![]() ![]() ‘You’d have to be a total idiot to say: ‘I’m the slacker generation guy. ‘Jesus!’ exclaims Beck at the very notion of being a mouthpiece for millions. 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. Beck was on the cover of SPIN for the first time in 1994. 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. 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 unless you’re in a Richard Linklater movie, slacker is not a word anybody wants to be called, even as a compliment. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Beck comes from a long line of capital-A Artists, a long line of monkeys amid chimpanzees. 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. 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. Beck Hansen was born in Los Angeles in 1970. Congratulations to you, truly, if you were cool enough back then that “Loser” wasn’t the first Beck song you ever heard. Either way, Beck was a monkey amid chimpanzees. Or, in a time of chimpanzees he was a monkey. In a town of chimpanzees, he was a monkey. And my second thought was, Of course they fucking do. My first thought was, Beck and Gibby Haynes don’t live on the same planet. 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. That was quite a jarring Butthole Surfers cameo, to me. 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. I remember watching the room just clear out. 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 was playing to a tape machine and the band started doing free-jazz shit over it, and I was screaming into this cheap mic. ![]() And then Beck says, “I remember we played the music-industry conference South by Southwest. ![]() His haphazard first tour was launched with local freaks making up his band, their concerts seemingly designed to offend.” This is early ’90s. The third time, in 1999, it says, “Beck’s early professional years were definitely not micromanaged. Beck has been on the cover of SPIN magazine four times. ![]()
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