90s Alt-Rock Self Loathing Anthems

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfEBFj71l74

I don't think they watched Loser, but this is good enough
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNTnkfIwJI4

Both songs were voted by John Peel listeners into his Festive 50 countdowns even though he never played either song.

besides during the countdowns obviously

in my mind, i usually lump these in with "Undone The Sweater Song" as the most slack-off songs that were ever played on the radio

Fucken LOL I haven't seen that Beavis & Butthead in a billion years. "There has to be the bit of the song that sucks so the bit that's cool sounds so much cooler." I'm surprised neither of them got their lighters out during the Hollies bits. That impression of Jonny's guitar is so spot-on. It's one of those songs it's impossible not to air guitar to. It's embarrassing because it was played in the shop all the time when I worked in a record store and I would always have to stop whatever I was doing and do the air guitar to those bits which my colleagues would always laugh at but the customers were kind of um.

Loser were first, though, wasn't it? I always forget what order they came out in, even though Loser is very much the sound of my sisX0r's old apartment in upstate NY and painting New Grape Twins t-shirts, and Creep is the sound of moving to NYC for the first time.

I can see where Beck was coming from with Loser but good grief it sounds dated nowadays. Like I used to love Beck as a teenager but every time I hear him rap now it's kind of cringeworthy.

The beat's pretty good though.

Both of these songs sounded pretty tongue-in-cheek to me.

It's really strange the way that, though the Beck track sounded more weird and out there at the time, and the Radiohead track really sounded like grunge-anthem-by-the-numbers, it's the Beck track that sounds terribly dated while the Radiohead track sounds less so?

But I guess that's always the case with throwing deliberately weird affectations on a track just because, the sound of "weird" dates a piece more quickly, like, what is considered outre or strange, while just going for simple or "classic" dates less quickly.

For the first dozen or times I heard the Beck song, it was always with the video (I've written before about how that was the exact moment I became aware that I was a *target market* and that I was being marketed to. Not that I hadn't been overtly marketed to before, but that was the first time that I actually was aware of the process of it (that might have had more to do with studying advertising at art school than the track or video itself, I dunno) and I didn't entirely like it.) while Creep was something that I heard music first and video a distant second so - believe it or not - Thom Yorke's looks were far less an influencing factor in the appreciation of the music than they were with Beck.

It's also just kind of funny, thinking about these songs in the context of my sisX0r, Beck was the ~kind of guy~ (in terms of looks and the sort of lyrics that he sung) that my more attractive sisX0r was always dating at the time. While I got stuck with the Thom Yorkes of the gene pool. LOL, that sounds much nastier than I intended. I'd have liked to have been dating the free spirited laid back surreal hippie dudes, but I always ended up with the weird looking, uptight dudes with massive chips on their shoulders.

LOL 90s. LOL nostalgia.

It is my own fault for ever watching Glee, but I still have terrible memories of them butchering Loser a couple of years back and it has made me hate that song. Loser is probably Beck's worst song, it's sad that that's probably what he'll be most remembered for.

I like Creep. I like the guitars on Creep. There's probably 100 good reasons to hate this song (and Lex can probably list them all), but I don't care.

just because it's the one with the cool JUH-JUH guitar noise

― TERMAINTOR 2 (some dude), Tuesday, February 21, 2012 9:44 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1qKy4cMPUI

These are okay, but I prefer Offspring's "Self Esteem".

Is "dated" a positive thing or a negative thing?

I don't really see how "dated" makes any difference when so many current bands have been borrowing old sounds.

"Loser" only sounds dated because of the hundreds of infinitely-worse songs it influenced.

^^^Patrice bit is pretty much all I can think of re: Creep now

definitely don't agree that "Loser" sounds more "dated"

cuz lol yeah these days bands never build songs out of drum loops, digital noise, pop-culture references, and half-assed heavily processed vocals, nope

i cannot imagine a more '90s-sounding beat than the one in Loser

I cannot imagine a more '90s-sounding guitar tone than the one in Creep

perhaps, but we love that guitar tone

no, we do not

what I would like is a song with the Creep guitar line over the Loser beat

definitely don't agree that "Loser" sounds more "dated"

― erotic war comedy pollster (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, February 22, 2012 1:53 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

man, the production on 'creep' sounds so cheap in retrospect

DRIVE BY BODY-PIERCE

anyone hating on "loser" should shave their face with some mace in the dark

things are gonna change, i can feel it

what I would like is a song with the Creep guitar line over the Loser beat

― (thinks and smiles) (DJP), Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Isn't that, like, the entirety of Amnesiac?

i like Inception OK, but omar's fake-out of it getting the #3 spot was jarring (and classic!)

rong thread sry ^

no somehow I think this was exactly the right thread

this thread has been INCEPTED

(Why am I so mean about Radiohead all the time? I love them! I just cannot stand ~Radiohead fans~ they make me want to punch my fandom in the face.)

Wait, have we entered another dream level, is this an Inception thread now, because then I can post this:

http://i.imgur.com/PzGCn.jpg

Isn't that, like, the entirety of Amnesiac?

maybe half of it? although the biggest beat is "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors" and the guitar on that is less "Loser" and more "oh my god, every time I close my eyes I see a twirling rainbow"

wow Cilian is REALLY not going to age well is he

Wait, I was thinking actually Idioteque which is on Kid A, duh, I am so bad with track listings of those two albums, can't tell them apart.

I didn't actually mean to inspire another "OMG which ages less well hip-hop or guitar rock" type argument.

I think maybe it's the idea that... hmm, how to put this without pissing someone off? It's what I was saying about "weird" sounds/new sounds - it's like nothing dates a movie faster than the technology used to do the special effects. And the stuff on Loser sounds, now, like the early CGI in Babylon 5, like, that stuff was groundbreakingly amazing at the time, but now looks rinky-dink.

BUT, that said, Loser wasn't even meant to sound cutting edge, maybe it was more like that kind of proto-hipster deliberately rubbish "let's make this sound bad to show ~authenticity~ maaaan." Or maybe I'm just thinking that coz I knew he was signed to Geffen? Was the track/video made on a Geffen budget to look cheap, or was it made before Geffen threw a wad of cash at him?

in some ways, the early 90s was a hotbed of stuff sounding shitty/cheap being passed off as cutting edge (and yes Beck definitely mined that territory)

track was made pre-Geffen, I dunno about the video fwiw

I tend to think of that whole "shitty sounding stuff passed off as cutting edge" as being an 80s thing, but maybe that was more indie (the crop of deliberately shit proto-twee bands) but I guess by the 90s it had fanned out everywhere through Grunge going mainstream and the whole aesthetic of deliberately-shit exploding (shut UP DJP) into popular culture.

loser production just sounds like tom rothrock (who produced it, surprise). sometimes the datedness of something can be a big part it's charm. re: special effects, think of ray harryhausen's dinosaurs, star wars' cantina scene, 80s prosthetic makeup, etc.

Radiohead is too intricate and precise to use a sloppy-sounding drum loop like the one in "Loser"

honestly I wish they would record something with a similar sounding drum pattern

"it's" = "its", as per usu

xp

I think maybe the 90s is just too close for me to have nostalgia about the datedness of its special effects just yet.

Also, it's not that Radiohead are too intricate and precise, it's that they would carefully engineer and go through all sorts of bending-over-backwards production techniques, to come up with something that sounded as arse as Loser because Beck couldn't, well, be bothered with doing it properly?

"properly" is in the eye of the beefcake pantyhose,,iirc

"Loser" sounds fine to me!

By "properly" I mean in a technically competent manner? It's one thing to be nostalgic about the deliberately shit aesthetic of the Loser drum break, but quite another to claim that it's, erm, ideal.

i cannot imagine a more '90s-sounding beat than the one in Loser

I cannot imagine a more '90s-sounding guitar tone than the one in Creep

Perfect summation of ILX arguments of late

Creep rip-offs the Hollies
whoa! which song???

beck originally wrote "loser" for Chino XL but he turned it down so beck did it himself
so Chino XL almost had both a "creep" song and a "loser" song

xp "white people mocking hiphop" compared to license to ill it sounds like straight-up homage

same chords/melody as "The Air That I Breathe" iirc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bb7S8-Iewi0

LOL this thread is actually making me dislike Beck in some contrarian stance when, actually I got out Odelay yesterday and it was pretty good.

I'm just super protective over Pablo era Radiohead.

LOL this thread is actually making me dislike Beck in some contrarian stance when, actually I got out Odelay yesterday and it was pretty good.

I'm just super protective over Pablo era Radiohead.

― White Chocolate Cheesecake

Not even Radiohead would be protective of their Pablo era.

'Creep' meant a lot more to me at the time. Neither song means all that much to me now.

Regarding the hip-hop mock comment:

This is sort of an egg/chicken paradox for me. I'm not aware of this song's history but when I first heard it I thought:

Was his first idea to write a song mocking the grunge sentiments or did he started mocking hip hop by free-styling and realized he was so lame at it that he seeked solace on the self-loathing grunge movement?

I understand why they loathe it, and I have no desire for them to ever revisit it, but I still find it quite sweet and worthy of... I don't know. I'm on record that it's nowhere near as bad as ppl (including them) say it is, And it's valuable to me to have watched them grow up in public. But we had that thread in the Sandbox.

(Blow Out is my jam but you saw my defense of that on Atease.)

I understand why they loathe it, and I have no desire for them to ever revisit it, but I still find it quite sweet and worthy of... I don't know. I'm on record that it's nowhere near as bad as ppl (including them) say it is, And it's valuable to me to have watched them grow up in public. But we had that thread in the Sandbox.

(Blow Out is my jam but you saw my defense of that on Atease.)

― White Chocolate Cheesecake

Blow Out is great, I'll grant that. Specially the acoustic version from CBC Radio Vancouver that has a few of the Posies playing with Thom.

There's a lot of great ideas in the album which get lost in their effort to fit in the grunge style of the era. The sudden outbursts of angry guitars and 'emotional' choruses in most of the songs ruins them completely for me.

The more subtle songs like 'thinking about you' or the acoustic versions of lurgee and you with johnny and thom on electroacoustic guitars are superb.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I identify better with "Creep." He'd be the dependent and depressing friend whom I often tell myself I hate but who always somehow manages to get me to talk for eight hours straight.

"Creep." "Loser" has some terrible lyrics, "Soy un perdedor" among them.

That's the best line!

Really? To me it sounds like frat boy/Peggy Hill/public-speaking politician Spanish. But I guess you would know.

i think it's "hey, remember spanish class?" spanish. plus a good joke.

On paper it's stupid; in the song, with that sitar in the background and Beck's timbre, it's stoopid.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

That was closer than I thought it was gonna be!

Beercan!

Oh my goodness.

How you like me now?