Word: odelay
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...last date with Beck Hansen, his smash album Odelay, was one of those classic affairs in which everything seemed to go perfectly. God knows we weren't expecting it. Last time we checked, he had been merely a folksy geek with the catchphrase of consummate apathy: "I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill...
Catchy, sure, but do you really want to bring him home to meet the folks? Still, against all odds, on Odelay, Beck managed to pull from his grab bag of idiosyncracies something somehow coherent, edgy and adorable all at the same time. Maybe it was the lovable geeky cowboy thing, or all that talk of him capturing the zeitgeist. Truth be told, we always did grin at that line about him being a loser and he always had been something of a likable maverick. His first album, Mellow Gold, introduced his sound: blending rural rockabilly and urban jangle into...
...Beck (he uses only his first name professionally) were a sports team, sportswriters would say he's having a heck of a postseason. His album Odelay has sold only about 750,000 copies; in contrast, Celine Dion's Falling into You, another Album of the Year nominee, has sold more than 7 million. But in a year when overall record sales were flat and creativity seemed flatter, Beck has become a critics' darling, deservedly so, and has garnered an impressive number of end-of the-year accolades. Rolling Stone's music-savvy readers voted Odelay the Album of the Year...
...With Odelay, his second CD on a major label, Beck proves he has more than one good song in him--in fact, he has a whole musical outlook. Odelay deftly mixes folky acoustic-guitar riffs with atmospheric lyrics and hip-hop samples and beats. One song, the hard-driving Devils Haircut, attacks America's culture of physical vanity as suffocating and inescapable; another, the smooth Where It's At, pays tribute to rap's roots by praising its resourceful spirit...
...Doubt, the ska-punk band Sublime. "Some of the stuff that's big for us lately seems less rock and has more of a beat influence," says Lisa Worden, music director for kroq, an alternative-rock station in Los Angeles. "Beck stays away from the typical rock sound." Odelay isn't a flawless album--Beck isn't as soulful as some of the hip-hop stars he emulates; No Diggity, the simmering single from Dr. Dre and Blackstreet, has more soul than anything on Odelay. But perhaps his hip-hop awkwardness is what draws some critics and rock fans...