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

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kinda like when i went into the philly record exchange and all the no-neck blues band records on the wall had been replaced by Warp singles.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.

"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"

people wanted to feel "modern" in the 80s. even though most people still drove 70s cars and lived in houses from the 50s and 80s dance music was mostly based on 70s disco and synth music had been a pop thing since the 60s and rockers mostly still looked like it was 1972 and the freshest new sound of the 80s was literally made out of music from the 70s.

but yeah if paul's boutique had come out in 1996 it would have been number one in the land.

The Odelay singles >>>>>>>>>>> the rest

“Minus” is a gem, IMO

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

a Matt Dike and Michael Ross The Genie joint fwiw - the Dust Bros only did three LP tracks

(they also only did the Know How single for Young MC, with Dike and Ross stepping back in after that)