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

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

Am I wrong in seeing some Pop Will Eat Itself in some of this or are they off to the side?

PWEI did not have much of an impact on the US apart from a minor hit for “Ich Bin Ein Auslander”. But PWEI are a great precursor to all this.

"Can U Dig It" was played a lot on 120 Minutes

Yeah, but what reach into the the musical mainstream/cultural gestalt did 120 Minutes have? Genuinely asking.

It was pretty much where you heard alt-music if you didn't live in a big city.

I only ask cause that was me in a small exurb watching 120 minutes in 1989

there was definitely a while there where 120M was THE subcultural thing, like a US version of the John Peel show

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTG7_YOFqQE

I lived in a small farm town and bought Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine because of 120 Minutes that has to count for something

Oh yeah and Urban Dance Squad probably figures in this

I liked "A Deeper Shade of Soul," but that was so early... other than just being another example of a '90s rock/hip-hop hybrid, I don't see it playing into the post–Odelay alt-rock era.

Urban Dance Squad or Big Audio Dynamite would be on a Billboard chart called like "World Groove."

BAD had multiple #1s on the Modern Rock chart

I thought about bring up BAD but feel like they are missing the weird ironic distance the beck et all stuff had.

there was definitely a while there where 120M was THE subcultural thing, like a US version of the John Peel show

― sleeve, Tuesday, January 24, 2023 12:46 PM (two hours ago)

my friends and i would tape it and watch over and over and over. it was a major source of musical discovery!
i had a PWEI tape and only have one memory of listening to it, not very good iirc
my friends were more into BAD than I was. that stuff was a little corny for me ?

to clarify though that was mostly early early 90s -- by the time Beck came around I wasn't watching/taping anymore so the post-Odelay landscape is something i only know from osmosis, not because I liked the music much or was looking to discover anything that sounded like that

I love both BAD and PWEI to bits. But their late 90s descendants are more Campag Velocet or Lo-Fidelity Allstars or Earl Brutus. With early Apollo 440 (Astral America era) or Senser as the bridge between them.

120 Minutes is where I saw this (speaking of hip hop influence)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAl-xzN8e-M

irrational otm, I don't hear a lot of Beckian ironic detachment in BAD

ok i went back and listened to the two BAD songs i remember -- they were fun. still a little corny but in a way i can enjoy now that i am decades beyond being a depressed teen.

I associate BAD more with Is there a name for that genre of turn-of-the-90s pop-rock with the positive vibes, huge guitar leads, and gated drums?

same

altho I think of them as late 80s?

there was definitely a while there where 120M was THE subcultural thing, like a US version of the John Peel show

For anyone feeling nostalgic, BTW, there's a fair number of 120 Minutes episodes at archive.org (albeit in VHS quality): https://archive.org/search?query=120+minutes

yes!!

I was in this weird lacuna where I pretty much didn't have cable until MTV had already stopped playing music videos. It's like, I saw music videos on network shows like "Friday Night Videos" circa 1984/5. Then a vast blank. The stuff that came after? I saw some of it at friends' houses, or on VHS or DVD or whatever.

Fast forward to 2002, I finally buy a teevee and plump for cable. MTV is already just wall-to-wall reality shows. At that point, one only saw videos on VH1 and its successors. I missed a huge portion of popular culture - not the first and probably not the last. Oh well.

Puffin, that's exactly my experience, every last comma.

Ditto, dudes

Check out Sledgehammer.

I think I've actually only had cable for about two years of my life. Finally got it in around 2010 and it wasn't long after that it became clear that streaming was the way to go. I too have mostly seen the videos that were on Friday Night Videos and am always surprised when I learn that lots of people's experience of a song from the 90s includes the video in a meaningful way -- I don't even know what they look like.

Right now, someone is realizing they didn't see the video of Van Halen's song "Right Now" until way later than it's release.

It's okay because Everybody Hurts, sometimes. Take comfort in VH1 Classic.

*its, gah

My video knowledge ends around 1995, so to me all those electronica videos that did well in the ilm video poll are fake

really fun thread!

i think the key is that "Odelay" as a concept covers several different bases. like first and foremost i think of the general sample- or pseudo-sample-heavy quick-cutting Dust Brothers thing, which leads to the somewhat distinct preoccupation with "collage" and "eclecticism." but then there's a grab-bag of other specific audio and visual signifiers - cowboy shirts, sideburns, late 60s lounge/exotica sonics, general late 60s/early 70s California looks and sounds, old-school hip-hop, continued 90s SoCal slacker chill skater irony, etc. etc.

that is --- each person could hear "Odelay" in connection to 90s alt-rock, focus in on one or more of the particular elements that the album is collaging together, and come to different conclusions, because all those things WERE trends that preceded and exceeded the album. then and now, the album ruled not so much because this combination was such a perfect one, but because it meshes so well with the songs, which were catchy as hell and packed with all these lines that were fun to sing along to.

i remember this feeling that odelay was something that you really needed to like if you wanted to get with the times? like it was the future. a future that lasted for what 3 years? lol.

I keep thinking of Fatboy Slim's singles continuing something similar to the Odelay mix Doctor Casino describes above.

i remember this feeling that odelay was something that you really needed to like if you wanted to get with the times? like it was the future. a future that lasted for what 3 years? lol.

Yeah my impression of Odelay as someone who wasn't there is that it was decided upon by the mainstream music media as a Happening Modern Classic, the sort of thing to be namechecked by ageing artists who wanted to feel they were in the know (this way lies Mick Jagger trying to get the Dust Brothers to produce some of Bridges to Babylon, say).

I am sure you will all be thrilled to hear the theme of Chuck Klosterman's essay about Loser is "so this is what we're doing now."

altho I think of them as late 80s?

BAD had a few minor hits off the first album in 1985, two not-so-noted albums in 86 and 88, a GREAT album in 1989, and then some much bigger international hits off the second album of the second line-up, in 1992.

megatop phoenix best album EVER. the crush collision foxbase alpha.