‘60 Songs That Explain the ’90s’: All Hail Beck, King of the Losers

Grunge. Wu-Tang Clan. Radiohead. “Wonderwall.” The music of the ’90s was as exciting as it was diverse. But what does it say about the era—and why does it still matter? 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s is back for 30 final episodes (and a brand-new book!) to try to answer those questions. Join Ringer music writer and ’90s survivor Rob Harvilla as he treks through the soundtrack of his youth, one song (and embarrassing anecdote) at a time. Follow and listen for free on Spotify. In Episode 93 of 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s—yep, you read that right—we’re covering Beck and “Loser,” with help from Alex Pappademas. Below is an excerpt of this episode’s transcript.

Beck has been on the cover of SPIN magazine four times. The third time, in 1999, it says, “Beck’s early professional years were definitely not micromanaged. His haphazard first tour was launched with local freaks making up his band, their concerts seemingly designed to offend.” This is early ’90s. And then Beck says, “I remember we played the music-industry conference South by Southwest. I was playing to a tape machine and the band started doing free-jazz shit over it, and I was screaming into this cheap mic. I broke a bunch of stuff and started humping the bass player and knocked my mic over and hit this poor girl in the head. I remember watching the room just clear out. Afterward, this hippie guy came backstage saying, ‘Man that was the best fucking thing I’ve ever seen!’ and then he handed me a Masons medallion.” The “hippie guy” was Gibby Haynes from the Butthole Surfers. That was quite a jarring Butthole Surfers cameo, to me. Beck meeting the lead singer of the Butthole Surfers, and the lead singer of the Butthole Surfers liking Beck, it’s like finding out that the Muppets universe coexists with the Texas Chainsaw Massacre universe. My first thought was, Beck and Gibby Haynes don’t live on the same planet. And my second thought was, Of course they fucking do.

Let’s try something, shall we? I feel like linear time, a straight chronology, any sort of studious logical discography-type action is of limited utility to us today, in attempting to make any sense of this person’s whole deal. So let’s try to hear Beck the way a dim 16-year-old in 1994 in fuckin’ Ohio might hypothetically have heard Beck, and let’s try to hear Beck in the rough song-and-album order in which I might’ve heard Beck, hypothetically. You get me. All right? So one day this person just drops out of the sky.

In a town of chimpanzees, he was a monkey. Or, in a time of chimpanzees he was a monkey. I prefer town myself. Either way, Beck was a monkey amid chimpanzees. Congratulations to you, truly, if you were cool enough back then that “Loser” wasn’t the first Beck song you ever heard. Good for you. Kudos. Beck Hansen was born in Los Angeles in 1970. His mother, Bibbe Hansen, is a musician and poet and actress with several Andy Warhol films to her credit; his father, David Campbell, is a big-shot composer and conductor and arranger who’s worked with everybody, including post-”Mutherfuker”-era Beck. Al Hansen, Beck’s maternal grandfather and Bibbe’s father, was a visual and performance artist who was part of Fluxus, the famed radical ’60s art movement. There’s a pedigree. Beck comes from a long line of capital-A Artists, a long line of monkeys amid chimpanzees. But nope, at 16, I ain’t privy to any of that; all I know is, in 1994, he just drops out of the sky and starts quasi-rapping the wackiest shit you’ve ever heard.

Shave your face with some mace in the dark, I found quite amusing in real time. Same deal with that yo, actually. The deadpan, the dispassionate, the desultory yo. Lotta latent thinkpieces hiding out in that yo. Lotta anxiety about appropriation. Yeah, yeah. So “Loser” comes on the radio. Better yet: “Loser” comes on MTV. You got Death squeegeeing blood onto car windshields. You got a coffin rumbling through the parking lot of the check-cashing joint. You got the two girls doing aerobics in the graveyard in photo negative, very “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” very nice. You got the on-stage leaf blower. And brandishing the on-stage leaf blower, all right, who is this guy?

Get crazy with the Cheez Whiz is the funniest line in this song, according to an informal poll that, at the time, I didn’t even realize I was taking of dudes I went to high school with in 1994, with Drive-by body-pierce somewhere in the top five. Beck Hansen is frankly a beautiful, a beatific, a luminous, a quite dazed-looking human being; he’s got the blond hair and the blue eyes; he’s the Goofus to Kurt Cobain’s Gallant; he is the Bob Dylan our generation deserves, according to the previous generation whose Bob Dylan was the actual Bob Dylan. And Beck, despite being in his mid-20s when “Loser” hits, is quite a youthful-looking human being as well, and thus, the two words most often used to describe Beck in 1994 are man-child and slacker.

So listen. I can take 20 minutes here and attempt to explain to you what this word slacker meant back then as a cultural term, as a compliment, as a pejorative, as a generational descriptor. But unless you’re in a Richard Linklater movie, slacker is not a word anybody wants to be called, even as a compliment. And it’s true that on “Loser,” and on many of his other songs, Beck radiates the exhaustion and grogginess and disorientation of a guy who just had that sleepover prank played on him where he passed out on the couch and everyone carried the couch he was still passed-out on to the middle of the high school football field and left him there. But that’s not quite the same thing as dismissing Beck as a slacker, and thus implying that making and performing “Loser” took no effort or skill or enthusiasm. Beck was on the cover of SPIN for the first time in 1994. The headline was “Subterranean Homeboy Blues.” That’s pretty good, but this article says: “The Dylan comparisons are dangerous enough and this spokesperson stuff just doesn’t wash with him. ‘Jesus!’ exclaims Beck at the very notion of being a mouthpiece for millions. ‘You’d have to be a total idiot to say: ‘I’m the slacker generation guy. This is my generation, we’re gonna fuckin’—we’re not gonna fuckin’ show up.’ I’d be laughed out of the room in an instant. I’ve always tried to get money to eat and pay my rent and shit, and it’s always been real hard for me. I’ve never had the money or time to slack.’”

I ain’t got the foggiest idea what any of that means, and maybe he knows what he means and maybe he doesn’t, but even if he doesn’t, that don’t make it meaningless, and that don’t mean he didn’t work hard on it. “Loser” was originally released on an L.A. independent label called Bong Load Records, and I feel like that’s all the description “Loser” really requires, musically or temperamentally. Beck worked on it with a local producer named Karl Stephenson; Beck laid down the slide-guitar riff, Karl put a drum loop from a blues cover of a Dr. John song behind it, and Beck quickly whipped up the lyrics and then tried to rap them like Chuck D. From Public Enemy. That’s what Beck told SPIN. “Loser” is Beck trying to rap like Chuck D.

Chuck D rapping Get crazy with the Cheez Whiz. Beck don’t sound like Chuck D; Beck listens back to his attempt to sound like Chuck D and decides this song he’s trying to rap like Chuck D on should be called “Loser” because he’s a loser. So that’s what the chorus is and that’s what the song’s called and Bong Load puts it out on vinyl and “Loser” inexplicably blows up on the radio—first in L.A., then literally everywhere else and everyone just naturally assumes that “I’m a loser baby / So why don’t you kill me” is Beck attempting to summarize the ethos of his generation. But Beck tells SPIN, “I didn’t even connect it at all to that kind of message until they were playing it on the radio and I heard it, and they said ‘This is the slacker anthem,’ and immediately it just clicked and I thought, ‘Oh shit, that sucks.’” End quote. Cheer up, though, Beck. Y’know who’s really into it? Mike D from the Beastie Boys.

Mike D rapping Get crazy with the Cheez Whiz. That makes sense, actually. Beck’s just a little closer to Mike D than Chuck D. So Mike D, talking to SPIN, he explains Beck like this: “He fits into the nomadic folk tradition of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, the whole traditional coffeehouse balladeer tip. But his hip-hop side legitimizes Public Enemy as the real folk music of the ’80s, because he draws on that aspect just as much as on anything else that he’s picked up along the way.”

To hear the full episode, click here. Subscribe here and check back every Wednesday for new episodes. And to preorder Rob’s new book, Songs That Explain the ’90s, visit the Hachette Book Group website.