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MEMORIES:
“Soy un perdedor
I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me?
(get crazy with the cheese whiz)” - “Loser”
Hailed by critics and music lovers as the most idiosyncratic of 90s alternative rockers, Beck Hansen has produced an ever-changing and vibrant body of work that defies definition and balks at boundaries. That said, Beck’s genre-bending music is very much a product of the 90s, an age that gave media overexposure to the masses, blending everything from the Delta blues to electronica, hip hop to hard rock with a free-flow style.
Born in Los Angeles, California, Beck was influenced by the city’s diverse musical offerings, from hip hop to Latin music. During his school years, he spent his time honing his musical and artistic skills, though he dropped out of high school in the mid-80s. Beck traveled around the world performing as a street musician. In the late 80s, he returned to the States, broke but motivated.
Once back in L.A., Beck snuck onto stages at venues such as punk clubs, coffee shops, and even went back to performing in the streets. He was soon discovered by the record label Bong Load. With some positive word of mouth from Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, and his hit single, “Loser,” Beck had a major-label bidding war before him. Eventually, he signed with Geffen, and scored an unconventional contract that allowed him to release un-commercial material on smaller indie labels.
The bluesy-hip-hop sounds of his first major single “Loser” found its way onto his debut Mellow Gold, and helped to make the album a big success. At the same time, he released Stereopathetic Soulmanure for Flipside Records, and One Foot in the Grave for K Reckords. He took his act on a worldwide tour, and followed it up with a spot in the 1995 Lollapalooza tour. Critics began to pan him as a one-hit wonder, and while audiences were soaking up “Loser” they were not really getting into his other works.
Soon Beck went to work on his official follow up to Mellow Gold with the Dust Brothers, who produced the Beastie Boys’ masterpiece, Paul’s Boutique. The result was 1998’s Odelay, an album that would bury the notion that Beck was a one-hit wonder. The lead single, “Where It’s At” got heavy airplay and became an MTV favorite. Rolling Stone and Spin magazines gave it perfect reviews and the album wound up on countless “Best of” lists that year. It went double-platinum and won a number of awards, including two Grammys on the strength of the leadsing and a string of other hits, including “Devil’s Haircut,” “Jack-Ass,” and “The New Pollution.” Beck became a low-fi hero to the alternative music masses.
The very same year, Beck began working on a new folk-styled album that was originally slated for release on the indie label, Bong Load. However, Geffen stepped in – excited by the results and the album’s production presence of Nigel Godrich – and released the album on Geffen Records in November. The record had a gentle, trippy tone, and was an unlikely follow-up to Odelay. Both Beck and Geffen made it clear that it was not the official follow-up and the album went on to become Beck’s third Top-20 album release. Officially speaking, the real follow up to Odelay took over a year to record and produce. Midnite Vultures ran the spectrum of funky sexual innuendo as a party album. Reviews were all over the map on it, but fans continued to love his expanding style.
2002 saw the release of Sea Change, which became Beck’s first Top-10 album. The rich and dense sounds of the album carried a unified musical theme and featured string arrangements by Beck’s father, David Campbell. No commercial singles were made available to the public, and he embarked on a tour with The Flaming Lips functioning as both his opening and backing band. In 2004, he returned to the studio to record Guero with the Dust Brothers. It marked a return to his Odelay sound, and got good critical press – and it debuted at #2 on the charts on the strength of its first single “E-Pro,” with the second single, “Girl” getting a lot of college radio play. Early the following year, Beck released an EP, aptly titled Game Boy Variations, which contained four remixes by independent artists using video game sounds from Game Boys.
In October of 2006, Beck released The Information. The album came with a sheet of stickers, to be used as a “make your own album cover.” The unusual ‘album art’ disqualified it from entering the UK albums chart, but it gave Beck his third straight Top-10 album in the States. The record, which took more than three years to create, is considered a hip-hop album, though it’s a genre-buster at least, with its songs true to Beck’s form, influenced by everything and everyone. Maybe one day we’ll have a category for Beck, but in the meantime let’s just sit back and soak up his melodies.
