![]() Part of the fun and frustration of encountering Mellow Gold was figuring out what, if any of this, Beck took seriously. The compacted ’70s soul of “Fuckin’ With My Head” and “Sweet Sunshine” the deadpan folk of “Nitemare Hippy Girl” and “Steal My Body Home”: listening to Mellow Gold was like finding a fossil from the future. And as vivid as it was, it also felt magically displaced in time. It could be direct-the roughness of the production, the visceral noise of some of the songs-but obscure, too, a knot of words that didn’t immediately register as metaphor or reality. In press coverage from the time, you can feel the ache of boomers hungering for the next Bob Dylan, but in reality, Beck was more like Tone Lōc or Mississippi John Hurt, or an asexual cousin to the Beastie Boys: a funny, self-styled dope just geeking out on the scene.Ĭompared to the rest of its 1994 class-Green Day’s Dookie, Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral, Hole’s Live Through This, Soundgarden’s Superunknown, and Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York- Mellow Gold was both weirder and lower to the ground. That he understood hip-hop as an extension of folk music rather than a betrayal of it-the way rap spun meaningful, entertaining stories out of everyday life using equipment anyone could get their hands on-felt insightful, even subversive, especially at a time when we were starting to digest the reality that grunge was just classic rock after all: the same quest for glory, the same macho, self-serious dream. Mostly though, fashioning himself as a kind of rapper was a chance for Beck to undermine the sanctity of what it meant to be a white guy with an acoustic guitar. In the same Spin interview where he raged against the toaster, he remembered the communal warmth he felt as a teenager riding the bus on L.A., hearing Grandmaster Flash playing on some kids’ boombox from the back, how people from all different parts of the city seemed to absorb the sound, some even getting up to dance. After all, he liked rap-the immediacy, the beat, the sense of performance. But he had a mischievous sense of creativity and no attachments to his own artistic self-image, and when Stephenson-alongside co-producers Rob Schnapf and Tom Rothrock, who ran the small Bong Load label-suggested they pair his rudimentary folk songs with Stephenson’s loops and grooves, Beck went with it. The way Stephenson remembers it, Beck Hansen was a street busker with a bad haircut. He soon moved to Los Angeles, where he struggled to plant his homey, psychedelic productions in an increasingly gangsta market. He loved watching DJ Ready Red strip samples from old funk and soul records, but he was uncomfortable with the violence and misogyny of the material. ![]() Rap-A-Lot was hardcore Stephenson was not. Stephenson had grown up playing in youth symphonies around Olympia, Washington, before quitting his grocery-store job and moving to Houston to work at Rap-A-Lot Records, then home to the Geto Boys. By “home studio,” I mean a tape recorder set up in such a way that Beck later remembered having to finish vocal takes before Stephenson’s girlfriend wanted to get in and cook dinner. ![]() ![]() Much of Mellow Gold was recorded in the home studio of a guy named Carl Stephenson. The toast is burning, and you just gotta rip it out and free it before it fills the house with smoke.” For Vedder, hearing “Loser” lap you on the radio must’ve felt like getting hit in the face by trash thrown from a passing car. When, in July, 1994, an interviewer from Spin magazine suggested that Beck’s backstory-poverty, an 8th-grade education, bouts of borderline homelessness-felt like fodder for darker sentiments, Beck, 23 and blindsided by his own new fame, pitched his voice up and whined, “You just gotta rage against the appliance, man. Or maybe you, like me, heard it on MTV, where it seemed like a cool breeze blowing through the abstract pain of mainstream alternative music. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |