WHEN BECK PLUGS IN A GUITAR, IT comes with fuzztone, processed vocals and a claustrophobic mix. Birds twitter and treated voices float through 'Whiskeyclone, Hotel City 1997' as Beck ruminates, ' Everything we done is wrong/ I'll be lonesome when I'm gone.' He delivers straightforward folk-rock in the songs 'Pay No Mind (Snoozer)' and 'Nitemare Hippy Girl.' Other songs are slowed down, made murky, surrounded in alien sounds. Beck made the album in home studios, using his few tracks shrewdly. Noises intrude, soundscapes suddenly change, vocals are electronically warped. On 'Mellow Gold,' there's no pretense that the performance is live. 'Pay No Mind (Snoozer)' notes, 'The drugs won't kill your day job, honey.' 'Soul Suckin Jerk,' with a lurching hip-hop bass line under chanting voices and ever-increasing guitar distortion, is the halucinatory tale of someone whose profession is 'throwin' chicken in a bucket with a soda pop can.' He burns his uniform, gets arrested, steals the cop's gun and ends up 'dancing on the roof, shooting holes in the moon.' Like other alternative-rockers, Beck has low expectations, high irony and a keen understanding of the unskilled job market. Beck strums an acoustic guitar and hoots on a harmonica, but the instruments don't imply virtuous sincerity.

'Mellow Gold' is no folksinger's album it's closer to the homemade hip-hop of Basehead. While Beck's rap roots comes are in Dylan's 'Subterranean Homesick Blues,' his splintered recordings make him a child of hip-hop. In bygone days, Beck's offhand vocal tone and free-associative lyrics would have had people calling him a 'new Dylan.' 'Shave your face with some Mace in the dark/savin' all your food stamps we're burning down the trailer park,' he advises in 'Loser, ' adding, 'My time is a piece of wax fallin' on a termite who's chokin' on the splinters.' For generational crossover, 'Loser' also has a secret ingredient: the chorus recalls the Beatles' 'Hey Jude,' while Beck raps like Bob Dylan talk-singing. The sentiment of 'Loser' - 'I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me' - reflects the twentysomething trademark, a mixture of self-mockery and sardonic defiance. Geffen Records, the winner, released 'Loser' and four other songs as an EP (Geffen 21930 CD) and then 'Mellow Gold.' As West Coast radio stations snapped it up, Beck moved from obscurity to a recording-company bidding war. The result, 'Loser,' was released as a single on the independent Bongload label. As an experiment with a hip-hop producer, Karl Stephenson, he sampled a slide-guitar line, added a drumbeat and casually rapped some lyrics into an eight-track tape recorder. And where 60's rockers set out to be beacons for a generation, Beck aspires only to be a symptom of his.īefore 'Loser' conquered MTV, Beck, whose surname is Hansen, had played around New York's Lower East Side folk scene and then in Los Angeles punk clubs (still with his acoustic guitar). Beck's borrowings aren't sacred relics as they are for 60's idolaters like Lenny Kravitz they're only junk he found on the cultural sidelines. Songs on his debut album, 'Mellow Gold' (Geffen 24634 CD and cassette), echo the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Neil Young and lesser 60's figures. Harking back to Bob Dylan, he started his set with a rewritten Woody Guthrie song.

While everyone knows the decade is over, Beck wants to rub it in. But his music is fascinated with the 1960's. It was pure slacker attitude no one was going to mock his song before he did.īeck wore 1970's detritus: a Pinto cap, a Farrah Fawcett T-shirt. It wasn't hostility but anticipation Beck, a 23-year-old songwriter from Los Angeles, hadn't performed his hit, 'Loser.' Beck came back to demolish the song, half-heartedly rapping the verses while band members imitated drumbeats.

THE CROWD CHANTED, 'LOSER! LOSER!' when Beck finished a determinedly sloppy set at Emo's here.

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