How boredom helped Beck accidentally find his niche
Every one of the greatest musicians in the world had to start at the bottom of the totem pole to get where they are. The Beatles were already a scrappy bar band before getting the call from George Martin, and Led Zeppelin was a ramshackle group formed out of the ashes of The Yardbirds when cutting their first singles. Even by the standards of rock and roll stars, though, Beck looked fairly dire when he was starting out.
After playing country-tinged songs across California, Beck struggled to find his niche throughout the early 1990s. Long before the wave of grunge hit, this flavour of country-flavoured rock and roll was laughed out of the room by fans who wanted to hear the latest bands from the LA rock scene. That meant that Beck had to do the one thing that no self-respecting musician wanted to do: odd jobs.
Between his various gigs and open mics, Beck was virtually homeless and surfing his way through life while trying to hold down menial work that never went anywhere. Where most other musicians would crack under pressure and find a proper job, Beck found his calling through frustration.
During his many gigs where no one paid attention to his music, Beck decided to mess with his audience’s head, recalling to Entertainment Weekly: “I’d be banging away on a Son House tune, and the whole audience would be talking, so maybe out of desperation or boredom, or the audience’s boredom, I’d make up these ridiculous songs just to see if people were listening. ‘Loser’ was an extension of that.”
While Beck’s unique sound didn’t have any place on the charts, the sheer weirdness of the song made it a staple of alternative radio. Riding a bluesy guitar riff, Beck created a song that seemed like a weirdo-parody of what hip-hop was supposed to be, boasting about such accolades as getting crazy with a can of Cheez-Wiz and dark subjects like a man hanging himself with a guitar string.
Despite the simple premise for the song, ‘Loser’ became one of the next anthems of Generation X, taking the concept of being a loser and making it seem fairly cool, all while Beck’s soulful croon glided over the beat. While the single was enough for Beck to ride the wave of irony on Mellow Gold, he wasn’t planning to become the next country-hip-hop trend of the early ’90s.
On his subsequent records like Odelay, Beck turned the album format into his own sonic playground, working with different pieces of electronic music and samplers to bring an array of sounds to every song, going from smooth organ flourishes to breakbeats in less than half a second on ‘Where It’s At’.
Although it took a while to get acclimated to what Beck was doing then, this was just another cry of rebellion from a different facet of the ’90s generation. Fans were hungry for anything but the norm, and Beck would give his audience whatever was on his mind at any moment.
