Loser?

Interview, August, 1996 by Ray Rogers

Even after a solid year of hearing "I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill me?" blaring on the radio and on MTV around the clock, nobody actually took Beck Hansen up on his 1993 offer and did him in. The press did a good job of haranguing him, though, slamming the singer as a flash-in-the-pan novelty and harnessing him with the dreaded "slacker" tag. But Beck was no Vanilla Ice-type flavor of the month. Instead of sinking back into obscurity, he's having the last laugh: Odelay (DGC), his latest album, is one hell of a second act. An action-packed speedway of hip-hop, folk, funk, and blues, produced by the Dust Brothers - revered mixmasters who guided the Beastie Boys to previous ill heights - the record mines the '70s, '80s, and '90s for its best moments and mocks the decades' fickle fads ("Everybody say, 'Ooh, la la, Sasson!'" goes one shout-out). It's got a single - the deliciously anarchic "Devil's Haircut" - that could give "Loser" a run for its money and emerge as this year's feel-bad anthem.

We met up with Beck at Travel Town, a children's train theme park located about a half hour from his new home in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles. Pulling up in his pale green '74 Ford pickup, the definitive overgrown kid looked youthful but scruffy, with a scattering of blond fuzz on his face and his dark shades clasped together by a paper clip. As a demented version of "B-I-N-G-O" whooshed out of a miniature train's speakers, we sat down to discuss life after "Loser," and his symphonic, sample-adelic new record.

RAY ROGERS: Who picked this place?

BECK: David Geffen picked it. No, I picked it because I do all of my traveling here. I like to ride trains that go nowhere. [laughs]

RR: There are lyrics on your new record about that: go-nowhere places and dead-end situations.

B: There's some about Southern California, which is sort of a dead-end place. It's like the bottom of the hill; everything just sort of slides into it. This whole area is kind of transparent. It doesn't really have any history, and what history it does have gets eaten up, dug up, and turned into something else.

RR: What do you appreciate about Southern California?

B: It's anonymous. There's cool things happening below the surface. It can be in a Chinese mall in Monterey Park that looks totally generic, but then there's a gambling den and weird movie theaters where you can buy a bean-curd popsicle or some crazy lizard.

RR: How does living here affect your music?

B: I'm not sure about this album, but the last one had to do with where I was living. [train whistle blows] All these things came out of the landscape, like horrible fumes, something acidic and rancid that you breathe in. Like the smog - you don't want to breathe it, but you can't help it 'cause it's there. You have no choice. And it takes over your whole being. But a lot about making a record is an unconscious thing. Just something that you do. You can't meditate on walking or certain human habits. You concentrate too much on the way you walk and you'll start walking pretty weird.

RR: Do you think doing interviews in places like this is a way to make you seem "offbeat"?

B: Oh, definitely not. I think trying to be offbeat is the most boring thing possible. I think it's silly when photographers want to make you look all interesting, and it's just like, 'Take the damn picture." I want to look boring. It's way more interesting than them hanging you up from a harness and feathering you and making you wear some see-through jumpsuit. Give me a break. I'd rather have a photo from Kinko's. Coming here is just an excuse to be outside.

RR: Why did you call the record Odelay?

B: It comes from Chicano slang - orale! It's sort of an exclamation of "all right, things are all right." I'll say, "What's up?" to my friend, Andy, and he'll go, "Odelay!" [laughs]

RR: Your songs are such a hodgepodge of musical styles that somehow perfectly fit the evocative narratives. What comes first?

B: Usually the music inspires the lyrics. The lyrics just sort of fall off like a bunch of crumbs from the melody. That's all I want them to be - crumbs. I don't want to work any kind of fabricated message. Sometimes I'll have an idea for a story or have a subject and that will inspire lyrics, but most of the time, hopefully, they already exist somewhere else.

RR: You're channeling them?

B: It's more like blowing your nose, you know. It's not really an elevated thing. [laughs]

RR: For some people it is.

B: Year, some people build it up, but that's a little pretentious, I think.

RR: Some people might think that saying songwriting is "like blowing your nose" is pretentious.

b: Pretentious? Well, I meant blowing your nose in the way of just living your life, and I would never separate music from life.

RR: Why do you think folk music and hip-hop intersect so well in your songs?

B: Well, it's all music that comes from nonprofessional areas. With hip-hop, you didn't need a studio, you just needed some turntables and some kind of recording thing. You could do it in your living room. That's the spirit of hip-hop. And folk wasn't about recording studios and all that. I guess they're both nonelitist forms of music.