Revisiting the Analog Odyssey of Beck’s Mellow Gold

The irony with Beck is he wasn’t being ironic: “I sleep in slime / I just got signed,” “I ain’t gonna work for no soul suckin’ jerk,” “Whiskey-stained bucktoothed backwoods creep / Grizzly bear motherfucker never goes to sleep,” “I was born in this hotel / Washing dishes in the sink / Magazines and free soda / Trying hard not to think,” “It’s a new age letdown in my face.”

Sound a bit more like an “$4-an-hour job” working stiff  “trying to stay alive” in Los Angeles? Highlight the right lines on his unlikely major-label breakthrough Mellow Gold and you get a portrait of a narrator as depressed as Kurt Cobain, with significantly more overt references to the working-class life. His stream-of-consciousness lyrical style originated from performing his folk ditties to indifferent audiences in coffeehouses and improvising on the spot to see if anyone even cared. Even the “Come on, motherfucker, put your clothes on” vérité recording at the start of “Truckdrivin’ Neighbors Downstairs (Yellow Sweat)” comes from Beck’s real-life neighbors fighting.

But as with Mellow Gold, let’s start with “Loser,” one of the most auspicious debut singles from any generation and one of the greatest songs, bar none. The unknown Beck Hansen met Rap-A-Lot producer Carl Stephenson of Geto Boys fame between stretches of homelessness, who looped one of Beck’s slide guitar bits, added his own sitar playing and other parts, while Beck tried to emulate Chuck D’s rapping and ended up writing his most iconic tune about how miserably he failed at this. Unlike Cobain, humor was Beck’s armor and with songs like “MTV Makes Me Want to Smoke Crack,” he tapped into world of fellow jaded goofballs who felt they were all sharing the same absurdist inside joke, fueled by more than a little hurt.

 

VIDEO: Beck “Loser”

The song arrived at a time when Radiohead had his peers identifying as a “Creep” (and “a weirdo”) and the Beastie Boys made guitar-wielders all over the burgeoning Alternative Nation comfortable with beats and drum loops and rapping. “Loser” neatly tied all of this and plenty of Pavement’s straight-faced meta-humor in a bow, but the tune was anything but neat. The lurching stumble of the verses’ meter, unforgettable ad libs (“get crazy with the Cheese Whiz”) and the indelible singsong catchiness of the hook, not to mention those slide and sitar riffs, all made for an obvious classic, to everyone but Beck, who thought it was mid until it took off faster than he could process and started making him more money than he’d ever seen.

Perhaps “Loser” got its “slacker anthem” reputation from being made mostly in six hours and sounding like it, but Beck always rejected this characterization. He was game to ride the wave for a bit as the nonsense poet of the ‘90s that the alternative and pop audience wanted from “Loser,” but he mostly emptied out any remaining wackiness from his muse with 1999’s Midnite Vultures, a Prince-electro pastiche with room for banjo and arena-rock riffs. He was never a convincingly funny artist again after 2002’s Sea Change, only halfheartedly returning to deadpan rapping and sampladelica on Guero, the last time he was really pushed for airplay dominance, and scattered moments thereafter.

In retrospect, you can really hear Beck’s discomfort with his initial accidental fame as a rapper in this trajectory, and his manic eclecticism now scans as an attempt to quickly find a reliable income stream doing virtually anything else: country, funk, rock, Tropicalia, breakup elegies.

But Mellow Gold’s unbelievable palette of musical (and anti-musical) noises and colorful samples had but one agenda, to squeeze more blood from the stone that was “Loser” and create some kind of lane out of lo-fi alt-folk and hip-hop mockery. The fact it managed to succeed would be remarkable in itself, but Mellow Gold is also a near-flawless work that I’ve come to prefer slightly to 1996’s less intense Odelay, which is widely considered to be his masterpiece. Odelay was my introduction, though, and its subsequent tour happened to be the first concert I ever attended, at 12, with the Cardigans and Atari Teenage Riot opening.

I knew “Loser,” but dirges like “Steal My Body Home” and the taunting noise-metal snippet “Mutherfucker” took some getting used to. And to this day I’ll never understand how more obvious stunners like “Beercan,” “Fuckin’ With My Head,” and “Pay No Mind (Snoozer)” (sing it with me: “like a giant dildo crushing the sun”) didn’t follow “Loser” to alt-rock radio even if the Top Ten was more of an unrepeatable fluke. The Dust Brothers honed this homemade bricolage into a more digestible stew on Odelay, helped by the more nostalgic aspects of crate-digging that their star collaborators in the Beasties popularized and videos like “The New Pollution” that harnessed dated aesthetics from the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s to make visual sense of this mishmash.

But 30 years later, it’s positive exhilarating to hear (and see, in the “Loser” video that has few precedents except maybe artsier R.E.M. and They Might Be Giants clips) how little this guy knew what he was doing and how desperately and cleverly he was trying to make something of it, anyway, almost like the aural equivalent of Seinfeld, with more non-sequiturs. Recurring motifs like more sitar on “Steal My Body Home” or hip-hop drum loops on “Beercan” play like strange arbitrary rules “Loser” conditioned.

 

VIDEO: Beck “Beercan”

For instance, check out that guitar part after the chorus on “Soul Suckin’ Jerk,” where Beck clumsily bangs on the string so the note comes out atonal and wrong. Only on a platinum ‘90s album would that have been singled out, celebrated and looped rather than being considered a sloppy mistake, but that’s what Beck, one of the ultimate havers of cake that ate it too, leaned into on Mellow Gold. He was embarrassed by his rapping, so he did only continued to do so in funnier voices (a pinched joke-y’all accent on “Beercan,” various explorations of his high and low registers on “Soul Suckin’ Jerk”). His sweetest melodies (“Nitemare Hippy Girl”) and most ear-grabbing chord progressions (“Pay No Mind [Snoozer]”) were simultaneously enhanced and deflated by his silliest, most inventive lyrics (“she’s got tofu the size of Texas”), which won him new-Dylan comparisons that don’t feel silly three decades on but obviously didn’t stick.

Just a few weeks ago, Beck’s 2014 album Morning Phase turned 10, which was about 20 years on from “Loser” at the time and completed some kind of circle, as the epitome of status-quo normalcy in easy-listening alternative, an album that may have been bland or pleasant or both if I could remember a single thing about it. It won the 2014 Grammy for Album of the Year over Beyoncé’s game-changing Beyoncé, a narrative Beck himself visibly wanted to be excluded from immediately. Everyone knows that’s how the Grammys work, and it maybe came off a little more tone-deaf on the voting body’s part considering how Beck’s most well-known music overlapped with hip-hop. That is, an ironic embrace of traditionally Black music that was especially serious in 1994 when gangsta rap and L.A.’s own reaction to Rodney King and police brutality had reached critical mass as popular and political art.

In that context, it’s especially surprising that Mellow Gold holds up better than ever, taking the piss out of virtually everything self-serious, not just rap but also depressive alt and pre-Lilith Fair folkiedom. The fact that its most famous song by far is making fun of himself doesn’t hurt either, but play Mellow Gold against anything captivating serious music fans now — Caroline Polachek, 21 Savage, The Smile, even Olivia Rodrigo — and it will inspire anyone to loosen up and make dumb shit. On one hand, it feels like a rained-out dumpster dive like “Loser” couldn’t be a hit now, and on the other, it feels like a precedent for anything-goes oddities like “Old Town Road” sweeping the universe via TikTok virality. Beck didn’t invent the insurgent mainstream interloper on Mellow Gold, but you’d be hard-pressed to name a finer example.

And in three decades, there still hasn’t been a worthier kicker to any discussion of this album than the one in Robert Christgau’s original review: “Proving how cool you are by making an album that sounds like shit is easy. Proving how cool you are by making an album that comes this close to sounding like shit is damn hard — unless you’re damn talented.”