90s Alt-Rock Self Loathing Anthems

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

I just played "Loser" for the first time in years and yeah, it still sounds fantastic to me.

Although the thing I find fascinating is that the other two Beck songs that round out the top 3 most popular on Spotify are "E-Pro" (#1) and "Girl" (#3)

to answer the question, Loser by a mile. Still have that CD single packed away somewhere.

We started a thread years ago about Guero's surprising hold on Beck fans.

I'm annoyed with myself because I've *lost* the picture that went with the slash. And it was truly shocking to me because Thom Yorke does actually appear to be even shorter than Beck. Though I'm not sure if Beck is actually as tiny as I think of him as being, or if he just appeared tiny because he spent much of the timeframe of my familiarity with him standing in close proximity to Thurston Moore and Thurston Moore is actually taller than the entire known universe?

i wouldn't call the aesthetic of the loser drum break "deliberately shit", though. more like ragged but right. tussin helps.

"Ragged but tight" was definitely a phrase that popped up in that slash once or twice. ;-)

lol (ew) lol

I'm sorry, I'll shut up now. ILX is trying to have a serious discussion about 90s production aesthetics and I just want to wibble on about hott boy slash.

wibble away

thx

the break: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udAJV4dVNyY

LOL it also says a lot about me that I misread "ragged but right" as "ragged but tight." I should go to bed.

I dunno, I just find that whole early 90s slacker schtick of Beck's really irritating now, which is weird, because obviously I still have a huge amount of affection for other 90s schtick like shoegaze bands. I think it's because, due to where I was living, I had to live through a hell of a lot more slacker schtick - if I had spent the 90s cusp in the M40 Corridor, I'd hate shoegaze the same way.

it also may be due to what you mentioned upthread: the simultaneously guilty and annoyed feeling you get when you first realize that you're someone's "target market". loser was the point at which i twigged to the fact that my secret special indie-slackerdom was fast becoming a mainstream pop cultural "thing", and it rankled, but i loved/love the song anyway. don draper effect.

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

― erotic war comedy pollster (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, February 22, 2012 4:54 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That doesn't make Loser not-dated, it makes those other bands "retro."

Anyway, correct answer is "Creep." I never liked Beck anyway aside from his appearance on "Futurama," and I always liked the intimacy of the production on the verses of "Creep."

Yeah, Cont, but the thing is - I was also then aware that I was at the time (have always been, and will continue to be) right slap in the middle of Radiohead's Target Market.

But the difference being, it felt like RH were these nicely educated chaps who came up to you, tapped you on the shoulder, said "excuse me, you look like you might be interested - would you care to take a look at our beautifully imagined and elegantly executed marketing scheme that we have designed as a work of art in itself to appeal to interesting people such as yourself?"

While Loser was like that cute chick in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, that you go to a party and there's this cool dude sat chatting you up, and you think he's one of you, but really he's a company shill who's been paid to sit in trendy bars casually mentioning a specific brand of sunglasses?

The former is flattering, the latter makes you feel, well, cheated.

geez Beck always dealt pretty directly with marketing and consumer culture, it's all over his lyrics - really literally in the case of Mellow Gold

Give the finger to the rock 'n' roll singer
As he's dancing upon your paycheck
The sales climb high
Through the garbage-pail sky
Like a giant dildo crushing the sun

what I'm getting at is that ascribing duplicity to his music is sort of... strange

"Sick of Myself" would have fit nicely on this poll

appreciate the literary construction of that analogy, WCC, but i always read beck as the nicely blunted dude who came up to you at a party, affixed an army surplus gas mask to your face, said "you wanna get small?" and then showed you some pictures of his dog in various hats.

like, "lol, i'm getting paid to crack jokes abt getting paid, trip"

which is a worm eating its tail, but so's everything else, so...

weren't becks parents like real deal LA art weirdo vets and friends w/fluxus and yoko ono and shit?

mom was a Warhol "star", grandfather was with fluxus

nonetheless Beck was homeless in NY prior to moving to LA and recording Loser

i just looked it up Beck's dad was a studio musician arranger and worked on DEATH MAGNETIC (no markers)

Yeah that Fluxus thing makes me more suspicious of him, not less. Also: SCIENTOLOGY.

OK, with Yorke, there's the possibility that he's gonna buttonhole you at a party and talk about Noam Chomsky for an hour, or take over your stereo and force you (force, heh) to listen to Joy Division until you both get thrown out of the party. But, like I said, Yorke is every dude I dated in college.

But this is what it comes down to. That with Beck I really had diminishing returns after Odelay so he's like a one night stand that hung around too long, while Radiohead are like this 20 year ~relationship~ like you ended up marrying your college sweetheart, even though he got you kicked out of your own party the night you met. So I'm gonna have affection for Creep because it was the start of something, while Loser was a one punchline joke.

And Beck was like, hipster homeless, not real homeless, so puh-lease.

have you considered you are just stringing together increasingly fantastical theories and impressions about two people you don't even know and acting like it says something about their art?

(This has become a proper irrational old skool ILX taking sides where you end up hating a song you once actually really loved because you are so deep in the ~rhetoric~ maaaaan)

And Beck was like, hipster homeless, not real homeless, so puh-lease.

Um, what does this mean?

Um, UMS, it's a bit rich for tearing me a new one for arguing this way on a thread that I started inspired by a piece of slash fiction. If you want a serious debate about the aesthetics of the 90s, go start your own.

By Hipster Homeless, I mean Williamsburg. I mean, people who sofa surf because they are too dedicated to their ~art~ to get a proper job, not people who actually have structural issues with their lives that have caused them to become homeless.

Um, what does this mean?

Olympia, WA

But, the social landscape of the early 90s was pretty different in that regard, to what "hipster" means now. I think that the lines between the two probably have become narrower in the past 20 years, and this is the subject of a billion and one ILX debates already, so we don't need to get into that here.

because they are too dedicated to their ~art~ to get a proper job

beck washed dishes, mowed lawns/operated a leafblower, worked other menial jobs etc. many of which are directly referenced in his early material fyi

I dunno what "structural issues" means - he came from a broken home where both of his parents were flakes and one of whom was a cult member so I just... waht

Yeah, that's only because being a Barista at Starbucks wasn't a career option outside of Seattle yet.

But, I fully admit that this annoyance is probably a lot more about a "type" that I encountered a lot, in NYC in the early 90s, than it is about Beck Hansen as a human being.

If you want a serious debate about the aesthetics of the 90s, go start your own.

― White Chocolate Cheesecake, Wednesday, February 22, 2012 5:50 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i will do no such thing

projection is a wonder to behold sometimes