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

Primitive Radio Gods's "Standing..." sounds little-to-nothing like Beck to me

But the mood/thesis of it does sound like a prototype for Moby's "Play" album

I must admit that I've always thought that the part of "Standing..." where the lead singer breaks his cool and starts singing along with the sample is a really great moment

If I had to guess at the creative inspiration of "Standing..." I'd say it was made after dude watched Silence Of The Lambs and heard Q Lazzarus. A quick scan of the wikipedia suggests too that "Standing..." predates "Mellow Gold" by some years

Since this thread started hopping recently, the neverending playlist in my stupid head has been replaying both "Dyin All Young" and "Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Hand" nonstop. Both songs. In more or less constant rotation.

By comparison, Beck's "Loser" barely charts, because I only need to hear it once every few years. Except when I am playing it at an open mic, which happens more often than you might think.

I hope this discussion runs its course soon because I really want to get my head back onto other topics.

“Standing outside….” kinda gives me some Tom’s diner vibes tbh, just slightly.

The original Tom's Diner (circa 1984) has nothing to do with this trend.

The 1990 DNA remix, yeah ok sure.

But if that is admissible, why not the version of Beethoven's fifth from Saturday Night Fever, or Also Sprach Zarathustra from the Being There soundtrack?

I saw Beck a couple of months after sleeve but as part of some event put on by 89X the Detroit area alternative rock station - it was him, Sloan, Pavement, and Soul Coughing which is such an incredibly 1997 line up to me.

Joey Waronker was playing drums and I remember it being one of the first times I was really enthralled by the drummer at a show.

yup, and Smokey Hormel on guitar!

was Justin Meldal-Johnsen there? I don't have a strong opinion of his playing but he seems like an endearingly weird person.

I always think he is really good but that seems to have been mpstly based on a live video I can't seem to find anymore of him playing "La femme d'argent" which part was created by the other guy anyway. Still he sounded great iirc.

Unless it was Jason Falkner. Maybe it is him I like.

I may be basing my opinion of JMJ largely on a documentary about fuzz pedals that was on Amazon a while ago - he just seems like a goofball music nerd, and I have a soft spot in my heart for goofball music nerds

that "beck sound" is more the influence that downtempo, hip hop triphop and the like had in music circa mid 90's. a very interesting period for music in general.

I don't think Beck sounds much like Portishead or Tricky or Stereolab, tho

Those folks didn't have their tongues in their cheeks; they were after a more coherent sound rather than the snippy-snip Beckian vibe

I do recall there being an Esquivel resurgence at the time that was hitched to all of those though (stereolab, beck, cornelius, et al). how much irony was involved depended on the players but at it's core I think everyone was sincere in their interests in this sound.

xp Yeah, I don't recall drawing a trip-hop connection at the time... and I was way into that stuff, buying comps with names like DJ Smash: Bluntz On Wax Volume 1 & 2

In 94 I loved Dummy inordinately; hadn't heard much like it. Post-Millennium Tension was the same year as Odelay, wasn't it? They reached me at different times.

I feel like this sound reached a nadir in the late 90s--like I'd go into an Old Navy store and hear this breakbeat music with sunshine pop samples. Just kind of sampledelic wallpaper.

T/S: snippy v dippy v snippy-dippy

xxp Maxinquaye came out around 6 months after Dummy (summer '95)... Pre-Millennium Tension was later, '96.

listening to the Primitive Radio Gods hit yesterday, i was struck by the otm-ness of fgti's comparison to Moby's Play. that album's gotten a couple of name-checks in this thread, and it does seem like maybe a lot of the mid-90s "oh wow music can combine all kinds of things now!!" enthusiasm for Odelay found a new home there at decade's end.

i get the trip-hop connection with Beck. it's not the content, it's the tempo and the... chunkiness? of the sound. also maybe specifically the acceptance of dirty vinyl clicks and pops and crackle (or non-vinyl-based analogs to those things) as part of the soundscape.

Old Navy and sunshine-pop samples makes me think also of "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)" which is another thing that, if you squint, might not have gotten recorded/released if not for Beck's success. but who knows? Like Primitive Radio Gods did at the time, it might have seemed to just exist on its own as a strange, spoken-word-adjacent novelty hit that doesn't come from or lead to anything else.

The original Tom's Diner (circa 1984) has nothing to do with this trend.

The 1990 DNA remix, yeah ok sure.

But if that is admissible, why not the version of Beethoven's fifth from Saturday Night Fever, or Also Sprach Zarathustra from the Being There soundtrack?

Broken phone booth man isn’t in line w this trend either is what I’m saying, feels strangely more a part of that weird poppy bush era 1990-91 sound in a way rather than the Odelay trend. It doesn’t come off like alt-rock hip-hop cut-up patchwork sounds. the sample is a red herring.

summer February '95
(...sorry, correcting myself above)

i was refering to an adoption of certain elements of trip hop, downtempo or (instrumental) hip hop in a rock and pop context. so that period was pretty interesting for music in general
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-GqTr8THJg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqu132vTl5Y

weird poppy bush era 1990-91 sound

I've everything to show
I've everything to hide
Look into my eyes
I turned up the radio, but I can't hear it

another interesting sonic thing about PRG: the moment fgti identifies upthread, where Broken Phone Booth Man sings the sample line himself --- to my ears, his choice of how to convey sincerity and being down-hearted owes a lot more to "alternative" and "college rock" than to "grunge" or to slacker irony, etc. it reminded me of Gin Blossoms or something.

i do however think the song bears comparison to both "Tom's Diner" and "Loser." makes sense - not every aspect of the Poppy Bush Interzone vanished at the start of 1992, and lots of people might have still been working over ideas developed in that time. over on the "positive vibes" thread we eventually cracked the code and determined that Collective Soul owed more than was ever acknowledged to the Life is a Highway/Three Strange Days axis.

PRG dude sounds like he owned the deep forest cd maybe too.

I was into a lot of this music at the time, a continuum from Portishead to Soul Coughing to Pizzicato 5, but somehow Odelay left me cold. I found the stream of consciousness rando lyrics too wacky.("Love machines on the sympathy crutches, discount orgies on the dropout buses...") I relistened the other day thanks to this thread and actually liked it better now than I did then.

also: i've been struggling to make a post out of it, but there's a significant shift in Soul Coughing's sound between their 1994/1996 albums and 1998's El Oso, which if anything suggests a receding of the maximalist multi-color sampledelic tide, but maybe more trip-hop coming in. it's leaner, meaner, grimier, and lacks those sunny midtempo summer festival type songs.

but they're an odd duck for many reasons... Mark degli Antoni was really the sampler player as much as the keyboardist, alongside what was really a jazz rhythm section, so the way they used and deployed their (sometimes wacky) sample stuff kinda worked differently. to my ears, anyway.

the moment fgti identifies upthread, where Broken Phone Booth Man sings the sample line himself --- to my ears, his choice of how to convey sincerity and being down-hearted owes a lot more to "alternative" and "college rock" than to "grunge" or to slacker irony

Compare with "Dyin all Young." While Prophet doesn't sing the whole sampled line, he does repeat the last three words in his own voice, and I don't think it's that different in affect from Phone Booth Man.

It's interesting, I'm re-reading this thread and aside from "Pepper" I still don't hear much/any influence-of-Odelay on much other chart music (if anything) aside from, maybe, Dan The Automator productions

I'm trying to think of why this might be? Production-wise "Odelay" is straight-up cribbing from crate-digging beat assemblage methods and it is that Odelay seems more of a facsimile than an original in this regard. What did I listen to subsequent to Beck? Blue Break Beats compilations, and those weren't covering famous samples from Beck songs but samples from classic rap

I guess Odelay influenced JSBX's "Acme"! But not to especially terrific effect (tho I have a soft spot for it)

sleeve's post makes me want to start a thread called:

"My Girlfriend Lost Her Fucking Shoe! Tales of concert experiences from when you were young that felt life-changing at the time (and maybe they were)"

There is nothing like being up front at a wild show when you're 14, 15, 16, 17 ... if I could go back in time right now, I would.

Adjacent to Beck and "Dyin' All Young" is "Block Rockin' Beats" with its Schooly D sample.

And to throw in (Odelay-style!) another angle: I remember reading an interview with Will Oldham around 1999 where he was asked about Beck, and was glad that he didn't have any songs that he had to play at shows the way Beck did. Lo-fi Beck and Oldham seem in a very similar early-90s place, branching off completely differently from there in ways beyond just the music.

Alpine static, you should...I have some pretty hilarious stories, love to hear some others, obviously this is not the thread for it.

This style of music...I liked Beck better a few albums in, but the rest of this style...it looks like my sister and her friends' CD collection, and she is 8 years younger. With that in mind, I'd call it a hip-hop sensibility for people who used to be into hip-hop and Manchester dance before it all got messed up.

I feel like those Ultra Lounge comps on Rhino with like Esquivel covering “light my fire” or whatever are tangentially related here (deadbeat, tropicalia)

deadweight

^^ fucking love that orphan tune

it really should have been on Mutations

Great Gondrey video too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vptfm9D6owo

Revisited Odelay.... it sounded pretty good to me! (I was never a big fan.) But yeah - it doesn't sound much like Smash Mouth, Sugar Ray, or much other late-'90s alt-rock that I can remember; different beats, vocals, vibe...

The Smash Mouth thing isn't that they as a band on the whole sounded like Beck, it's that their breakthrough hit (and a later, slightly less commercially successful rewrite of said hit) owed a bit to him and the success he had in the mid-'90s.

I have no memory of the track "Minus," but it's really cool!

The whole Esquivel!/Exotica revival was more of a Stereolab thing. The initial two Esquivel! comps on Bar/None were issued in '94-5, alongside Stereolab's early heyday and the Loungecore movement (Combustible Edison etc.), plus the archival research of Irwin Chusid (who produced those comps amongst other relevant genre reissues). Beck was certainly a fellow traveler to all this.

Glad to see the "Dead weight" appreciation. I bought a dollar yard sale copy of the Life Less Ordinary soundtrack for that, and put it on the very first mix CD I ever made, when we crossed the CD-burner threshold. Absolutely deserved to be on Mutations.

Adjacent to Beck and "Dyin' All Young" is "Block Rockin' Beats" with its Schooly D sample.

??

are we talking about "all star" re the song that's supposed to owe a debt to beck? i agree with the folks saying it doesn't sound remotely like beck. did beck actually do the bowling shirt / mutton chops thing explicitly on tour or in videos? i just feel like he was too smarty pants and his sound was coming from a different universe. i hear "all star" and it reminds me of like .. the mighty mighty bosstones, guy fieri, etc. i don't recall a lot of collage in it but maybe i'm misremembering (not going to watch the all star video on a relaxing friday evening). more generic grunge and socal peppiness with a bright pop sheen.

No, "Walking On The Sun", with its '60s organ, fuzz guitar, and looped beat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQj--Kjn0z8

I guess I do hear the similarities, hearing them back to back like that

(When I stopped the Smash Mouth video, someone across the street was blaring Cake’s “Short Skirt, Long Jacket” – it felt like the whole world had somehow collapsed into this thread)

Lol, this whole time I also thought we were talking about "All Star", which is the only Smashmouth song I've ever heard, as far as I know.