The reason why Beck blocked Weird Al Yankovic from parodying ‘Loser’
The ubiquitous Beck track is, of course, ‘Loser’, which was released in March 1993 as Beck’s second single on the Bong Load Custom Records label. The independently released track started to gain traction on local rock stations, which led to Beck signing a major record deal with the Geffen subsidiary DGC Records.
Following the re-release, ‘Loser’ peaked at number ten on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, which marked the first time a Beck track hit a major chart. From there, it found its place on the 1994 album Mellow Gold, and ‘Loser’ is certainly the first track that fans bring to mind when thinking about the Los Angeles-born musician.
In the mid-1990s, Weird Al Yankovich asked Beck if he could cover the famous song. However, Beck rejected the request as he feared that he was already not being taken seriously as a musical artist. He didn’t want a potential comedic cover by Weird Al to further jeopardise his status in the industry.
After the wild success of the single, Beck remembers there being a constant wave of negativity in the press. He claimed during an Audible Original that he worried that a Yankovich cover would make him cannon fodder for industry heads, and writers already thought his efforts were “hodgepodge ideas” and not “real songs”.
“Weird Al’ Yankovic tried to do a parody of it. It was going to be called ‘Schmoozer’,” Beck said (via Billboard). “I had a lot of people who were veterans in the business telling me at 20, 21, 22, ‘You should go back to school. You don’t really have the talent to do this. The songs, as they are, aren’t going to work. They’re too rough. They’re too raw. They’re not real songs. These are kind of, like, sort of hodgepodge ideas.'”
He continued: “[‘Loser’] wasn’t really taken seriously at all. And when it came out, and it was popular, it still wasn’t taken that serious at all. I mean, you can go back to the press of the day. I just remember myriad articles and headlines of, ‘One-hit wonder joke band Beck,’ ‘Novelty act.’ I remember there was a review in a big paper in LA once, and it was not a lot of kindness. I felt very dismissed and kind of, like, a bit of a footnote.”
Interestingly though, upon reflection, Beck felt a twinge of regret at not letting Yankovich cover ‘Loser’. He explained: “I regret denying him permission to do it,” he said. “I think it would have been an amazing video. I’m actually really sad it didn’t happen.” Now, we can only fantasise about what the cover version might have sounded like.
