'if Odelay sucked...' How Alt-Rock Dealt With Beck In The '90s

Just gave "pepper" a listen on YT. First video in the if-you-like-this recommended bar on the right is "loser" by Beck.

Pepper, Loser, Flagpole Sitta = holy trinity of 90s quasinovelty hits whose titles almost rhyme

I checked Spotify and Odelay is not among Beck's "Popular Releases" nor are any Odelay tracks in his top 10.

On iTunes, it takes until his 23rd most popular track to get to Odelay ("Devil's Haircut"). And that's excluding songs where he's a featured artist.

"Loser" aside, people who listen to Beck don't seem to be going for any of his 90s output

That sounds utterly unhinged, but I'm sure the data doesn't lie

On YouTube Music, “Where It’s At” is his #2, and “Devils Haircut” is #5…

looking again it's possible i'm totally misinterpreting this itunes thing, please ignore

If Beck wants us to focus on something other than his 90s output, he is doing a shit job of it.

Like it or not, his legacy is a 90s legacy. He can try to pretend that he did significant things earlier. He cant point to what he did later. But it will be in vain. Like it or not, his legacy is a piece of wax choking on a turntable. Proclaming otherwise is... a lost cause.

I checked Spotify and Odelay is not among Beck's "Popular Releases" nor are any Odelay tracks in his top 10.

― George Santos' If I Could Only Remember My Name - C or D? (President Keyes), Friday, January 20, 2023 10:16 AM (thirty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I don't really understand how the top 10 on Spotify works, but it's not ranked by total plays. (I think it probably weights songs that have received a lot of plays recently?) I clicked through his catalog and came up with this. The Odelay hits do crack the top 10, but just barely.

1. Loser (Mellow Gold) 332M
2. Dreams (Colors) 68M
3. Up All Night (Colors) 47M
4. Wow (Colors) 44M
5. Morning (Morning Phase) 43M
6. Blue Moon (Morning Phase) 41M
7. E-Pro (Guero) 38M
8. Go It Alone (Guero) 32M
9. Where It's At (Odelay) 30M
10. Devil's Haircut (Odelay) 29M

for a contrast, "Pepper" is at 71M

I noticed this elsewhere, but newer music gets a LOT more streams for quite a few veteran artists. Probably lots of prosaic reasons for it.

BTW I love both Loser and Pepper and I am frequently asked to play both in open mic situations.

No one, to date, has requested Lost Cause or Devil's Haircut.

(I think it probably weights songs that have received a lot of plays recently?)

Yeah I think Spotify top 10 are listens from the last month. Might be wrong.

Scanning the thread, I'm surprised no one's mentioned DJ Shadow except in a quote. Endtroducing... is part of this conversation, no?

I don't think so, no. Endtroducing... was instrumental hip-hop as album-length art project. College radio and the music press picked up on it, but it wasn't in conversation with pop, really.

anecdotally I'd disagree, based mainly on what lots of my friends were playing at the time, DJ Shadow was much more of a piece with people who liked Beck than shit like Smashmouth was. Endtroducing, Paul's Boutique and later Beasties, other Hello Nasty stuff, Odelay...this stuff basically soundtracked 75% of every party I went to in my final years of college.

That tracks with my experience of 1996-1997.

The college newspaper editor who introduced me to Paul's Boutique in that era was introduced to Roxy Music thanks to yours truly. Roxy could not have been uncooler.

Add Chuck Prophet to this?

Big fan of Prophet, and thought The Hurting Business leaned heavily on Beck and 90s film noir, in its production especially. As JCLC says about "Pepper," Prophet's songs come from living through dark things in a way that keeps the sound from just being a Morricone joke-violence pastiche.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RS9N6JzyxYk

people played dj shadow at parties? i was going to
object to the original comparison but mainly just because dj shadow is sooooooo serious (self-serious too, but that wasn’t really the point of the comparison so i didn’t bring it up)

i never listened to anything after private press though, maybe he lightened up

This thread has made me think a few things

- from the mid-to-late eighties there was an underground rock notion of "collage" that was kind of a backlash against 1982-83 hardcore punk "purity". Lots of demonstration of one's deep listening, not just dedication to New Wave newness. Songs like Butthole Surfers' "Moving to Florida" is a good early example - it actually mixes different reverb types, sounding like samples from the Birthday Party one minute, then Sabbath, then The Smiths. Also stuff like the early surf-revival band Lawndale mixing "Take Five" and "Whole Lotta Love". This keeps picking up speed and getting more high-concept. Bongwater, etc.
- a parallel thing happening in hip hop with the move from scratching to sampling - even before Paul's Boutique and 3 Feet High, I recall a lot of excitement picking out the mix of references in Public Enemy and Schooly D
- there was lots of tying this into postmodernist critical theory, after pomo had had its way with androgyny and Madonna a few years before
- 3 Feet High really opened the floodgates for overt, wacky juxtapositions both for hiphop and rock. Didn't even Dread Zeppelin get some critical respect? Mighty Mighty Bosstones' proposition of "how about ska with Van Halen guitar tone" seemed like an interesting idea, if not a good one.
- ten years later it didn't feel novel at all, just irritating. But then suburban boys singing over fuzzed-out delta blues riffs seemed fun and novel in '66 and spent by '76. That didn't hurt Nazareth/Smashmouth from carrying these notions onwards in the mainstream.
- was mashup was what channeled these instincts next? starting with Moby's Play but really fueled by mp3s.

yes! mashups for hipsters. when proles got into mashups, hipsters moved on to "balearic"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMAfKo65nng

Music trends flowed in and out of style so quickly for so long. My brain couldn't handle understanding it before '88 but from them until probably 2006 it felt like the landscape was entirely flipped on its head every 3 years. This slowed throughout the 2000s and now it's more like every 7 years if we're lucky. The large number of seemingly fresh styles that were considered hip by '94-97 was so expansive that an album like Odelay was bound to arrive and react to the absurdity of it all.

IMO Its influence on charting music and radio hits seems a bit exaggerated throughout this thread. A lot of the stuff listed was released around the same time -- "Pepper" was definitely inspired by Mellow Gold, "Natural One" was a year earlier and likely reacting to Grand Royal. Aside from the vocals, Primitive Radio Gods almost feels like it could have been track 1 on Pure Moods 2. Sonic Youth, Luscious Jackson, and yea definitely JSBX were a part of this era for sure, but this was all before Odelay was released.

Odelay-style hits had already been happening, and the album feels more like the "lock thread" of this era than a signal of what followed, where anything cool about this moment was entirely drained in favor of McG and bowling shirts. It's a cool album that might have inspired lots of very uncool hits and non-hits - the worst of them might have been Better Than Ezra's "Extraordinary" (2001).

So I think this is "How Alt-Rock dealt with Beck." And I stand by my assessment that Smash Mouth sounds like watered down Beck, especially the dude's vocal melodies. But overall I think these hits were more a reaction to this weird era and not so much one album or artist.

I love Pepper but will forever associate it with a solo 10 hour drive where that and Macarena were the only two songs on every single radio station.

Mellow gold > Odelay

Other eclectic albums you highly anticipated if you were a Beck/Beasties fan around this time:
UNKLE - Psyence Fiction
Handsome Boy Modeling School - So... How's Your Girl?
Deltron 3030

Eventually Gorillaz took over this niche.

Some really good posts here – though I think some of the stuff being cited above was influenced more by trip-hop and the general “electronica” trend than by Beck, Beasties, etc.

Eventually Gorillaz took over this niche.

Very otm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwBjhBL9G6U

MC Paul Barman

Eventually Gorillaz took over this niche.

liked the first Gorillaz album fine at the time but I'm still super mystified by this.

Mainly in how the niche hasn't been hollowed out. The #229 biggest artist on Spotify. But seeing how "Feel Good Inc" (2005) is head and shoulders over everything else, I guess that tells you most of the listeners are pushing middle age. Or /r/vinyl dudes or... i dunno. zzz

I was thinking of Gorillaz yesterday when listing UK bands but stopped short of the 2000s.

Some really good posts here – though I think some of the stuff being cited above was influenced more by trip-hop and the general “electronica” trend than by Beck, Beasties, etc.

I tend to think the whole "stereolab-tortoise" axis feels bracketed off from this--different reference points, even if ultimately a lot of the methodology is the same

I deeply love that stuff, but I realize it's easy to tag it as the stilted, academic version of the beck-a-likes

There’s also the whole Dub Narcotic/K Records axis that intersects some of this on the indier side of things…

tonight I remembered the existence of Dub Narcotic Sound System

Lots of SPIN/MTV2 rotation was influenced by Tricky or Portishead or whatever, but not the VH1 landfill.

I'm guessing Sneaker Pimps earned more rotation than either.

Sure but again their most popular songs came out around the same time as Odelay.

so basically

Grand royal
Trip hop
acoustic guitars

add in Euro-sleaze and fake plastic grunge, and Whale nailed the blend in '95... ;-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ALHOT-Ubho
My sense of the timing of these things is a little off, but I always thought this Royal Trux song from '94 was a gnarled take on Beck, but apparently it was recorded months before Mellow Gold was released. Guess it was just their riff on hip-hop, though.

Yeah, recorded like six months earlier…

Here's a snippet of a 1998 interview (by Jay Ruttenberg!):

I have to ask them about my favorite Royal Trux song, 1994’s "Shockwave Rider." (...) It’s incredibly accessible: if Beck had recorded the number two years later and supported it with a Spike Jonze–directed video starring a white convertible and some Nevada desert, it would have gone triple-platinum. I mention this to the twosome and they snicker at me.

"That shit’s fuckin’ weak, man," says Hagerty. "Using samples is lame. It’s imperialism. We just did ‘Shockwave Rider’ to show that ‘Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we know the whole routine, this is how it’s done.’ Just to check in and punch the ticket—‘look, we know how to do this and we can do it really well—but we’re making these other kind of records.’

"Part of what we do is illustrate restraint," continues the proudly ascetic man who refuses to fly. "It’s like: we can clone human beings now, but we don’t. Until now, has man ever discovered something and said, ‘Wait a minute, we don’t want to go down that road’?"

ctrl-f "Are you Jimmy Ray?" found!

Odelay release date: June 18, 1996

Electriclarryland release date: May 6, 1996

Yeah "Pepper" is sarcastic Mellow Gold. The one-chord drone. Gibby said they purposely put the backwards singing in the same place as in "Loser."

I don't think I've ever noticed that bit is backwards.

Ohh ohh the Beasties have been mentioned plenty but as far as "post-Odelay" specifically goes that's Song for the Man all over imo