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

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.

Now that I'm listening to this, I guess I have heard it and it does have a bit of a similarity to "Where It's At".

I was right there with the radio when "Walking..." broke, and can't be alone in the disappointment upon getting the album* that it was that track and 11 goofy Ska songs.

*Double-Platinum in the US!

Getting into the Odelay Deluxe bonus tracks – "Deadweight" actually does sound specifically like "Walkin' on the Sun." And the acoustic gtr parts of "Gold Chains" (unreleased tho it may have been) are not unlike Sugar Ray...

Does MC 900 Ft Jesus come into this?

smash-mouth-prove-singer-guy-fieri-not-same-person

heard this song in the supermarket today. assumed i was listening to a failed sugar ray carbon copy from 1999 but it turned out to be from 2015, it's freaking me out in a bad bad way

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBeGAk-xfyI

That’s… really something. I looked up his bio, at least he’s not denying it:

Sonically the music is influenced by the bright melodies and laid-back grooves of the ’90s alterna-pop/rock acts he loves, like LEN, Sugar Ray, Uncle Kracker, No Doubt, and Sublime — artists who captured the effortless, carefree feeling of waking up each morning to a sunny day.

thread Q asks for effects and then everyone's all up in each other's faces about antecedents.
tom waits, capt beefheart, TMBG, while we're at it. de la soul, tribe, definitely.

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 still reckon Drinking in L.A. is a bang to rights Odelay descendant

The space age pop revival and it spreading to Beck, Stereolab etc is true but also there's the broader lounge revival that it was one wing of. The irony or at least sense that the fascination was revisionary was often part and parcel but it also meant stuff that could be straight up pastiches i.e. The Mike Flowers Pops on the bachelor pad end, and The Moog Cookbook on the muzak end.

And it meant lounge songs becoming UK/European hits thanks to high budget car adverts. It meant the Karminsky Experience Inc. and Tipys and Dimitri From Paris. It meant the Syd Dale Orchestra tracks being used as theme music to TV shows with a sense of cool. And comps like This Is Easy and The Sound Gallery. And spy themes being done up as dance remixes (cf. David Arnold and Propellerheads - together or apart). And names like New Adventures in Hi-Fi and the sound of "This Is Hardcore" or the sleeve of I've Been Expecting You (that eyebrow!) and...

Plus, in more sincere (but even more cool-conscious) waters, there's coffee table trip hop, Mo' Wax etc.

Obv you could probably suck most of the 90s into this void of you go really far but I find it interesting that this whole thing was very transatlantic, even if applied differently in the UK than in the US/CAN.

Tipsy*

BS2000 was a band with a Beastie Boy that sounded like they were influenced by Beck.

we did end up with the fantastic TOAH DYNAMIC in the uk but i guessvthey equal parts bonzo dog/ traffic & early happy mondays and they weren't exactly salient. not sure if evil superstars' ESOL word salad was at all beck inspired but it was there

Good posts ycsmfwhh and I 100% agree re: “Drinking In LA”

thread Q asks for effects and then everyone's all up in each other's faces about antecedents.

b/c part of the discussion is whether the later acts would’ve come along anyway without Odelay, and to what extent it was part of larger trends

Butterfly effect. Music is always in conversation with itself. Without a controlled experiment, using alternate universes, there is no way to know how things would have evolved in the absence of a specific artist or recording.

Perhaps, but it’s better than talking about politics

https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/bob-dylan-what-do-you-think-of-this-kid-called-beck-i-want-to-make-a-record-the-way-he-makes-records/

IN THE EARLY AUTUMN OF 1996, DANIEL LANOIS AND BOB DYLAN RENDEZVOUSED IN A NEW YOK HOTEL ROOM AT THE SOUTHERN EDGE OF CENTRAL PARK. Dylan read from a ream of lovelorn lyrics, reportedly written while snowbound on his Minnesota farm the previous winter. These were the words Lanois had wanted back at Teatro, when Dylan was feeling out the room and the relationship. Dylan asked if he had a record, and Lanois answered yes. “Off we went,” says Lanois.

Dylan had one more question, engineer Mark Howard remembers: “‘What do you think of this kid called Beck? I want to make a record the way he makes records.’”

That June, Beck had released Odelay, its loops and samples slipping ideas from hip-hop and electronica into the rock charts. It was a novel way to repurpose the past, to look back while moving forward. Lanois had some experience with the method, too, thanks to very recent work with Luscious Jackson, whose Fever In Fever Out LP he co-produced with New York native Tony Mangurian.

#onethread

"How Dad-Rock Dealt With Beck..."

Huh, I didn’t know Lanois co-produced that Luscious Jackson album.

Yeah along with Jagger, Dylan was exactly the kind of person I was thinking of when I said Odelay was the Happening Classic for the older gen.

Eventually Gorillaz took over this niche.

― Chris L, Friday, January 20, 2023 11:39 PM

yes and no.
two of the studio gurus who basically crafted the first gorillaz album were cass browne and morgan nicholls from senseless things.
before they were sucked into the gorillaz machine they made an album under the guise of delakota.
and their album, one love, was a total odelay spin off.

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

Another band I don't think anyone mentioned: Space Monkeys

xxxpost - dylan always seems to have some idea of what's going on, like working with arthur baker in the early 80s etc so it wasn't unprecedented

I don't think it's toooo much of a stretch to connect Cold Irons Bound's dubby bass and junkshop beat to all of this (and to the hip hop-pier end of trip hop), even if the similarities are only in my head (they are).

Space Monkeys yes! <3 Acid House Killed Rock N Roll!

There's a little discussion about Big Audio Dynamite upthread, and I just heard "Rush" for the first time in a long time on 1st Wave. I've never really listened that hard to the song before (or any BAD for that matter), so it's just occuring to me that the extended sampled organ breakdown (2:00-3:00 in the track)--while having precedent earlier in the BAD catalogue and some backpacker Hip Hop--seriously forecasts the approach Beck & the Dust Brothers took with such material on Odelay.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h8zs898lr4