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

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

The way Hot Chip work in the Todd Rundgren Intro sample into Shake a Fist feels very modelled on that Sellers lift in Rush as well.

"Feel like the Beta Band were the most blatant post-Beck Brit band, but also stirred in enough to make it their own."

"where it's at" reminds me of beta band! or the other way around. its funny, i really like beta band but i've never heard the odelay album. i liked the were it's at video though. i thought all those big beat/spike jonze videos were pretty cool at the time.

Imo a big difference is something seemingly wholly absent from the Beta Band's language was cocktail lounge/bachelor pad jazz-funk muzak, which is the bedrock of something like Where It's At.

its funny that back then i considered a lot of people to just be funny video artists. i never would have bought one of their albums. a large part of their charm for me were the videos. for instance, every hair metal band. or even guns & roses. but so many goofy 90s bands. even if i really liked their songs it would have felt weird to just listen to the CD. beck was definitely one of those. i can only hum "where it's at" and "devil's haircut" because i saw the videos so much. (and i can't really hum "devil's haircut" i just tunelessly warble the words devil's haircut over and over...)

Odelay is great imo, but I have noooo idea how it would sound to someone coming to it fresh in 2023.

(nothing against beck or hair metal or guns & roses. they just seemed like they needed the visuals. i would listen to them more intently now if someone asked me to. though scanning this thread i don't know if i would want to listen to a lot of the Beck-adjacent records mentioned. they would probably sound pretty cornball. would listen to emperor tomato ketchup though! for the record the only two new albums in 1996 that i would die for and get a tattoo of would be brave murder day and second toughest in the infants. i have listened to both of them a million times and i hope to listen to them a million more before i die.) (i remember listening to ATliens a lot back then. was that the Odelay of rap? hahaha! kidding. we all know it was that kool keith record. which i bought back then and didn't play much. i did buy entroducing...and listened to it a total of once. i listened to a lot of new rap though. that was a good year. Ironman! on vinyl, natch. though now i listen to Ironman on CD.)
(and i love the dust brothers to death. still waiting for a deluxe instrumental paul's boutique cd. i might be the only person i know who still listens to tone loc and young mc on cd...)

that was just such an amazing year for rap and good beats and samples. i guess i didn't need beck. i was just listening to beats, rhymes, and life the other day. lemme tellya, still sounds awesome!

i've actually been going back and dusting off old Mo' Wax playlists on Youtube and enjoying them. after endtroducing came out i think they put out 20 singles a day. i don't own much of it but i will be buried with my major force boxed set.

and not long after Mo' Wax peaked Matador became an electonica label. #twoloneswordsmen #jega #redsnapper

kinda like when i went into the philly record exchange and all the no-neck blues band records on the wall had been replaced by Warp singles. it was in the air! the stench of something new...

(that was a good year for vinyl lovers. i could buy emperor tomato ketchup for $9.95 on vinyl - which i did - and the CD was, like, $17.99. even 2XLP Ironman would only be $12.99.)

Imo a big difference is something seemingly wholly absent from the Beta Band's language was cocktail lounge/bachelor pad jazz-funk muzak, which is the bedrock of something like Where It's At.

i remember kinda cringing at the james brown/soul thing he would do. think it was some awards show where i saw that. mtv awards or something. people thought that was great back then?

it was so cool how matador released those Pole records here in the US, seems very daring in retrospect

and burger/ink - las vegas

some guy just came in and spent $150 bucks on horton heat and supersuckers CDs! thank you 90s guy! other 90s stuff too. dinosaur. no beck though. its a wet snowy day here i wasn't expecting much store-wise.

I bought the bran van record that had "Drinking in LA" on it, and to the best of my recollection, it did not had anything that sounded like the single on it.

late but this post was otm, 'then the morning comes' smash mouth was def doing an exotica kitsch thing, its honestly the most charming thing about them I think

The connection between Odelay and Smash Mouth doesn't really exist to me

The mid-to-late 90s had a nearly simultaneous ska-fusion moment and a neo-swing moment, coupled with the enormous popularity of Pulp Fiction/Reservoir Dogs OSTs, and like... that movie The Mask, there was this generalised kinda kitsch blip that felt independent of a few of the progenitors suggested in this thread. Smash Mouth, to me, were most influenced by The Mighty Mighty Bosstones etc.

― french testicle (flamboyant goon tie included), Thursday, January 19, 2023 4:28 PM (nine months ago) bookmarkflaglink

but maybe im missing the cocktail lounge thing in odelay? it didn't register to me that way at the time

Intro to "The new pollution"?

"Tropicalia" felt like the next step in that direction

I was going to say, maybe people mixing up Brazilian influence with Cocktail Nation influence?

I don't think that it was really one thing or the other, these things were very much grouped together as part of an overall hip retro revival at the time, and Beck was tapping into a variety of different elements of this.

there was definitely post-beck french stuff that i liked that had a lot of that in it. or even Fantasma speaking of matador. that kinda thing.

so much turn of the century bossa electronica exotica stuff forgotten to the sands of time. i come across them all the time.

I quoted upthread Eric Harvey's description of late 1990s "recombinant pop."

it’s part of the whole sickly 70s vibe soup, big lapels, leisure suits,

(Of odelay)

but maybe im missing the cocktail lounge thing in odelay? it didn't register to me that way at the time

― xheugy eddy (D-40), Wednesday, 1 November 2023 18:30 (five hours ago) link

Intro to "The new pollution"?

― /asarco (AcnalbasacNoom), Wednesday, 1 November 2023 18:36 (five hours ago) link

"Deadweight" also came out during the tail end of the album cycle. Felt like every 60 minutes MTV was spinning that "The New Pollution" or "Where It's At" in '97. Weird that I have no memory of the "Jack Ass" music video.

a big shame on us all for forgetting Everything's "Hooch"

XP "Jack-Ass" is the black & white one about miners with the cameo by Willie Nelson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8SKL4fniRM

...which led to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW4ymIkBUuE

"it’s part of the whole sickly 70s vibe soup, big lapels, leisure suits,"

heeey ladiesssss!! still the best dust brothers video outside of wild thing maybe.

maybe it all comes from that one video.

Beastie Boys were way ahead of their time with that stuff, people seemed to find it nearly incomprehensible.

I've mentioned this elsewhere but for me, growing up in the 80s, it was like the entire 70s had been actively memory holed by most people, like anything vaguely reminiscent of the 70s was bad and should be avoided. Paul's Boutique was probably the first time I heard current musicians really embrace a whole lot of 70s music and culture.

And of course the Dust Brothers were a b8g part of that move.

re: "Hooch," I would have sworn it came up here, but I was actually thinking of last summer's revive of 50 Memorable Songs Of The Late 1990s That Apparently Only You Remember, Even Though They Were Totally On The Radio And Stuff which covers the chill acoustic-strumming-over-sampled-beats-with-vinyl-crackle side of things. good MarkoP playlist on that also.