Beck

The Komondor's Leap

Shot in the '70s by canine photographer Joan Ludwig, the cover photo of “Odelay” captures a Komondor leaping over an obstacle. In mid-jump, this specimen of the rare Hungarian breed unfurls its white, corded coat like a tapestry. It's a bizarre, singular dog - were it not an animal, we'd call it eccentric - impossible to look away from. And yet: despite a silhouette that's not exactly sleek, in the act of jumping the Komondor reveals an unexpected grace and agility, hard to imagine from looking at it standing still.

Rarely has an album cover been more fitting. Launched into the American pop empyrean of the '90s by “Mellow Gold” (Geffen, 1994), but above all by that immortal smash single “Loser”, one of the eternal anthems of the slacker X Generation, Beck Hansen was, to the scene at large, a genuine mystery man. He seemed to have stumbled into the upper reaches of the Billboard charts by pure chance, with his dazed stare and disheveled dandy mop of hair, and yet all eyes were on him - the world was waiting on his next move.

In 1996, with "Odelay", the twenty-six-year-old Beck would take his own personal leap over the fence, catalyzing once and for all the attention of the music world, alternative and mainstream alike. It's an album that, speaking of leaps, recognizes no genre boundary it can't clear, making even its already colorful '94 predecessor look pale by comparison.

The interest between the Los Angeles musician and the early-90s music scene was, however, entirely mutual. As mentioned, if "Mellow Gold" had introduced even mainstream audiences to the Bay Area whiz kid, Beck himself was paying extremely close, almost obsessive attention to everything happening around him, from the top of the charts to the ramshackle dives hosting slacker rock bands for a handful of diehards.

As he had already shown with his kaleidoscopic Geffen debut and, to a lesser extent, with the lo-fi records that preceded it, as well as with the lopsided folk album "One Foot In The Grave" (Rebel Beat factory, 1994), Beck refuses to be confined to a single genre. His compositions seem instead to spring from a holistic vision in which every kind of music can coexist with every other, embrace it, weave into it in an exotic pattern, dance alongside it, or even collide with it head-on. "Odelay" is the unrepeatable summa of this particular worldview: a warped, hyper-saturated mirror in which country, folk, bossa nova, hip-hop, alternative rock, dance and whatever else can all see themselves reflected in a single, dazzling, brand-new body.

Beck is a reckless alchemist determined not only to tear down the barriers between genres, but also to bend the very concept of space-time, using the most cutting-edge sampling and mash-up techniques to stitch together sonic fabrics drawn from different eras.

"Odelay" is thus the record of a singer-songwriter and skilled guitarist, who swears he never looped a single riff but actually played them all as they sound, yet it's conceived and executed like the work of a DJ or a mosaic artist, to be admired in its dazzling entirety or savored tile by tile. It's a boundaryless journey, a mesmerizing electric flow, but also a collection of songs with a life of their own, fully enjoyable on their own terms, the product of a perfect synthesis of funky aestheticism, small-town understatement, apparently bored seriousness and a lightness that never tips over into parody. It's a complex yet forward-looking ecosystem, at least in 1996, a moment when rock definitively spoke the language of crossover in search of new coordinates — we're in the period right after the grunge hangover, sketching out the electronic/big beat contamination to come.

I’ve got two turntables and a microphone

"I've got two turntables and a microphone", Beck seems to make it sound so easy when, in "Where It's At", the first formidable single pulled from "Odelay", he sampled this mantra from Mantronix's "Needle To The Groove". In truth, even here things are far from simple: there's also an inimitably sixties-flavored keyboard riff destined to become legendary, numerous other samples including one lifted from a teen sex-ed guide literally titled "Sex for Teens: (Where It's At)", brash electronic interventions on both the vocal and instrumental lines, and a finale of pure West Coast psychedelia. Rounding out the package, in an era when visuals still mattered enormously, is an equally iconic video in which Hansen tries his hand at all sorts of activities, from street cleaning in community-service garb to an impersonation of Captain Beefheart.

In short, not exactly something you can pull off with just two turntables and a microphone. Beck certainly brought a healthy dose of genius and nerve to the table, plus, of course, a stellar cast of producers and session players. Alongside his trusted producers Tom Rothrock and Rob Schnapf, who here worked only on the bare, dusty folk of "Ramshackle", came the likes of Bob Ludwig on mastering and Jon Spencer, but above all the Dust Brothers, already responsible for a masterpiece like the Beastie Boys' "Paul's Boutique", brought in to work on all the record's most representative tracks and give the album the hip-hop stamp Beck was after.

Singing every track and playing acoustic guitar, electric guitar, slide guitar, Moog, bass, drums, organ, Clavinet, xylophone, piano and whatever else was lying around, Hansen spent the long recording sessions acting almost as a one-man band, though he didn't turn down help from friends of the caliber of percussionist Joey Waronker (Rem, Atoms For Peace) and double bassist Charlie Haden (Ornette Coleman Quartet).

On its release in June 1996, "Odelay" was a commercial success, at least relative to its nature as an underground album, reaching No. 16 on the Billboard chart. By 2008 the record had sold around 2.3 million copies, numbers that aren't exactly typical of an alternative record. And yet it's anything but an easy listen. Layered like a hefty onion and stuffed with references, "Odelay" is nevertheless also a damn catchy record, at times even downright winking at the listener. All its layers, its interlocking parts, its flights and its plunges fit together so well that they produce songs of striking immediacy. The singles are the shining proof of this. There's the aforementioned "Where It's At", and even more so the opener "Devils Haircut", with its loping slacker riffing dotted with reggae and a chorus that matches the stickiness of "Loser", and of course "The New Pollution", a riot of lazy guitars, psychedelic keyboards, funk rhythms and saxophone forays straight out of a Brazilian sunset. The success of these last two tracks also owed much to their videos, multiple Mtv Award winners packed with references ranging from "Midnight Cowboy" to Kraftwerk, from Serge Gainsbourg to "Les Quatre Cents Coups".

Just as immediate, though less biting, are the record's two indie-folk ballads. There's the aforementioned "Ramshackle", thick with melancholy and capable of conjuring a sense of listlessness through its sparse, lazy drums and its weighted-down guitar strumming, and then the achingly sweet "Jack-Ass", garnished with cheerful little bells and buoyant keyboards. Both tracks foreshadow the enormous songwriting potential Beck would fully crown in the following decades with albums like "Sea Change" and "Morning Phase".

Oralè, Oh Delay, Odelay

It's not entirely clear what "Odelay" is supposed to mean. According to one theory, it's an Americanization of the Mexican slang term oralè — Beck, after all, loves sprinkling Spanish throughout his lyrics — which translates roughly as "what's going on?". Beck Hansen's close friend Stephen Malkmus of Pavement, on the other hand, swears it's simply a contraction of the phrase "oh delay", a clear nod to the record's famously long-delayed production.

Running thirteen tracks and fifty-four minutes, "Odelay" was recorded across a span of three years, from 1994 to 1996. The Dust Brothers have recalled in interviews that finishing some of the tracks took months. A prime example is one of the most intricate songs in the set: "Hotwax", which took a full six months to take on its final, immortal shape. It began with Hansen's scorching guitar riff, after which the producers set to work with a downpour of samples and a storm of scratching and electronic manipulation that would rage on for a long while before the perfect result was reached. Never satisfied with how things stood, Beck would show up in the studio every day with some new gadget, a party horn, a beat-up old tape player, you name it. The masterpiece that resulted is exactly that: molten wax, a magmatic fluid of references and rhythms that even dips into "Jingle Bells" and reveals a new nuance with every listen.

Another example of boundless production perfectionism is "Derelict", where polyrhythmic percussion creates a disorienting effect that reinforces the ideas expressed by both lyrics and title, turning downright psychedelic during the lysergic intrusion of Indian sitars. The ten seconds of Van Halen-style tapping solo that, at 1'30", slice through the gently swaying flow of the tranquil "Lord Only Knows" likewise drive home the sheer inexhaustibility of the solutions on display.

If hip-hop is the substance Beck chooses as the glue holding together his mosaic overloaded with energy and influences, and folk and country are used to bring the record's more introspective moments to life, there's no shortage of forays with a clear alternative-rock pedigree either. "Novacane" thus packs a rock punch, while the bass drive of "Minus" and the bite of its distorted guitars push things into outright punk territory.

Pushing the technical and conceptual revolution begun with “Mellow Gold“ to its ultimate consequences, Beck delivered in “Odelay” his definitive and unrepeatable masterpiece, a record that is at once a snapshot of its own present and a prophecy of a borderless music still unimaginable for its time. Beck's fifth album is so clearly a point of arrival that even its own author never pushed further in that direction again, or at least not with the same intensity, choosing instead to explore different musical territory with each release — certainly varied, but never again mixed and cold-fused into a single melting pot quite like this.

Thanks to Paolo Ciro for his invaluable help with collaboration and editing

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05/02/2023