie Boys. This guy. That guy. Mike D rapping get crazy with the cheeseways. That makes more sense. Actually, Beck's just a little closer to Mike D than Chuck D. So Mike D talking to Spin, he explains back like this.

He says, he fits into the nomadic folk tradition of Ramblin Jack Elliott's, the whole traditional coffee house balladeer tip. But his hip-hop side legitimizes public enemy as the real folk music of the 80s, because he draws on that aspect just as much as on anything else that he's picked up along the way. End quote. All right. Sure. Let's move on to a song that fits into the nomadic folk tradition of Rambling Jack Elliott.

Give the finger to the rock and roll singer as he's dancing upon your paycheck. The second Beck song, Most Normal Uncooled people heard in 1994 is called Pay No Mind. Excellent exploded P on the word paycheck. There. That's a superbly 90. 1994 pronunciation of the word paycheck. I'm so excited that we finally arrived at this part. Here we go.

The sales climb high through the garbage pale sky like a giant dildo crushing the sun. I swear to you that the very first time I heard, pay no mind. I was 16 and I was riding shotgun in a car. idling in the Taco Bell Drive-Thru Lane. And I'm here to tell you that is the ideal age in the ideal location at which and in which to receive the line like a giant

dildo crushing the sun. 16 years old in the Taco Bell Drive-Thru Lane. easily the most harmonious alignment of lyrical sentiment and physical location I have ever personally experienced. Then I got a Mexican pizza, two taco supremes, and a giant mountain dew. Beck is a guy with a guitar, a singer-songwriter, a troubadour. Whatever else he is, whichever rapper he's ill-advisedly attempting to imitate, whatever the hell he's talking. about. Don't lose sight of the fact that he's a guy with a guitar. Pay No Mind is the second single from Mellow Gold, his major label debut album. He's been kicking this song around for a couple

years already, but now it's a song about how he just realized that now he's the rock and roll singer dancing on your paycheck. I sleep in slime. I just got signed. That is pure self-loathing 90s rock star attitude, my friends. Just a superbly 1994 song in every respect. Who says he's not the voice of a generation? All right, you're 16, you're convinced, you're sold. You've polished off your Mexican pizza and your two Taco Supremes and your Mountain Dew. And now it's off to the Super Kmart in basically the same parking lot to break your budget and buy your first Beck CD. And really everyone's first Beck CD. What else we got on Mellow Gold? What's the Vise? The vibe is affable incongruity.

Loser is track one, pay no mind is track two, and now this is happening. This is driving the bridge to a song called, right? This is the bridge to a song called Fucking With My Head, parentheses, Mountain Dew Rock, and I didn't plan that, but I had to mention it, right? Right. What else we got? He actually had a job blowing leaves for a while. That's where he got the leaf blower, one assumes. This song is called beer can.

It's the best rapping Beck does on this whole album. If you consider Beck rapping well to be at all central to Beck's value proposition, that is not Beck's value proposition. Beck's value proposition at this point is that he wraps medium well about all the leaf blowing type shitty jobs he had to work until he convinced bongload records to pay him for rapping medium well. This song is called Soul Sucking Jerk, for whom Beck ain't going to work no more.

Fuck, man, I'm going to love with you. I just realized how many Beck albums I want to talk about. Mellow Gold is like my 10th favorite Beck album. I don't mean that ugly either. Yeah, so you're 16, and you buy mellow gold first because it's got loser on it, and you're totally awed by the ramshackle, white rapper, junkyard, troubadour audacity of it. And then you find out this is the second album Beck put out in 1994, and the first one is called Stereopathetic Soul Manure.

This is the first song on Stereopathetic Soul Manure, which is not on a major label, which is a big deal if your CD hookup. is Super Kmart or Camelot Records. This song is called Pink Noise, parentheses, Rock Me Amadeus. I put this record on at home recently, and my 12-year-old son just turns to me and goes, Dad, why do you like stuff like this? While sitting at home cooking up a steak,

Satan came down dressed like a snake. Tusha, son. My kid's not into screaming noise rock, butthole surfers adjacent, Beck. Maybe my kid will like surrealist blues man, Beck. This song is called One Foot in the Grave. I am intrigued by the laughing people

in the crowd. I wonder if they're supposed to be laughing. I wonder if Beck is trying to make them laugh. I wonder sometimes if Beck in 1994 finds any of this even 10% as funny as everyone around him does.

Well, he called my name is a turn up the flame. and then I realized it was out of mayonnaise. Hold on. We talked about how everyone calls him a slacker, but we never talked

about how everyone also calls him manchild on account of his disconcerting youthfulness. He looks like he's 12. He probably still looks like he's 12.

But also I think he got manchild a lot because Beck specializes in lyrics so random and vivid and bizarre and childlike and disarming that it all scans

as mere silliness. I realized I was out of mayonnaise. You can safely confine him to the funny category, right? The goofballs, the jokesters, the nerds, the losers. When he's on the cover of Spin in 1997, and by then he'll be commanding quite a bit more respect, he's asked about getting called a man-child all the time, and he says, what do I have to do?

I've got hair on my chest, you know. I'm 26. I mean, granted, I look young. I always take it as a little disqual. disrespectful. It's like I'm not to be taken seriously. And the spin reporter, Neil Strauss, asks a very basic, but in this case, legitimately great question, which is, how do you want to be perceived? And Beck says, human nature says that you don't want to be categorized with Beck stamped on your forehead and sealed in hot wax. I'm just a musician that certain people seem to like.

I don't need all the attachments. I don't need the slacker thing. I sure don't need the retro or kitsch culture-loving thing. It's constantly frustrating and sometimes hilarious. Supposedly being this person, you're not. But maybe I'd like to be taken a tiny, tiny bit more seriously.

The records aren't all wacky or silly nonsense. You know? End quote. Do we know that? No. Yeah, don't go throw no coupons on my grave. If I was in the crowd,

hearing this song for the first time, that's the line I would have laughed out loud at. Don't go throw in no coupons on my grave, but it's a legitimately poignant line also in its way. Maybe, arguably, possibly, I think so. I think he thinks so. For the record, however chaotic and incongruous and ramshackle, mellow gold might sound to you, stereopathic soul manure is like 20 times more chaotic. And My favorite song is called Satan gave me a taco. All right. If you're 16 and you're smitten and indeed you still ain't gotten enough of Beck at this point and you still got any CD money left, go ahead and buy the third album he put out in 1994, which is called, and I admire the confusion this creates,

one foot in the grave, but does not include the no coupon song called One Foot in the Grave. And also a lot of the time Beck sounds like this. where you want to do the things you feel. Walk around with a broken leg and a hundred dollar bill. This is called hollow log, and it's striking, how poignant, how romantic, how sincere he can sound. Singing the same sort of dulcet nonsense, but now he's singing it earnestly, tenderly, quietly. He's a guy with a guitar. And the binary that you're taught, as an alt-rockin mid-90s teenager,

You're taught that there are two kinds of music, funny music and serious music. It's not quite right. Funny music and real music. And the One Foot in the Grave record, which co-stars Calvin Johnson from the childlike, legendary underground, is this supposed to be funny Olympia Washington band beat happening? One Foot in the Graves is the first time that as a teenager, I think, oh, that's a real musician, actually, which is embarrassing for me. right? I bought into the funny versus real dichotomy back then. I bought into all kinds of bullshit dichotomies. This is a great opening line for a song, no matter what it's supposed to mean. Definitely this is the wrong place to be. There's blood on a futon. There's a kid drinking fire.

That song is called cyanide breathmints, and I defy you to write better opening lines for a song. called cyanide breathment than definitely this is the wrong place to be. There's blood on the futon. There's a kid drinking fire. That's a little something called world building. Look into it. Is that supposed to be funny? Is it supposed to be menacing?

Is it supposed to be poignant? So much of Beck's appeal. And the fascination he triggered in mid-90s teenagers, especially, is tied up in this idea of sincerity, of authorial intent, of tragedy versus comedy, of prestige. Is he Bob Dylan or is he Weird Al Yankovic? And is Bob Dylan any more prestigious than Weird Al? Really?

In 1997, Beck told Spin, you could look at some of my lyrics and think it's a bunch of random gibberish that I made up off the top of my head. But it really isn't at all. I couldn't sing it if it didn't mean something to me, if it didn't relate to some experience or some running joke I have with a friend. Even if other people don't really get them, still there's this sense that it's real. End quote.

I went on a road trip once with my two close friends. I believe we drove from Cleveland, Ohio to Blacksburg, Virginia. It's like six hours. It's fine. We were on our way back. We've been driving for hours. We were almost home. And whether we knew it or not, we were filled with that exhausted, almost home euphoria.

Right? and my buddy Mike's driving and I'm riding shotgun and we're listening to Beck's one foot in the grave record. And this song called I Get Lonesome Starts. It starts like this. And Mike and I turn to each other over the course of these first four seconds and we make a silent agreement. And then we start very loudly singing the song to one another.

There ain't nobody left to impress. And everyone's kissing their own. And this is quite a fun song to sing super loudly on a road trip. And it's one of those deals where it's more fun when you don't really know any of the words beyond, well, there ain't nobody left to impress. It's like that scene in Tommy Boy where Chris Farley and David Spade sing REMs. It's the end of the world as we know it. And I feel fine.

But they don't know any of the words beyond six o'clock TV hour. And meanwhile, our buddy Brian in the backseat doesn't know this Beck song at all, and he's just watching us confused. And you need that, right? You need a baffled control person who doesn't get it. That's what makes it funny. That's what makes Beck yours. So if you buy all three 1994 Beck albums and that still ain't enough, it is theoretically possible in 1994 to go backward to his early shit, to his prehistory, to primarily as cassette demos. but it's quite challenging to do that. We are talking physical media that is quite challenging to acquire or really even hear about in fucking Ohio at the time, but it's possible.

It's possible, theoretically, to go back to what appears to be the first ever Beck release, a cassette demo called Banjo Story from 1988. You get it. He's 18.

years old. There's like 10 of these demo tapes, allegedly. You can find them on YouTube now. Don't even fucking ask 16-year-old me back in 1994 how to find them then. Let me direct you, if you desire a starting point, to a 1992 tape called Don't Get Bent Out of Shape, which apparently itself has two or three versions, but I prefer the version that starts with a song called MTV makes me want to smoke crack and then continues with a grim little ditty called Mexico. Come gather around me, people. It's a story you never heard.

He's a guy with a guitar. He's a grim, serious guy with a guitar. About to tell you a grim, serious story. He is our Bob Dylan. He is the least freewheeling human you've ever heard in your life. About me and my friends and some shit. that occurred. And there is something so stupendously funny to me

about how anguished he sounds when he sings some shit that occurred. He is our Weird Al Yankovic. Well, Weird Al is still our Weird Al. He is worthy of mention in the same breath as the sainted Weird Al Yankovic. Put it that way. The other thing this version of Don't Get Bent Out of Shape

has going for it is that you get an early version of the song. pay no mind. And I'm trying not to be upset that the line someone kissed their own ass by mistake does not appear on the far more popular and widely heard mellow gold version of Pay No Mind because that is a phenomenal line.

If you want to sum up the mid-90s Alt Rock Revolution in one sentence, that sentence is someone kissed their own ass by mistake. I'm not 100% on this, but I think I'm glad I have had no access to Beck's early years back then. When you're a Mexican pizza-breaths 16-year-old, it's better, really, to think of Beck

as a dude who dropped out of the sky. No context, no history, no effort, no struggle, no hard times, no driving away early crowds until only the guy from the butthole surfers is left to a teenager. Beck's got more appeal as a unicorn, a lightning bolt, a slacker, sure, fine. A guy who passed out on the couch and woke up on MTV. Did he come to the mainstream, and did the mainstream come to him? There's a difference, but I forget which side of that divide he's even supposed to embody. It doesn't matter.

What matters is that Beck becomes a rock star in 1994. And then in 1996, he becomes something even more shocking and wonderful and improbable. He becomes a durable rock star. Western unions of the country Westerns. Silver Fox who's looking for romance And the chain smoke Kansas flash dance ass pants There are way more famous songs On Beck's 1996 album O'Dalay

Which is my second favorite Beck album Where It's Ad, Devil's Haircut, etc. But those lines from Hot Lex Those are the lines. This is the voice of my generation. Silver Foxes looking for romance with the chain smoke Kansas flash dance ass pants.

We got the Dust Brothers on junk drawer production here. Connecting back to the Beastie Boys, right, to 1989's Paul's boutique. We have established a sensible lineage. We have fixed back in space and time, which is too bad, because the less sense he makes the better.

And the sweeter he sounds while he's making no sense, the better. When I wake up, someone will sweep up my legs. This is a super sweet and prestigious song that Beck called Jackass in a vain attempt to undercut the sweetness because that's how rock stardom worked in the 90s. I have no idea what he means by any of what he's saying here, and all of it means the world to me. Nowadays, for me, Odelay, falls into the dreaded okay computer wormhole, by which I mean that I loved it so much and played

it so much at the time. And so now, even when I'm sitting in total silence, I will hear O'Dalay playing in my head for the rest of my life. And as a consequence, I don't have anything to say about it. And I suspect there's very important information being conveyed to me here, this idea that I can love something so much for so long that I lose the ability or at least lose the desire to talk about it, you know? It's crazy, right? It's fascinating. Yeah, maybe. Same deal with this shit. The best Beck album is Midnight Vultures from 1999. I'm sorry, we don't have time to argue about this. I wrote down the sentence, either Beck is cosplaying as Prince here, or this is where we find out

that Prince has been cosplaying as Bex. this whole time, but then I deleted it because that's fucking ridiculous. This is the record that truly confounded people, Midnight Pulchers. This is the record where no one could tell if he was serious. This is the record that was either a masterpiece or a maddening mix and match indulges. This record is filthiness personified. Beck was in your room last night. That's who was in your room last night. Grab your sweetie and try your best to sing along. Here's what I actually have to say about Midnight Vultures. Nothing I have to say about this record is going to be what Beck himself said about it,

talking to spin in 1999. Quote, about a year ago, I started seeing these ads in the paper for laser vaginal rejuvenation. First, it was a little ad. The next week, it was twice as big. and after a month it was a full page. It just took over. Something in that triggered a bunch of associations and projections. Like, what kind of activities do you have to engage in

to get to the point where you need to bring a laser into the equation? The new album exists in that realm. End quote. I believe him. I believe that's the realm Midnight Vultures exists. in. I have always believed everything he says, even when I didn't understand him, which was usually. And my wish for you is that the next time you listen to Beck, whichever record, whichever era, whichever version you prefer, however much sincerity you're willing to grant him.

My wish is that you hear him the way I heard him that day in the Taco Bell drive-thru laid as a visionary, as an underground legend, as a mainstream rock star. as a celestial leaf blower as a giant dildo crushing the sun. We are thrilled to welcome Alex Papademus, writer, critic, podcaster. You've read him in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times,

GQ, and thousands of other places. He is also the co-author with Joan LeMay of the rad new book, Quantum Criminals, Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and other sole survivors from the songs of Steely Dan. Alex, it's an honor to talk to you.

It's great. to be here. It's so good to be here. And that it's for this makes me really happy. I hope you mean that because I mean that. Yeah. You say that word and you think of start thinking of names. You say loser and then you think of Alex Papademus right away. I thought of Beck first, but I did think of loser next immediately. I see what you're saying there. Yes. Alex, when did you hear Beck for the first time and what did you make of him? I feel like first impression. really matter when it comes to this person? It was probably either alternative nation or 120 minutes on MTV, a music television channel

of the 90s that I'm sure you're familiar with. Ridiculousness. Yeah, you can. Yeah, home of ridiculousness. They were trying to figure out their business model. And at the time, they were experimenting with videos, music videos, like pictures with songs. No, it's inseparable from that video. for me, I think that first experience and like that first blush of it, which was like,

you know, shot for $300 when he was on Bongload and Bongload records. Bongload Records, California, Bonload Custom Records, I believe, is the name of it. And, uh, you know, shot by Steve Hance, who's like a Cal arts guy and like looks like a weird student film, but made with like scraps of old 16 millimeter. like something they found in the garbage. And it, but like absolutely an iconic aesthetic, like immediately. And I as a young person just kind of programmed to receive information for 120 minutes about what was cool.

I'm like, okay, here it is. This is the next thing. And it makes, you know, it's felt. Yeah, it's like that's a perfect marriage of visual and sound, I feel like. And so I think it's, that's, that's the first experience for sure. And then pretty quickly after that, like, you know, he was all over that show and made some very iconic appearances like, you know, when sort of Thurston Moore would host. And so you knew who he was via MTV, I think, very quickly.

Like, you got a sense of at least who he was at that age. Sure. I didn't know it's $300, but that makes total sense. I absolutely believe that dollar amount for the loser. Yeah. I think they got more money to finish it from the late, like when he signed to DGC, they're like, can you make a video? And they're like, oh, yeah, we need another like 10 grand. like master it or something.

But like essentially the budget that I believe that he like the quote to Bonload for I'll make your videos, 300 bucks. Got to rent a truck and some build a coffin, I guess. Yeah, it's like 20 bucks to make the coffin move. However they did that. Yeah, it's very impressive. Yeah. You got to set a guitar on fire from, and that's, you know,

you got to go to the rip store and buy a guitar. Then, you know, it's, yeah. There's not, it's not, it's not cheap. But it's not, you know. You wrote about. the 20th anniversary of loser for Grantland and you described loser as a golden albatross. Do you buy into the idea that Beck at all considered this song a curse almost or is complaining about your hit song just what you had to do in the 90s when you got a hit song?

Yeah, I mean, it was the thing that one did. Like you had to immediately disclaim, but especially something like this because I think there was at least for the moment. And I think like this is the part of it that we have to like contextualize and create for people in the context of this conversation in this show because I think it's the part that's the hardest to explain in some ways that like there was this desire for someone to be making a generational statement. There was a there was a feeling among I guess like cultural commentators that there was that was absent somehow and like that needs someone needed to be anointed to do this. And I think like at this point we've gotten that. like Perk Cobain was going to just kind of like his back was going to go up like a cat if anybody tried to say that, you know, maybe try to push him into that position. And so we were looking

around and there was a moment of like, is this going to be the guy who steps up and is like, you know, I think he said like, you know, like the the slacker loser generation guy, like the spokesperson man for that whole thing. And of course he immediately ran like, you know, ran the other way. and like you know did not participate in any of that didn't let that any of that be put on him and it became very clear that like and it was clear in this song even that like nobody he's not trying to make that song like there's nothing about this that sort of is a you know is like an an an an annoyment other than kind of making that word the chorus which had already been it's like in the culture already like there's the sub pop shirt from the even earlier 90s that they sold

a million of in seattle that's just a black t-shirt that says loser on it i think it says subpop on the back or that it does now, but like at the time you just knew that's what that was. Um, so that had been, that idea had been around, but the idea of, you know, it became a really good thing for him actually to be put in that box. I think it was useful because it gave him something to push off against artistically. Like there was something that he needed to immediately say, you know, it's interesting, right? Because like this is, you know, the 90s, this decade that you talk about on this show is among other things like, I think, it's the last golden age of novelty records, right?

Novelty hits. And it's interesting to think about all the people who kind of had them at first and then moved on from that in interesting ways because a lot of the artists who would become the signal artists of that time, I would say like, I mean, that loser, absolutely, like, is a, you know, it's just something that, you know, oh, like it's catchy and you want to hear it again. I would say creep by radio head is a novelty hit at first, that then they sort of have to, you know, run away from. And I would even

push against it. Yeah. Push against. And sort of push, I would put like smells like teen spirit in that same box because at the time nobody had heard anything like that on mainstream radio. There were, you know, pretty much. I think that's what's great about it is that it's the reason you make an O delay and it's the reason you become sort of protein in the way that he becomes protein. Like you're, you're going to say, no, I'm not going to just do this one thing. Like I'm not going to make loser two. And like even like, you know, even the parts of a goal that are loser too. It's almost like he's parodying loser. You know, like soul-sucking

jerk is like a parody of loser. It's like try like, like, what if we did it's a sea chante, you know, and like it just, we're already kind of like, you know, just eating through whatever it is in front of us and kind of making it, you know, it's very, it's a termite art take on that whole thing. So yeah, that was, I think the way in which it defined him, I think it gave him a reason to redefine himself and keep redefining himself and not. that guy because it was intolerable to imagine, you know, sort of being spokesman thing for that, you know, for a generation that I don't think he really felt much real kinship with, honestly. I really like that read of Mellow Gold that it's loser and then a bunch of other songs that are

like directly antagonistic toward loser. You know, that's that's a fun major label debut record right there. Yeah. I was listening to the whole thing when I like when I said before I did this like to get it you know just kind of get back into you know into it and you just I wonder what you know how people felt because again I was like I was in from like eight seconds into that song I was in I was a fan sure at that point but I wonder if there are people who are like oh this is the funny loser song guy and then they're hearing like these kind of like you know drone folk things I mean I wonder who went and bought like if there are people who went and bought like stereopathic soul manure the like compilation of the stuff that came out after the stuff from before the floor

that saw the light of day later and what they really thought about that. They were very confused by that, I think I would say, totally hypothetically. But they were like, oh, wow, this is what I thought it would be at all. You wrote about how loser was so ubiquitous that you almost can't hear it now, you know, when you listen to it. Like, did this song get so popular and freighted with meaning that it's almost destroyed as a piece of music? Like, is it a good song? or is that question meaningless now?

Well, that's the thing. I think, first of all, it is, I mean, I said novelty songs before, and like it is an objectively perfect novelty song because it's like there's just so many things about it that are like, this is a weird thing that I want to hear again, and I haven't heard this in a pop song. It's like the loop is weird, the deep weird voice that turns out is just Beck's actual voice, like,

and all of these like lines that kind of embed themselves in your brain. but I also think it's a really I was just, you know, like listening to it to do this and I was like, this is, you know, this is a great song. This is an objectively great song. I like, I love rap music, but I can really not rap many songs in their entirety.

Like there are very few rap songs that I can do back to front. One of them is the Humpty Dance and the one is this. Like I just, I was like, can I do, can I, I, I'm not going to do it. But like, I would love it. if you did actually. Oh, God. The whole thing, I was like, you're boxed into that, you know, into that. In the time of chimpanzees I was among the meat,

mutine in my veins and mouth pecanque chunky with the plastic eyeballs, spray paint the vegetables, dog food skulls with the beef cake panty hose. I'll keep going. But I have to be somewhere in an hour. That was way farther than I thought you were going to go. I am delighted. Absolutely delighted. That was excellent.

We have time. We have time. We have time. It's also at the end. That was awesome. We do have time. Let me assure you that we have time for that. But yeah, so I think that's like it's, it is so clearly, it's an articulation of an aesthetic, like, that's fully formed. You don't really know what it came out of, at least at the time. Like, there was no real sort of, like, data points about any, what it was connected to. Like, you can, you can now sort of make those connections that, like, Carl Stevenson, who produced it had produced ghetto boys out.

like in Houston and like had been you know like he was like a rap-a-lot kind of affiliate and has a couple of tracks on a few of those early before they changed the spelling before they dropped the H ghetto boys like that far back and like you can connect him to like the whole anti-folk thing that was happening like certain the late 80s in New York with like you know Hamel on trial and pale face and stuff and like he kind of passed through that world and got like however whatever he needed to get out of it and came back to L.A. as a songwriter sort of formed by that. But, you know, and you can, we've learned all of that later.

But I think, yeah, like, just in the moment, I'm like, this is, you know, this is somebody who has something to say and this is how he's saying it. And like that feeling is there. Yeah. Which is in, yeah, that's what you want from music. I think. So, yeah, I mean, I think it's great. It is hard to sort of like be like, I'm going to put on loser by Beck in the same way that

it's like, unless you're like showing it to it, playing it for a child who's never heard it's weird to be like, I'm going to listen to smells like teen spirit today. Yeah, exactly. You feel like a weird, you know, person. Like it's not, you know, like it just you have it in your blood somehow. Sure. Did the Bob Dylan comparisons ever make sense? I think I always assumed anyone who ever compared back to Bob Dylan was joking.

But maybe I'm wrong. I think people, some people probably wanted that to be true in the same way. I think there's a desire to have things remind us of other things. Like people like to be, you know, would rather, would rather recognize something than kind of sort of create a new category. And I think that's something that that's that's I think the generational spokesman thing. But I also think it's such a surface comparison that like nobody who's making, nobody who's saying that has really paid attention to both of them because there's so like, you know, the way that Dylan writes is not like

the way Beck writes. And there is something of the rhyming dictionary with Bob Dylan and that like many, you know, sort of like, loser is two verses. It's not desolation row. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's two verses in a backwards part.

Like it's not, you know, there's something I think inherent to Dylan about going long and kind of like really kind of stretching out like one story over the course of a thing rather of a really long piece and that sort of the repetition and the circularness of all of that and the, the highlands and the, you know, all of the desolation row. of it all and that was about sort of making a like a series of quick and maybe like disconnected

statements in those songs it's a very different way of approaching that but yeah it's just it's like oh folk guy with a guitar the thing guitar is on uh on a wire then that must be bob dillon if your guitar is on the thing in front of your face the the harmonic caddy um that's a guitar that's right You have a harmonica on that thing. Yeah, yeah, sorry, yeah, but if you're, yeah, but yeah, you get worse. Yeah. You have lived in Los Angeles for quite some time now, and I'm curious about the L.A. of it all with Beck, like if you hear a ton of L.A. in him, and if you have to understand L.A. at least a little

to understand Beck at all. I wrote this in the Grantland thing, I think about Guido, that album, that song, and like that sort of like the whole, the sort of cliche. in record reviews was always like channel surfing. Like it's sort of, we're going from image to image and, you know, kind of sound to sound and things are kind of mixed up. And that's the way people talked about like Beck or the Beastie Boys or people that were making this very like recombinant kind of music that, you know, sampled all kinds of

different genres. But yeah, I think there's something about when you see, especially like the LA that he grew, that Beck is from the like sort of east side and like the kind of like when you look at like Echo Park and East LA and downtown even LA, LA, like there's somewhere. about like, but just in general, like the feeling of driving around and seeing like just from moment to moment, you know, incredible, depending on like where you point your camera, like incredible beauty or like the ugliest shit you've ever seen in your life, architecture. It is itself kind of beautiful and weird and watching getting all of these, you know, commercial

messages kind of blasted at you from billboards and then seeing the craziest people walking down the street, you know, sort of carrying something that they have, like, pulled out of the river or something like that. It's like sort of, and, you know, the kind of just profusion of cultures, you know, kind of crossing over in some of those places, which isn't true of like, like, necessarily of L.A. in general, but, like, in some of those kind of places. I feel like just you walk down like that, you know, like walking through Echo Park, you're like that, you know, still to this day, even in a sort of much more gentrified time than when, you know, he was there. but like I think about how he used to there's you know there's just things that don't you know they don't seem like

it's like the way that the environment I think feeds those things kind of enriches our understanding of how he got there how you would get to a place where you would be making delta blues and hip hop and noise rock kind of within one song like makes sense I think when you understand that experience all right i i know mellow gold did well with rock critics but i always remembered the reaction to odalay you know starting with where it's at as being sort of a wow he's actually really good sort of condescending reaction like what do you remember of the evolution of how critics thought about beck or wrote about beck yeah i mean i think like for me i just i remember him being very much anointed by by spin but magazine back in the day which was my

Bible and I think you but I think you can even see in the I think maybe is his first cover story I think is by Mike Rubin and I think there is some sense of like yeah there's some sense of like okay this is a guy who has emerged from a tradition from an indie rock tradition and is kind and is kind of grounded in that and is not necessarily this like you know this hero figure you know it's like this there is like he's somebody who's gotten a little bit lucky and is trying to to manage that but then I think yeah by the time O'Dalae happens. I've been, there's a really good

playlist that I've been listening to by Matthew Perpetua entitled the international. It's that he's very good at this and sort of nailing a thing that both sort of makes you feel very old and very much like a cliche that like you are able to

you know, you're like, he can't get me and then he like gets me. He's like, I know exactly you're a type of person, my friend. You feel seen, unfortunately. yes, absolutely. Yes. It's like the, like the tweet joke about being shot by a sniper. It's like, I feel attacked, but also seen. So there's one called the late 90s Sophisticit, and I think the Beck song that is on there is actually from a tiny bit later, because it's like a B-side, I believe. I forget what he put on there for that.

But there is Tropicalia from Mutations, which is the one that comes out after this. Great song. Yeah, absolutely. A radio hit as well. But, yeah, I think so when Odelae happens, it feels like it's of a piece with a bunch of other, like with a movement. that people are trying to sort of foreshap into a movement, which this late 90s sophisticate thing captures really well, where it's like a number of people basically taking the sort of format of a hip-hop track,

like a beat as like the spine of the track, and seeing what else you can do over top of that. And so it's kind of like it ends up being like at the, by the late late 90s, it's like the, it's, you know, hello nasty. And it's Cornelius and. it's like Chimo Mato and corner shop and like all of that's you know that stuff it's very sort of international it's sort of it's multi it's not as white as indie rock has been and there's something I think very exciting about Odelae because it feels like okay here's the next step here is like

one of the sort of art here is an artist making the transition into the thing that we want to have be next and of course the thing that is actually next is like ska and new metal and new and And in sync and stuff like that. Like that's where we're actually headed. Yeah. And not like election and a little bit of electronica, but even that kind of doesn't catch it in the way that like I think if you read an old like, you know, those like, you know, year review spin issues from that moment.

It's like that's what they really wanted to have happened. I wanted the chemical brothers. Yeah. Yeah. Rony size is not going to take over. Yes. As a paper bag. Yeah.

Yeah, he's got a brown pit. That's a good song. That's a great. There's like, you know, Christian Sands goes hard. Yeah, tricky. Tricky, absolutely. Oh, yeah. Have you done, have you done, have you done a tricky song yet?

That would explain some 90s. I've thought about black steel, actually, which is such a weird one, but that's the one I always go to, you know, is just tricky, tricky doing public enemy is all. That's the one I always go to with him. Yeah. I should do that. I said we were suckers. Um, yeah, so I feel like there's a real desire and a real excitement around Odley because it's somebody sort of making the step up in a way that is really interesting and exciting.

Like sort of making this sort of I'm going to now like, you know, because Mellow Gold is stuff that all the stuff on Mellow Gold like three dates loser being a hit. I'm pretty sure. Like I think it's all kind of invented in a vacuum. And Odley is the first like I'm going to make a statement. And like it just feels like a giant leap forward. but it also, I think, like I'm saying, it's like kind of rhymes with a bunch of stuff that, like, music critics are excited about. And it feels like a sort of a, you know, hit in the sphere of this movement. There's a line in your Grantland piece I really like where you're talking about O'Dillay and you say,

the willful disarray of mellow gold has given way to the illusion of disarray. Like, is there a difference between being a wacky, unknown burnout teenager and being like a rock star adult who knows everyone wants you to sound like a wacky burnout teenager? When does Beck become Beck, like kind of in scare quotes a little bit? Yeah. I mean, I think it's, I think it's there because I think already by the time you get to O'Dala, it's like noise rock and being, you know, and kind of like I'm a kid in a basement with a four track going like, into the microphone, the thing, doing the things that you do when you, you know, when you have like you're using your voice and a four track. Like that becomes one of the tools in the tool belt.

You know, it's one of the things, like, he can do is one of the sort of forms that he can work in. And so that is one of the channels that you surf past is like, you know, action is, is noise and chaos. But it's like, you know, in this very smooth, you know, Dust Brothers engineered, you know, space where it's like, it's deployed, like, like strategically. And I think that would be, you know, I guess it would, you know, he got, he would get less and less noisy and less and less interested in that. it's not been something that he's really returned to. Like he got funkier, but he never got more. Like, you know, he didn't get, like, like, like, I remember seeing him early the first,

maybe the first time I saw him in San Francisco in the late 90s when I was a kid. I think he played like the Fillmore there, like a big, you know, big,ish theater. Oh, yeah. At that time. And I remember, like, I remember him having what looked like a SoCal metal band, drummer at least, like a real, like,

but not like a super. for pro. I'm talking like a just a garage. Like I don't know who the musicians were. Just like a guy. It looked like just guys who lived on his block. And it was like, do you play the drums? And like it ended like they ended the show with like a crazy like noise jam and like set the drums on fire, I think.

Like they were at least like a symbol was lit on fire at one point. And that would there would be less and less of that going forward. He would not really be interested in like being loud or being, you know, angry, noisy, you know, abrasive. And, you know, there were other things that were obviously more, you know, to his, taste once he's figured out how to do it. But yeah, you know, I feel like he's gotten better and better. So you think so.

Seems like it's work. I think it's a hockey stick curve up through. Um, I have to. Okay. I'm not, I don't, I don't, I don't want to necessarily call it. Yeah, I know you mean. I think it's, he's still, he's still, he's still. good for like a there's always a good song in that mix and like he's always sort of trying to do

something you know different and interesting even if it doesn't you know it's like i don't love like the danger mouse record but like it's right yeah yeah yeah the idea of him putting himself in the hands of somebody like that is is an interesting impulse right to follow i you know i think anyway anyway we're talking we're going far far into this is not ban splain we're not being all related to the end we don't have six hours we got to get to the humpty dance of course i did want to ask about sea change, which was just 2001. And that, of course, is his sad, straight, acoustic guitar, like serious breakup album. And I remember that getting the sort of, wow, he's a real songwriter who writes real songs about real emotions, like sort of condescending reaction.

Do you dig that album, or is that too conventional a mode for him, almost? I performatively talk shit about that album. And it's because I resent. people being like this is what we've been waiting for this exactly because the previous one is midnight vultures right that's right before and i love midnight vultures so much and i think that it is a perfect record and i think that it is his greatest record and i think it's like far in away that and the idea of like after like glad he got that midnight vultures bullshit out of his system so that now he can make a serious singer-songwriter album. And I hate that framing so much that I think it just sort of made it,

it colors my overall feeling about C-Change, which is objectively really, really wonderful too. Like it's actually really, like, these are good songs. And what I love about it is that it is his breakup record with like he had sort of a long-time relationship going through the whole arc of becoming Beck, the Beck that we know, becoming this successful guy and then sort of had this kind of painful breakup and wrote these songs about it. But I'm pretty sure he recorded this album like two years after all of the shit went down. And there is something about it where it's like

he's, what he's actually doing is making a really well-made pop record and really thinking about how it's going to sound and like these amazing string arrangements and all of this. And like, It's so, like, it's such a, just a well-constructed piece of work that you can't fully hate on it. But like I, like I said, I prefer, I don't want to say, like, I prefer the funny, zany, Beck, because I don't know that it's not, that's not what I prefer about it. But I know what you mean. Sort of what's happening on Midnight Vultures is just so much more interesting and from moment to moment. And like, you just sort of, you put it on and like that record's like, you ever like watch Pulp Fiction recently? like and you're like oh

this is my favorite scene too actually yeah and actually in this scene is one of my favorite scenes as well like and it's just you're just kind of like you and then it's two hours later because like you and you're not what you don't watch anything else like that's how I feel about midnight bolters like each time I'm like oh this thing is coming up that I'm excited

about that I'm in this this weird rap or this kind of a sample or you know whatever that it's like I don't want to die the night is coming like I'm excited for that that's the best nicotine and so that's yeah but that's my that's my seat change beef. But yeah, it's like I dig it. It's really good. It sounds like

Serge Gainsburg. It's wonderful. I swear to God I didn't plan this until after we decided to do this. As you might be aware, Steely Dan's comeback album Two Against Nature. Unexpectedly won the Grammy for album of the year in 2001. Beating out Eminem's the Marshal Mathers

EP, Radiohead's Kid A, Paul Simons, you're the one and Midnight Vultures. Should Midnight Vultures have won the Grammy for album of the year. I think the answer is yes, based on what you just said. That's, yeah, it's great. That's number one in my heart for sure. I think there's a split, probably split vote, any like hipsters in that voting body who are underrepresented in 2000, like split between kid A and Midnight vultures. So there wouldn't have been, you know, that force was

kind of divided. And I mean, this is, this is in my book, but like, basically, like, I think that, like weirdly stealing Dan sort of sums up everything else that's nominated in the category it's like almost like they are they are the sort of there is kind of like weird and sexual as midnight vultures they are as arty

and hated touring just as much as radio head their baby boomers like Paul Simon and their edge lords like Eminem so it's kind of like you vote once and you kind of can honor every there we go yeah but I know I think there's there is something about, yeah, that to me is the, you know, Midnight Vultures is the most Steely Dan of all the Beck Records and that's probably why I like it. It's the most can't buy a thrill, you know, inspired. And as you also might be aware, Beck's comeback album, Morning

Phase unexpectedly won a Grammy for album of the year in 2015, beating out Beyonce and pretty much is everyone, pretty much everyone is still very, very angry? Like, did, is that, is that record's reputation like damaged long term by the Beyonce of it all? Like we should we be concerned about Beck's legacy as a whole given if you know one thing about him now, that's the thing you know? It's that. I mean, I hope that's not, for his sake, I hope that's not the case because that would be terrible.

So it beat lemonade? I didn't know this, actually. It beats four. It beat the one. It beat the surprise drop with all the videos. Yes. Okay. Because, yeah, I mean, obviously, that's not right.

Morning phase is bad. I feel like morning phase, I don't have a thing. It doesn't like, it doesn't register for me. That's the one that is like that is I, what I kind of like performatively think about sea change like I actually think is true morning phase. That's a little boring. That one is like, you know, the one. The one that I love that doesn't, of the sad back, acoustic back that never gets enough love is mutations.

I think mutation is really good. Absolutely. There's the one that sounds like the kinks in places the most, which is something you don't get from him very often. But I think that's like quietly one of his best records that, you know, is under-discussed because it's like has this, you know, as his reputation for being stopgap product or something. But is his legacy ruined by taking a Grammy from Beyonce?

I think no, everybody knows a Grammy's stupid. Like it's sort of that they always made, like they're famously just like, you know, a body voting body. That's what they make. They make mistakes. Like there's a voting body that, you know, sort of just, that's what they do. And so I think, weirdly, though, I feel like, you know, I feel like he's continued to be interesting in kind of every decade in a way that I think a lot of his, you know, peers maybe

haven't so much. But now it almost is like, he's like one, what he needs, ironically, what Beck needs at this moment to sort of, you know, for the legacy is another novelty hit. It's like a, like he, that. he's actually back to these full circle back to this point where he needs something that is going to be like sort of you know tick talk viral and you know i think i think it's still i think it's still possible maybe this is the time to drop loser too like to finally be like still a loser who who is going to help him get there who are we hooking him up with what's the collab

there that gets him loser to the mind reals please don't answer that actually back and doja Hatt loser. There we go. Oh my God. Okay, we better pivot to the Humpty Dance portion of our pro. I'm just kidding. Alex, it was wonderful. Stop what you're doing.

No, no, I was, I didn't want you to ask me to do it, but I wanted you to feel like I was going to do it whether you ask me or not. Yeah, that's, that is exactly how I felt. That's perfect. This is happening. It's really upset. I have not upset. You're like, this is going to be so fucking awkward. He's going to do the whole song.

Big like a pickle. I'm still getting paid. It was great to talk to you, Alex. Thank you so much. This was the best. I'm so happy that we got to do this from. Thanks very much to our guest this week, Alex Papademus. Thanks as always to our producers, Jonathan Kerma and Justin Sales.

Additional production held by Chloe Clark. Thank you very much. And thanks to you for later. And now I must insist that you go listen to Loser by Beck. We'll see you next week.