In Spin's 20 Years of Alternative Music, Beck is called "a generation's consolation prize after the death of Kurt Cobain." Chronologically, it's an apt assessment: Cobain killed himself on April 5, 1994; "Loser" peaked at #10 on the Billboard charts three weeks later. But back in the mid-90s, Beck was practically Cobain's polar opposite. Whereas Kurt exuded raw power with every phlegm-spewing roar, Beck rapped in monotone (when he wasn't crooning like a sleep-deprived folkie). Kurt hunched and staggered; Beck pranced, did splits, and mimicked robots. Kurt raged against a doomed world with a vitriolic mix of anger and sincerity; Beck took the piss out of a doomed world with a mix of irony and showmanship. Admittedly, they were both known to wear flannel shirts from time to time.
Beck's popularity can not only be read as a consolation prize to Cobain's legend, but as a reaction to it-- the weirdo L.A. huckster who could sing "I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill me" as a t-shirt-ready slacker joke rather than a seething slacker lament. So, after getting their hearts busted by an unlikely savior, Alternative America turned to a cheese-whiz rhyming folk-hop clown who treated death as just another convention to flout. With "Loser", Beck was the rebound boyfriend, the one who'll make you laugh for the time being. And then came Odelay-- a thoroughly carefree-sounding affair that made everyone take this boyish imp very seriously. It's the album where he managed to combine the disparate noise, blues, and subverted hippie-isms of his early work into a showy post-modern marvel.
In hindsight, the record sounds like the world's most accomplished demo reel-- an introductory smorgasbord pumped-up on its own premeditated randomness. The origins of Mutations' shambling acoustic blues can be found within come-down closer "Ramshackle". And Odelay's funkiest, most scatterbrained tracks like "Where It's At" and "High 5 (Rock the Catskills)" were later pushed to their logical extreme on Midnite Vultures' ingenious Prince-isms. Add some sweeping strings and "Jack-Ass" easily becomes a Sea Change highlight. So while Beck has spent the last 12 years largely sampling and expounding upon the ideas he presented on his most popular album, Odelay's most distinguishing feature is its effortless summation of decades of popular music by-way-of the Dust Brothers' still-fresh production.
From the nervy opening chords of "Devil's Haircut" (based on the garage-rock classic "I Can Only Give You Everything") to the signature sax riff of "The New Pollution" (lovingly pilfered from forgotten tenor player Joe Thomas's "Venus"), Odelay is the album every record-diving MPC-phile wants to make. Though the LP was a huge commercial success, its sound was never successfully equaled by savvy opportunists. Chalk it up to the increasingly complicated legalities of sampling, as Beck explained in a 2005 interview: "Back [on Odelay] it was basically me writing chord changes and melodies, and then endless records being scratched and little sounds coming off the turntable. Now it's prohibitively difficult and expensive to justify your one weird little horn blare that happens for half of a second one time in a song and makes you give away 70% of the song and $50,000." And, of course, it's the little lifts-- the sex-ed dialogue on "Where It's At", the snippet of Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony #8 in B Minor" on "High 5", the dozens (hundreds?) of unique drum hits and perfectly placed sonic scribbles-- that makes Odelay such a deep and engaging listen even after all the headphone sessions and Best Album of the 90s accolades. Tellingly, when Beck and the Dust Brothers tried to recreate their signature style on 2005's Guero they couldn't pull it off, inadvertently reinforcing Odelay's lasting appeal in the process.
To some, it may seem a bit premature for this 12-year-old LP to get the deluxe treatment, but in this age of shameless instant-reissues put forth by disintegrating major labels, it's a relatively classy (if not exactly indispensable) barrel scrape. Along with a playfully drawn-over cover and liner note contributions from Thurston Moore and Dave Eggers, the reissue is padded with an entire disc of era-appropriate B-sides along with two previously unreleased tracks. While sometimes intriguing and ecstatic, the bonus tracks rarely live up to anything from the proper album. Of the unearthed songs, the schizophrenic dial-flip pastiche "Inferno" contains many genre-hopping ideas across its seven minutes but none are fully realized. And "Gold Chains" is a decidedly less funky version of "Sissyneck" with lyrical hip-hop symbolizers in place of country tropes. Unwisely, the extra disc begins with U.N.K.L.E.'s never ending "Where It's At" redo, which at 12 minutes is easily nine minutes too long. Elsewhere, semi-songs, stepping-stones, and studio wankery abound, revealing Beck's growth post-Mellow Gold in real time-- they're interesting in theory, at least. The most enduring tracks-- "Feather in Your Cap" and "Brother"-- are somber ballads Beck recorded before he hooked up with the Dust Brothers. With lines like, "Disappointment is a feather in your cap/ You want the truth so you can crush it in your hand," these songs suggest the straightforward emotionalism of Sea Change-- an approach Beck would need a few more years to feel comfortable bringing to the fore.
For all of their differences, both Kurt Cobain and Beck had overarching obsessions with death and decay. Kurt took his preoccupation with the ultimate end to its ultimate end, but Beck chose to gussy it up on Odelay, going on cryptically about Gods and devils while hip-hop-tinged party music juxtaposed the existential angst. On "Novocane", he screams through a bullhorn: "Got so numb, longhorn drums/ Detonate with the suicide gate." Later on, he's "more dead than alive" over a distinctly lively old-school jam. "Put a song in your throat/ Let the dead beats pound all around," he hums on "Ramshackle". Through ingenious technical savvy and an ear for hooks that span generations, Beck and the Dust Brothers managed to turn many dead beats into signs of life on Odelay. Twelve years on, it's still a prize-- no consolation necessary.
