In 1997, a little over a year after the release of his second proper album Odelay, 26-year-old Beck Hansenappeared on “The Late Show With David Letterman” for a live performance and brief interview. “Your last name is Hansen. You related to the Hansons?” Letterman asked, referencing the pop trio behind “MMMBop.”
“They’re a bunch of holograms that I projected from my fifth chakra,” Beck replied. Letterman quickly changed the subject, unsure of how to handle the eccentric response. The brief exchange showed a young, confident musician who didn’t seem too concerned with what other people thought of him.
For 20+ years, Beck’s bizarre sense of humor and oddball nature have remained constant; these qualities go hand in hand with his pattern of producing the unexpected. Beck's resistance to being pigeonholed in a specific genre was established early on in his career. After a few years as a failed folk musician, he struck gold in 1993 with the independent release of his hip-hop-meets-country slacker anthem “Loser.” The bilingual chorus set over a jangly guitar riff features Beck proudly (and repetitively) declaring his own ineptitude.
The song peaked at No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 and sold over 600,000 copies in the U.S. alone. Suddenly, the ‘90s alt-rock masses thought they’d found their next Kurt Cobain—everyone wanted to be a loser. A major label bidding war ensued and Beck eventually signed with Geffen Records, via A&R manager Mark Kates.
“Thurston Moore came into town and was like, ‘Who's this guy Beck that everybody's talking about?’” Kates told us recently. “At the time, Beck had kind of a quiet existence, I don't think he had a really big social circle in his life. Everything changed really dramatically in a lot of ways, and it was all happening at once.”
By the time Beck signed with Geffen and released his first album, Mellow Gold,in 1994, “Loser” was already in the Top 40. For the two years that followed, Beck went to work on his second release, an album critics anticipated to be a total flop—even an LA Times headline read, “Don't Get Bitter on Us, Beck: Thanks to his rap-folk song ‘Loser,’ the 23-year-old musician is one of the hottest figures to emerge from the L.A. rock scene in years. But now that he's going national, how will he hold up under all the attention?” How could the shaggy-haired Silver Lake slacker be anything more than a one-hit wonder?
Enter: The Dust Brothers, who either met Beck at Geffen or when he showed up at their house in 1994, depending on which Dust Brother you ask. E.Z. Mike (Mike Simpson) and King Gizmo (John King) made a name for themselves in the late 1980s, producing eight tracks off Tone Lōc’s Lōc-ed After Dark (including “Wild Thing”) and two tracks off Young MC’s debut, Stone Cold Rhythm. But it was the duo’s sample-heavy work on the Beastie Boys’Paul’s Boutique that led Beck to recruit them for his next project. (For the record, the Dust Brothers also produced the other Hanson's “MMMBop.”) The pairing seemed strange from the outside, considering Beck’s strong roots in folk music, but the Dust Brothers had been for the Beasties what Beck now needed: someone to take him beyond his biggest hit. “Even though we had had some cool stuff come out, we were a clever and insightful choice for him to make,” King said.
After the release of the Beastie Boys’ License to Ill and their breakthrough single, “Fight for Your Right to Party,” few imagined a follow-up that could compare. “I’m sure people thought the Beasties were a one-hit wonder, but I knew better,” King told us recently. “‘Fight for Your Right to Party’ was one of their worst songs.’” Then came Paul’s Boutique,a landmark album in hip-hop history (we named it the third-best album of the ‘80s). Just as the Dust Brothers helped the Beastie Boys break from their party-boy reputation, they also allowed Beck to move beyond the ten words that defined him at that point: “I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me?”
In 1994, the three set up shop in King and Simpson’s Silver Lake home. “The way things would usually go down is we would just play him some records,” King said. “We would play something that would make us all laugh. A lot of times, it wasn’t planned. He would be the one to be like ‘Let’s make a song out of this’ or ‘Can we loop that?’”
Beck’s penchant for surprise met King and Simpson’s wide-ranging tastes in Odelay’s first single “Where It’s At,” a delightfully disjointed rap-rock track that features samples that frankly, have no business being next to each other. “We would listen to stuff and either sample it or get inspired by it,” King said. “It was usually pretty ridiculous stuff. We’d be like, ‘God, it’s so not cool’ that it made us laugh. And then we’d try to make a song that was as not cool as the sample we heard.” For “Where It’s At,” this meant Lee Dorsey’s “Get Out of My Life, Woman” and dialogue from an obscure sex-ed album, among other oddities.
While Mellow Gold featured a cross-pollination of genres like folk and psychedelia, Odelay attempted to marry those sounds (and others including jazz, blues, country, and the era's alt-rock) to hip-hop textures and rhythms. “Hip-hop was very important to him,” Kates said. “Representing his version of that was very important.” Songs like “Novacane” and “High 5 (Rock the Catskills)” feature Beck’s monotone raps with inscrutable bars like, “Cyanide ride down the turnpike / After hours on the miracle mic.” These lines, matched with layers of loops and samples, created an album that would more readily connect to the Beasties and OG hip-hop like Grandmaster Flash than Beck’s more straightforward counterparts in alt-rock. “Odelay, to me, is hip-hop,” King said. “We were applying our techniques that we learned trying to emulate Boogie Down Productions. The way that we collaged it together was just like how we would make rap music.”
Though Paul’s Boutique is clearly more of a rap record than Odelay, the link between the two is undeniable, from the shared Minimoog sounds to the samples from Sly and the Family Stone and DJ Grand Wizard Theodore. King and Simpson are the first to admit to these kinds of connections. “I think that they really both are collages,” Simpson said. “Rap music had been sampling for years, but never in that dense, sort of genre-bending way.”
Odelay contained samples, but not as many as Paul’s Boutique, whose closer alone, “B for Bouillabaisse,” contains 25 of them. According to Simpson, Beck was much more interested in playing the music himself. “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 result was a much more musical record. Rather than sampling Them’s “I Can Only Give You Everything” on “Devils Haircut,” Beck played the guitar riff himself. While Adam Yauch played bass throughout Paul’s Boutique, Beck tried his hand at almost every instrument. “He could just pick up a sitar or a French horn and make something cool out of it,” Simpson said.
Beck’s talent didn’t go unnoticed. “All kinds of people tried to get with Beck,” King said. “When we finished Odelay, the rumor I heard was that Rick Rubin picked up Beck in his Rolls Royce and they drove around listening to the record. Rick told him he shouldn’t release it. He told him that they should just start working together.”
But Beck didn’t end up working with Rubin. True to form, he went his own way, releasing the genre-bending album on June 18, 1996. The reception was staggering in a way that few could have predicted: Odelay not only ended up on countless publications’ year-end lists, but it was a hit with the establishment, scoring the Grammys’ coveted Album of the Year nomination the following year. Unsurprisingly, Beck lost to Celine Dion, but he did take home two other genre Grammys that year (and controversially, went on to win the AOTY award last year).
Though it’s hard to imagine a white folk musician’s twist on hip-hop being as universally embraced now than it was 20 years ago, Beck’s freewheeling attitude combined with the Dust Brothers’ now-popular cut-and-paste method of sampling created an album that continues to feel contemporary. Beck would reunite with the Dust Brothers and return to this kind of style on 2005’s Guero, but the results just weren’t as compelling. Maybe it had something to do with Odelay’s timing. In 1996, when genres were more clearly defined and alternative rock acts stayed well within their lanes, Beck, E.Z. Mike, and King Gizmo made an unexpected turn, taking mainstream audiences along for the ride.
“The album feels like a time capsule of all these different ideas and sounds,” Simpson said. “It's emblematic of a time where it felt like anything could go.”