Did ‘Odelay’ invent the modern world of sub-genre?
A devil-may-care divebomb into music’s many myriads of stylings is par for the course in a climate of dissolving genre as we understand it today, but nearly 30 years ago, the pop world was still firmly wedded to neat, well-defined categorisation.
Dropping his second major label album to an alternative crowd still seeing him as the ‘Loser’ guy, Beck’s signature Odelay delivered a dense, smorgasbord of disparate samples with a crackling fusion of funk, folk and white boy hip hop that still sounds as audaciously bold as it did back in 1996.
“I had very low expectations,” Beck told Apple Music in 2018. “There was a famous producer that came to my house who got an advanced copy, and he took me for a drive, and he said, ‘You know, I got your album.’ I was shocked. I was like, ‘How did you get it? I haven’t even given it to my friends yet.’ He said, ‘If you release it, it’ll be a huge mistake. You should not release this record. You should go back in and make a real album with real songs.’”
He added: “I remember being so deflated, and I went home very discouraged and scared because I was 24 and I had virtually no money, and I had just spent about $300,000 making this record. I thought it would be paying it off, working in a minimum wage job for a decade. It was going to be a disaster.”
The producer was rumoured to be Zen guru Rick Rubin. If true, it’s an extraordinary illustration of just how confoundingly unorthodox Odelay was and how its resulting success wasn’t anywhere near obvious during its recording. Trusting his gut, Beck sought out Los Angeles production duo The Dust Brothers, famed for their artful collage of foraged records and dense-sample stitching on Beastie Boys’ acclaimed Paul’s Boutique.
Beck’s multi-instrumental knack and insistence on playing live on plenty of the record’s tracks kept Odelay from accusations of wannabe hip hop.
“It was the first time that we got to work with someone who could play every instrument, and so often we’d be playing records for Beck, and then he would grab an instrument and either start playing that riff or riffing off that riff,” The Dust Brothers’ Michael Simpson told Pitchfork in 2016. “He could just pick up a sitar or a French horn and make something cool out of it.”
So, did Odelay invent the modern sub-genre climate?
All this would have been much easier in the digital age, where any artist looking to craft a similarly patchworked mosaic of pleasingly clashing genres has an infinite palette of sources and records to rummage through. But perhaps the magic of Odelay lies in the fact that it is the end result of a life’s worth of record hunting, an organic cornucopia of 45s and rare 7″s that in themselves tell some kind of story.
“I would have thrived in a time like this,” Beck told NME. “If I had a laptop and SoundCloud, I would have loved it.”
It’s impossible to unequivocally declare Odelay the inventor of a subgenre, but it certainly still stands as an important musical road sign, pointing the path toward the climate of nebulous cross-pollination that’s defined the pop ecosystem of the 2020s.
