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

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

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 ?