Deep Album Cuts Vol. 252: Beck
Beck is nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year, alongside A Tribe Called Quest, Pat Benatar, Kate Bush, Devo, Duran Duran, New York Dolls, Rage Against The Machine, and Dionne Warwick, among others. I'm not surprised that Beck got the nod, but I'm not sure why it happened this year, I thought he had a good chance of getting in 2 years ago in his first year of eligibility.
Beck deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):
1. Fuckin With My Head (Mountain Dew Rock)
2. Soul Suckin' Jerk
3. Motherfucker
4. Hollow Log
5. Asshole
6. Novacane
7. Hotwax
8. Sissyneck
9. Bottle Of Blues
10. Diamond Bollocks
11. Debra
12. Milk & Honey
13. Already Dead
14. It's All In Your Mind
15. Broken Drum
16. Strange Apparition
17. Orphans
18. Morning
19. Square One
20. Chemical
Tracks 1, 2 and 3 from Mellow Gold (1994)
Tracks 4 and 5 from One Foot In The Grave (1994)
Track 18 from Morning Phase (2014)Tracks 6, 7 and 8 from Odelay (1996)
Tracks 9 and 10 from Mutations (1998)
Tracks 11 and 12 from Midnite Vultures (1999)
Tracks 13 and 14 from Sea Change (2002)
Track 15 from Guero (2005)
Track 16 from The Information (2006)
Track 17 from Modern Guilt (2008)
Track 19 from Colors (2017)
Track 20 from Hyperspace (2019)
Beck famously released a whole bunch of indie records in 1993 and 1994 just before and after his big major label debut Mellow Gold. Unfortunately, One Foot In The Grave is the only one of those currently on streaming services -- Stereopathetic Soulmanure (which sold over 100,000 copies and is a pretty interesting little grab bag of different sounds), Golden Feelings, and A Western Harvest Field By Moonlight are all out of print. "Asshole" from One Foot is notable for later being covered by Tom Petty.
My opinion of Beck has been very up-and-down over the years before I wound up with a moderate amount of love for him. I dismissed him as kind of a novelty act for a couple years after "Loser," although I had friends who really liked Mellow Gold (and as a 12-year-old I was a little scandalized by the tracklist, it was the first time I'd seen an album with two F-words in song titles!) Then Beck won me over big time with Odelay, which I still think is by far his best record even if I don't rate quite as highly now. It was hard to narrow down songs from Odelay for the playlist because there are so many jams on that album, in fact it was a little of a relief to find that those songs still hold up. There were so many hit songs in the 2nd half the '90s that copied Beck's acoustic-guitar-over-hip-hop-drums aesthetic (Sugar Ray, Everlast, Kid Rock, etc.) that I just got sick of the sound for a while.
By the time Midnite Vultures came out, I was a bit more immersed in hip hop and R&B, and the way he kind of veered from homage to parody on songs like "Hollywood Freaks" started to really irritate me. "Debra" is still a pretty excellent song, though, campy as it is, it's very justifiably the most popular song off that album -- I'm surprised it was never a single, there was such a buzz about it when he started playing it on tour in 1997 and performed it on PBS's "Sessions at West 54th."
I sorta wish Beck didn't swung between extremes so much on records like Midnite Vultures and Sea Change, I think he should stand to mix styles in one album more instead of alternating beats-driven albums with singer-songwriter albums. The closing tracks on Mellow Gold and Odelay are two of his best acoustic songs, and the uptempo hidden track "Diamond Bollocks" is my favorite song on Mutations. I kind of dismissed Sea Change for a long time because I just didn't want to hear a sad acoustic album from him at the time, but it's a pretty expressive breakup record and definitely a step up from Mutations. I remember buying the One Foot-era "It's All In Your Mind" 7" single and loving it after Odelay, and I don't quite like the Sea Change re-recording as much, but it's still a great song.
I haven't spent a lot of time with Beck's music from the past 20 years, but he's continued to do pretty well on the charts and got that AOTY Grammy for Morning Phase, so I tried to drive into his later work and find things that appealed to me. "Broken Drum" was dedicated to Elliott Smith after his death and is a pretty beautiful song. I hadn't heard much of The Information before but it's kind of the good mix of styles I was looking for, an Odelay-ish record with Mutations/Sea Change producer Nigel Godrich. Predictably, I do not dig Danger Mouse-produced Modern Guilt, really think that guy is overrated. Morning Phase is pleasant but definitely not even in his 5 best albums, he totally got belatedly rewarded for his earlier work in typical Grammys fashion. But I liked his poppier last couple albums. Colors was produced by Greg Kurstin, who was in Beck's backing band ages before he became a chart-topping hitmaker, and Hyperspace was produced by Pharrell Williams, someone who is talented in some very similar ways as Beck and an interesting foil for him.
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