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

odelay and beck in general = unmistakably l.a. beastie boys - unmistakably new york.

Beasties had been living in LA since paul's boutique though and did Check Your Head and G-Son studios their rehearsal space/skate ramp place in LA

How so? I always detected some LA-ness about the Beastie Boys xp

Apart from 'why is Curly yelling at me'

I associate the B-movie wah wah funk stuff on CYH and Ill Communication as LA-ish (not that I've ever been, mind).

Fastball’s “The Way” was the first thing that came to mind.

Yeah, that's a good connection. The quasi-John Barry guitar line feels like it's treading on the same ground as the smash mouth tracks mentioned earlier

Paul’s boutique also was recorded in Los Angeles even tho for me it’s the ultimate New York City album. Check your head always felt kind of NYC as well, for whatever reason.

Smashmouth do seem very Californian to me but the Beasties put out a comp of instrumentals with the same title and artwork as this, I think pre-Odelay

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJQPP6AEnnw

ok fair enough i just mean like.. you hear the beasties and their voices are new york ones. you hear beck and he sounds like a rich l.a. boy. guys i don't really know what i'm talking about at all, just enjoying hate-remembering beck.

Imani Coppola "Legend of a Cowgirl" feels like it was an attempt to recreate "New Pollution"

No mention of the (oft shitty) Fun Lovin' Criminals but don't they fit somewhere as well? Not Beck-ish but in that alt-rock/hip hop/cult sampling/pop culture-referencing tent.

you hear the beasties and their voices are new york ones.

yeah def

you hear beck and he sounds like a rich l.a. boy.

i wouldn't know

Add Chuck Prophet to this?

And did we mention

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb6Nl_BB6sU

Can't tell if check your head/ill communication have an "l.a. sound" or if i've simply been fed the beasties' "we bought a studio in LA and broke out our instruments for the first time in years" mythology for so long that it stuck

xp the American "Your Woman"

Are you Jimmy Ray?

oh shit you know what song i heard in a grocery store in grand junction, colorado last weekend that i haven't heard in literally over twenty years? mmm mmm mmm mmm by crash test dummies. what a weird and surprisingly good song. connected to a strain of mostly bad 90s radio rock though. the low voiced acoustic thing.

"the way" is a good song

Apart from 'why is Curly yelling at me'

real life lol

oh shit you know what song i heard in a grocery store in grand junction, colorado last weekend that i haven't heard in literally over twenty years? mmm mmm mmm mmm by crash test dummies. what a weird and surprisingly good song. connected to a strain of mostly bad 90s radio rock though. the low voiced acoustic thing.

'if Automatic for the People sucked...' How Alt-Rock Dealt...

Not sure if this is relevant to the subject at hand, but I did recently come to the realization that The Offspring's Pretty Fly for a White Guy is basically just Rick Rubin era Run DMC/ Beastie Boys, but with a 90s Californian spin to it.

Also there's even a remix of it by the Dust Brothers, which was among one of the earliest MP3s that I recall downloading.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njRZDwR_ST8

Superman never made any money

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poMw4oko7RI

Basehead was basically Beck a few years before Beck, though not as good.

Yeah, growing up in Canada I feel like Superman Song was a bigger hit than Mmmm Mmmm Mmmm was, but maybe 6 year old me just took greater notice to a song that was literally about Superman.

Also, two albums after Mmmm Mmmm Mmmmm, Crash Test Dummies would go the route of adding drum loops, rapping, and vague "electronics influences", on their album "Give Yourself a Hand".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCKoub_8Y48

Play with Toys is so good :(

One of the best fluke products of that "something in the air" - How Bizarre

The last time I heard a Crash Test Dummies song it reminded me of middle period Swans — the quieter stuff on Children of God and The Burning World and albums like that.

Basehead was basically Beck a few years before Beck, though not as good.

Sorry, I think you misspelled "rather better."

XP now that would be some double bill

later than Odelay but

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVWWl3mcr_w

So I really think the Beta Band are just an example of a rock band that listened to some rap and hip hop and their dynamic is more about channeling elements of anthemic Jock Jams into something more introspective. And maybe the stuff the singer did with less group involvement (like the s/t) is more interesting and holds up better, the debut at its best sounds like DIY Euro hip hop. But there are also beats that sound like Cypress Hill, they copied the Japanese rap from Buhloone Mindstate pretty much verbatim on one of their songs, their funk is the Madchester variety, and the energy on their tracks builds in a more linear way- I get why someone would call them "post-Odelay" because they're combining a bunch of disparate things in a way that calls attention to the disparity. But if there's a traceable lineage to the Grand Royal magazine kind of style it might be an obsession with appearing cool.

Is Luna's Pup Tent post-Odelay?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a8G_cqZMHM

This is probably one of the quintessential releases from that time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Home_with_the_Groovebox

I was listening to a recent episode of Time Crisis (Ezra Koenig's radio show), and while discussing early Ween there was a pretty good discussion of 'funny white guy' music of the '90s, on a spectrum from nerdy/dorky/not concerned with appearing cool (eg They Might Be Giants, Phish) ---- to being concerned with cool, or possibly just being cool (Beck, Ween, etc). Maybe Cake is the exact middle?

Only learned recently than TMBG's 'Window' was apparently a goof on Crash Test Dummies and their ilk and suddenly it all makes sense
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_VYHsWzqZI

Feel like Mark's Keyboard Repair had a big influence on acts such as Cornershop, Badly Drawn Boy...goofing around with different genres, fragments of songs etc.

Cake's "The Distance" fits the bill for sure, and though I don't love it, it's honestly aged better than a lot of the class of '96 buzz bin hip-hop dabblers

Can we clarify the typology a bit?

Like, is sampling essential? I don't think there are samples in Cake, OK Go, Luna, Smashmouth, Sugar Ray.

And can we usefully distinguish between hip-hop / rap and a general category of speak-singing (Sprechgesang) like the way 1950s ballads would sometimes have a spoken verse.

Good Work Everybody!

Here's some relevant recent discussion: 50 Memorable Songs Of The Late 1990s That Apparently Only You Remember, Even Though They Were Totally On The Radio And Stuff

Cake doesn't have sampling but it does have deadpan white-guy rapping (or "quasi-rapping) and the whistling synths imported from g-funk in a clearly "alternative rock" setting, feels like it fits

there's a lot of record scratching even on songs without samples

The Distance for sure fits. This thread makes me want to see a graph indicating the presence of vibraslap on charting singles from '89 - '99

And like a lot of stuff on here, it's more contemporaneous with Odelay than part of its immediate influence--The Distance came out like 6 weeks after the Beck record

cake is like the rick and morty of alt rock bands (this is a bad thing imo)

Can we clarify the typology a bit?

Like, is sampling essential? I don't think there are samples in Cake, OK Go, Luna, Smashmouth, Sugar Ray

No, sampling is not an essential criteria, I think if anything the point is more that record production techniques are employed which emulate something of the sound of a sample collage. One I mentioned upthread is mismatching the reverbs on different instruments so that instead of creating an illusion of depth or space, the reverb is there to make everything sound like it came from a different source, to flatten it or to make the production sound more cut up.

At this point even the Smashing Pumpkins had done a couple of things where they're constructing tracks horizontally by looping an extracted bar, rather than doing takes. One difference is they were looking for the tightest bar to loop, not some x-factor.

I wouldn't swear, but my instinct is Sugar Ray used some samples.

walkin’ on the sun has a sampled “big beat” (a la fatboy slim or any number of wall of sound artists)

oh sorry wrong shitty band

Hehe

Iirc, Sugar Ray sampled or at least interpolated* "Sauvecito" by Malo on "Every Morning".

*A key practice of this era

How many of the bands/artists mentioned so far had that tinny transistor radio effect as the intro of a track that opens up on the downbeat?

Fastball definitely. Maybe Sugar ray.