Beck loser which album

It surprisingly made some noise on FM radio in L. Since it actually hit the charts in , most people consider to be the 20th anniversary of the song, which had as big an impact on the DIY singer-songwriter movement as Kurt Cobain had upon alternative rock. Or even second. A young white guy sort-of rapping about monkeys, shotgun weddings, pigeon wings — what did this mean? Was it utter nonsense, or a deep statement by a legend in the making?

I just remember it being a laugh, but some people heard it and liked it. Beck has maintained a presence on the charts worldwide since becoming the torchbearer for another generation of young musicians who had no prospects unless they cut their hair, and is still a critical favorite who continues to evolve.

Now in his 40s, Beck is respected as an artist who can play several instruments, and arrange them to make his still-quirky lyrics and voice appeal to a wide variety of listeners. Only members can comment. Become a member. The toast is burning, and you just gotta rip it out and free it before it fills the house with smoke. Much of Mellow Gold was recorded in the home studio of a guy named Carl Stephenson. Stephenson had grown up playing in youth symphonies around Olympia, Washington, before quitting his grocery-store job and moving to Houston to work at Rap-A-Lot Records, then home to the Geto Boys.

Rap-A-Lot was hardcore; Stephenson was not. He loved watching DJ Ready Red strip samples from old funk and soul records, but he was uncomfortable with the violence and misogyny of the material. He soon moved to Los Angeles, where he struggled to plant his homey, psychedelic productions in an increasingly gangsta market. The way Stephenson remembers it, Beck Hansen was a street busker with a bad haircut. After all, he liked rap—the immediacy, the beat, the sense of performance.

In the same Spin interview where he raged against the toaster, he remembered the communal warmth he felt as a teenager riding the bus on L. Mostly though, fashioning himself as a kind of rapper was a chance for Beck to undermine the sanctity of what it meant to be a white guy with an acoustic guitar. That he understood hip-hop as an extension of folk music rather than a betrayal of it—the way rap spun meaningful, entertaining stories out of everyday life using equipment anyone could get their hands on—felt insightful, even subversive, especially at a time when we were starting to digest the reality that grunge was just classic rock after all: the same quest for glory, the same macho, self-serious dream.

And as vivid as it was, it also felt magically displaced in time. Part of the fun and frustration of encountering Mellow Gold was figuring out what, if any of this, Beck took seriously. His mother, Bibbe, had been in some Andy Warhol movies and later played in a band called Black Fag with the drag performer Vaginal Davis.

Where punks of generations past responded to dwindling prospects with angst, the slacker supposedly shrugged.