Something Is Vacant When I Think It's All Beginning: A Beck Survey
Also: A live scene report with Bob Dylan and new music by Tracey Nelson
Thank you for reading Evil Speakers. Don’t forget to check out my interview with Charlotte Cornfield. Part two of “Catalog Club: Deerhunter (2007-2013)” goes up Monday, covering 2008’s “Microcastle” and “Weird Era Cont.” Also you can preorder my book (due September 8) “Is This It: The Never-Ending Rise and Fall of The Strokes (and Rock ‘n’ Roll)” now.
This column is a critical overview of Beck’s career, timed with the 30th anniversary of “Odelay,” written in the essay style of “The Rolling Stone Record Guide” and “Spin Alternative Record Guide,” books I grew up reading and still love that were nevertheless rendered irrelevant by the internet. Until now!
Programming note for regular readers expecting reviews of the new Jack White and Rolling Stones albums: I’ll be diving into those next week.
To all my paying subscribers — thank you for making this newsletter viable.
Last month, for reasons that escape me, people online were talking about hipster music — what it was, what it wasn’t, when it started, when it ended. When I say “people online” I really mean the few remaining non-bots populating the social media platform once known as Twitter, the desiccated town square barely hanging on amid the flickering vestiges of the old, dying internet. The way station situated between the lost 20th century and the still-emerging 21st. The very thing I’m increasingly inclined to talk about in the past tense.
Anyway: A website I thought was already dead published a lengthy timeline on hipster music’s rise and fall. It takes place between 2000 and 2014, and it’s loaded with references to all the musical acts you would expect. I don’t have the time or inclination to sort though them all now, given the task at hand, though I did find it curious that this website (associated with what was once considered the most “hipster” magazine — maybe ever, certainly of the last 30 years) credited LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge” with “hard launching” the hipster era. And while I know what they meant by that, in the context they were discussing this — I was not playing the annoying pedant squealing out for, like, a Chet Baker shoutout or something — I nevertheless felt the chill of An Older Person who recognizes that not-so-distant history has seemingly been forgotten and, perhaps, erased.
This is all a long-winded way of pointing out that nobody talks about Odelay anymore.
I was 18 when Odelay was released in the summer of 1996, and it soundtracked the freshman year of college I started that fall. So I’m squarely in the demo to talk about Odelay three decades after the fact. But even I am about a month late in recognizing the 30th anniversary of this (still?) landmark album, a record that was indeed the personification of hipper-than-thou-ness upon its release. Explaining this to someone who wasn’t there is like explaining why the album’s author, a 25-year-old singer-songwriter from Los Angeles who sometimes played guitar and sometimes rapped named Beck Hansen, was 10 times cooler in 1996 than James Murphy was in 2002 or any other year. But he was. And Odelay was (and is) one of the most important records of its time — in terms of influence (though not always, or even often, in the positive sense), critical esteem (though that has faded, as it almost always does), and for how it signifies the era (which has only grown stronger since the nineties). I would argue that Odelay is, in fact, the most nineties album ever made, for how it sounds (production style, aesthetic preferences, overall sense of “good” taste for its time) but even more for its philosophical outlook. This was how we envisioned “adventurous pop music” at the end of the old century, right before the internet began to change the world and our perception of it forever. And, depending on your age, parts of it might still sound like adventurous pop music (as it does to me) or parts of it might sound like Smash Mouth or Everlast’s “What It’s Like” (as it does to me when I attempt to mentally step slightly outside of my own experience) (though I’m obviously unable to do this completely, as I just compared this quintessential nineties album to two other quintessentially nineties music things).
To understand Beck’s late-nineties hipster appeal, it’s helpful to look at the video for “The New Pollution,” the third single from Odelay, which Beck also directed. It amounts to nothing less than a greatest hits compilation for the back half of the 20th century, smashing together visual references from the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties in a manner that seems commonplace now but at the time felt fresh and different. There are moments that seem authentically Lynchian, particularly the film Mulholland Dr., which Lynch had not yet made, a testament to Beck’s uncanny prescience during Odelay’s album cycle. But the overall vibe of the video is completely different now than it was then. In early 1997, when the video was released, it felt like “the future,” a manifestation of one man’s imagination and his extraordinary taste in old, inaccessible things. But now, it looks like the lid being shut on a way of life (or experiencing media, at least) that was evaporating. The pre-”everyone is a curator now” times. We’re all alone in the new pollution these days.
Back then I was interested in Beck because it was widely believed that he was a bellwether artist for the decade, the post-modern Dylan to the Beastie Boys’ post-modern Beatles. This was after he was widely believed to be a one-hit wonder after the left-field success of his 1994 smash hit single “Loser,” a song he had recorded three years prior and was subsequently thrown away by disinterested record labels until it became the pre-internet equivalent of a viral hit, somehow entering the U.S. Top 10 after an initial release of just 500 copies pressed on vinyl, back when “pressed on vinyl” was synonymous with “relegated to complete obscurity.” As he later discussed during a wide-ranging interview in 2022 at South by Southwest, Beck agreed at the time that he was a fluky fad, so he put all the ideas he ever had into the next record, a kaleidoscopic folk/rap hybrid with cut-and-paste lyrics produced by the guys who did Paul’s Boutique, assuming it would be his last.
But it was not his last. In their review of Odelay, Rolling Stone likened the album in the third paragraph to Highway 61 Revisited and Exile On Main St. The review culminated with a rhetorical question that had (at the time) a self-evidently affirmative answer: “Could the future of rock & roll be a snot-nosed slacker with a bad haircut, an absurdly eclectic record collection, two turntables and a microphone?” (Incredibly, despite such lofty praise, the magazine still “only” gave Odelay four out of five stars. The boomers just negged Gen-Xers relentlessly, man.)
Decades later, I’m still interested in Beck, but for the opposite reason I cared in the nineties. For years now, I’ve considered him the giant of nineties music who has had the biggest drop off in cultural significance, the kind of person for whom comparisons to Highway 61 Revisited and Exile On Main St. might seem far-fetched or even comically hyperbolic to someone who wasn’t there. It’s not that Beck is “irrelevant now,” exactly, in the way so many pop stars from 30 years ago are now. He’s among the elite class of musicians from that time to put out impactful music in the aughts (2002’s Sea Change being the most famous) and 2010s (like 2014’s Morning Phase, a Sea Change redux that won the Grammy for Album Of The Year, making it one of the “spoilers” for Beyoncé’s long-thwarted conquest for the award). As for the 2020s, well, there’s still time. (He hasn’t put out an album since 2019’s Hyperspace, a collaboration with Pharrell Williams you might know if you rode in a nice car with a 51-year-old wearing expensive sneakers before Covid.) But Beck is still very famous. When he shows up, say, looking waxy and grinning blankly in the background of a Jenny Lewis music video, even when surrounded by other cool celebrities, you notice. Of course you do. He’s Beck.
But Beck is, at this point, probably more famous for being famous. His actual music barely seems like a concern now. This is a vibes-based assessment, I admit, based on my dubious ability to judge classic-rock stocks. And there is some evidence to the contrary. Odelay made the top 10 of Rolling Stone’s list of greatest nineties albums back in 2019. It also appears on Pitchfork’s most recent nineties albums list, from 2022, though it tumbled to No. 93 after landing at No. 19 on their previous nineties albums list from 2003.
But of all the music from the nineties that is constantly litigated and re-litigated and litigated once more by younger generations — the pop stars, the rappers, the grunge martyrs, the alt-rock prima donnas, the nü-metal mooks, the boy-band mannequins, whatever you call those weirdos who were really into Big Bad Voodoo Daddy after Swingers — Beck never seems to come up. Trust me — it’s my job to pay attention, and caring about Beck pays pennies on the dollar at the moment. It’s not that his music is hated or considered bad; it’s that it’s not considered. People don’t even want to argue about Beck anymore — like they do about Nirvana, like they do about Smashing Pumpkins, like they do about Limp Bizkit, like they do about what the hell “shoegaze” even means now, and so on. Which is strange, in a way, if you came up at a time when being a Midnite Vultures person or a Sea Change person actually kind of mattered if you cared about music. Beck used to start arguments. Was he simply a snarky dude “doing things ironically” or was he carrying forward the concepts of Fluxus, the pranksterish mid-20th century “anti-art” movement that included Al Hansen, Beck’s granddaddy? Was his embrace of hip-hop and R&B inclusive and innovative or insulting and patronizing? Or was it maybe a comment on this sort of conversation? Was he a spokesman for a generation or the guy who got lucky with “Loser”? Is it possible these things were not mutually exclusive?
