90s Alt-Rock Self Loathing Anthems

i'd love to, but i have to wash my hair

xp

This is reminding me of old conversations about "Entertain Me": YOU WRITE EVERY STORY ON THIS SITE, DON'T YOU?!?!? DON'T YOU!?!?? Um, do I look like I have the time?

beck: sufficiently dirty but insufficiently dronerock

LOL

I really am gonna go to bed this time. Please feel free to going back to discussing musical and/or aesthetic considerations in my absence, heh.

Projectin' time. I have this stuck in my head as a thoughtworm and yeah, I know, I should go and write my fan fiction on atease because ILX is sick of it, but that place is a fucking tedious pile of teenagers spouting banal shit about their cats and actually shouting at you if you wanna write intensely about Radiohead. I'm less drunk and sleep deprived and flippant so I'm gonna have another stab at it.

Both songs are kind of one-trick ponies based on riffage, but the difference in my reaction really is about the characters portrayed. I'm not sure if I'm talking about the characters in the songs, or the public image of the artists that created them - but my impressions are not about the real people.

That the Loser character is this fun, happy go lucky stoner dude who makes a total joke of his own pathos while being the entertaining wacky guy at parties. But both the song and the character project this underwhelming sense of shallowness - and the lasting impression is a kind of emptiness that is just as much an affectation as the clove-smoking Creep in the Joy Division t-shirt. (Whether that affectation is a front for a homeless kid from a broken home with one parent who's a cult member - or a borderline trustafarian whose dad actually owns a studio in LA, that's not really the point.) I don't even really buy the whole subversive act, like writing songs about "giant dildoes crushing the sun" and singing "MTV makes me wanna smoke crack" - while being played on MTV heavy rotation - it's such an empty gesture, it signifies nothing, it's just this kind of shrugging wacky laughter in place of a real reaction. He sings this dismissive song-diss about the "nitemare hippy girl" (or however he spells it) but it comes across as projection because he is equally the nitemare hippy boy, he seems just as shallow as the world he's laughing at.

And yeah, the Creep is the pretentious guy in the corner smoking cloves in a Joy Division t-shirt while holding up a book of Pablo Neruda to prove that he is just so above everyone else at that party - dudes like that are fun in their own way if you go up to them, ask to bum a clove off them, quote Emily Dickenson at them, challenge them for their opinion on Movement vs PCL then steal their beret and walk off with it and make them dance to Sprockets. Not that that has ever happened to me, mind.

But as fucking annoying as the Creep character is, the song is just more instantly relatable than the happy go lucky stoner dude. It's the way that those coruscating guitar ker-CHUNG strikes just absolutely mirroring the sickening sucker punch feeling in your gut when your own insecurities just take the wind out of you. That feeling of worshipping someone from afar, of being all "OMG you are the most beautiful person in the entire universe" and then, they turn up at your gig, and instead of being all "yeah, check out my band I'm a rock star..." like you felt five minutes ago, you are instantly reduced to being an unsettled, insecure teenager again, hiding behind your clove cigarettes and your Joy Division t-shirt too terrified to talk to anyone and too angry at yourself to do anything else.

I'm never going to be the Loser, I don't even aspire to being the Loser, he just irritates the shit out of me, because he's the kind of guy that turns up to a party and everyone makes a big fuss out of him coz he's so much fun, like, don't you see through this? But the Creep? I've been him. We'd be buds.

Which also reminds me that the character from Underwhelmed, he probably belongs in this thread, too.

Underwhelmed rocks... Although all of the third party candidates mentioned in this thread, including my own, don't belong in this poll as much as Loser and Creep.

There's way too much debate regarding facts and theories about Beck and Thom Yorke that are somewhat interesting, but make no difference in the way I hear either of these songs, or any of their music, really..

I decided to choose "Loser" because "he hung himself with a guitar string."

Write in vote for:

SKEE-LO - I WISH

I decided to choose "Loser" because "he hung himself with a guitar string."

― billstevejim, Friday, February 24, 2012 3:30 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah that line was fire! love it

Oh snap it's alt-rock, sorry. Ok... let's see:

Beck is tongue in cheek, mocks hip-hop and 90s teenage-angst and it samples Johnny Jenkins's I Walk on Gilded Splinters.

Creep rip-offs the Hollies, wears its heart on its sleeve and it makes me feel ashamed to say I like Radiohead with certain people.

But that's the same thing it boils down to, for me. I have so much more love and appreciation for ppl or songs that wear their hearts on their sleeves than those that wrap everything in layers of irony and mocking and hip name-checking.

By the time 'Loser' came out it was kind of necessary imo. Someone had to do it.

Y'know maybe if Loser had demolished the Beastie Boys instead of lionising them?

By the time 'Loser' came out it was kind of necessary imo. Someone had to do it.

― Homosexual Satan Wasp (Matt DC)

This, we had an overload of 'heart on your sleeve' kind of artists at the moment, many bordering on pathetic self-loathing. Loser felt like a breathe of fresh air.

Loser came out just prior to Cobain's suicide iirc

don't really get any more zeitgeisty than that

i don't really scan beck as "mocking" hip hop, like at all

me either

like he seems like a p natural outgrowth of beasties, cali slacker/punk/skater/bo-ho/surfer/post-hardcore culture like ppl glen e friedman took pictures of culture + a little folky my parents were 60s weirdos vibes

Beck isn't mocking hip-hop, he's just largely terrible at rapping.

Beck isn't mocking hip-hop, he's just largely terrible at rapping.

^^^ which is how Beck felt about his rapping on the song, and is where the chorus came from

beck originally wrote "loser" for Chino XL but he turned it down so beck did it himself

Y'know maybe if Loser had demolished the Beastie Boys instead of lionising them?

will not hear a word said against the beastie boys. would take nearly half the tracks on check your head over "creep".

and yeah, i get no impression that beck is mocking hip-hop. mockery is his basic stance circa mellow gold and odelay, but the influence feels p genuine.

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?