(Didn't have time to dig out the accompanying 7"s and CD singles today)
Odelay by Beck came out 30 years ago today and it sure is a moment in time that is interesting to reflect on. In 1996, just prior to Odelay coming out, I’m not sure I could have been a bigger Beck fan. I had been consumed with listening to his music and finding out as much about his wild and difficult to find discography as I could. The very first time I ever went on the World Wide Web I tried to find information about Beck.
I fell in love with Beck’s music during the 1994 Mellow Gold frenzy that saw him release 3 full length albums, many singles and countless compilation appearances. Each piece of music I found was more or at least as interesting as the thing I discovered before it. His music spoke to me in a way that few things had previously and he was absolutely my gateway drug into punk and indie rock as I started to lose interest in what was happening in hip hop around that time.
So to say that I was primed and ready for the next Beck album was an understatement of ridiculous proportion. I. Was. Ready. I was writing for my college newspaper in 1996 and I was sent an advanced copy of Odelay maybe a month or two before the street date. It came as a promo CD with no artwork and I remember getting it in the mail and not being able to listen to it right away. I think I had class or something and then I had to go to work afterwards. My car didn’t have a CD player, so I did the only thing that made sense.
I drove the CD to my girlfriend and the time's house and asked her to record it to a blank tape for me so I could listen to it in the car when I drove to work after class. Looking back, that seems like an odd thing to do, but at the time I couldn’t think of anything more important than hearing Beck’s newest album.
When I finally was able to listen to the album, I had really confusing emotions to process. I really, really wanted to love this record. And I did love parts of it immediately. The funk country of “Sissyneck,” the elegant acoustics of “Jackass,” the perfectly upbeat and fun “Lord Only Knows” and the melancholy closer “Ramshackle” hit me perfectly almost instantly.
But a lot of the other songs didn’t reach those same heights. I thought “Where It’s At” was a little too slow and slick. “Devil’s Haircut" was excellent musically, but something about the lyrics weren’t really connecting with me. “Derelict” was kind of weird, but not in an engaging way like “Sweet Sunshine” or “Steal My Body Home” were on Mellow Gold. Everything sort of felt like it was taking itself much more seriously as music, but the joy I found in Beck’s music was how he didn’t seem to be taking things all that seriously beforehand, making fun of the machine instead of fitting into it.
I did still like the record a lot overall. I hunted down all of the singles and weirdo variants. I saw him play seven or eight times in the next year, including one of the best shows I have ever seen when he played solo acoustic at Maxwell’s in Hoboken in 1996. I traded show recording bootleg tapes with strangers and friends on the internet. It was an interesting time to say the least as most of my earliest internet memories are because of trying to find out more stuff about Beck. To this day, my primary goal when I open any form of what makes up the internet today, it’s to try to acquire information. I’ve never been a meme guy, I just want to learn more. A lot of that is probably because of habits I picked up when I first got access to the internet.
As the years have gone by and as Beck has released more and more records, drifting further and further away from the things that I liked most about him at the beginning, I have weirdly mixed feelings about Odelay. It’s certainly a lot better than many of the records he released after it (maybe better than all of them?). The songs that I liked right away still hold up really well all of these years later. The memories of that time period being pretty influential to a 19 year old are hard to overlook.
That said, I don’t listen to Odelay nearly as much as I do a lot of other records from the same time period. A whole lot of musical discovery was happening for me between 1994 and 1996 and when I reflect on everything 30 years later, Odelay is kind of a disappointment when you hold it up to Mellow Gold, Stereopathetic Soulmanure and One Foot In The Grave. I had probably drifted a little too far into punk rock to totally connect with a record like Odelay by that point. When you have discovered groups like Rocket From The Crypt and Leatherface, the energy level on Odelay seems a bit lacking in comparison.
And that’s not to say it isn’t a well done, important record. It is. And it's especially important for Beck as it really made his career. I’m happy for him for that. Genuinely. He was such an important cog in my life so he deserves everything he has. But for me, I always connected with him more when he was the oddball outcast, mocking the alternative revolution and setting fire to squeegees. That’s the Beck for me.
