Oh hey. This blog has been around since 2003, if you can believe it. In the early days, I kinda just used it as a random thoughts aggregator, sort of a prelude to what people ended up doing on social media a few years later. Later I started doing random essays and things. The last several years, it's mainly housed cross-posts from my podcast and radio show. It's hard to get myself to write things here regularly because I spend most of my waking hours writing and editing stuff for my day job. But I wanted to do something different so I'm going to feature a song every day (hopefully)...and yes, I know this is starting four days into the year. Cut me some slack, I just thought of this idea earlier today. There's going to be no rhyme or reason to these picks, other than I like them, although there might be some other relevant factors playing a role. ANYHOO, here we go:
Pay No Mind (Snoozer)
I first heard Beck when a lot of people did, back in '94 when "Loser" blew up. I wish I could say I was hip to his first two albums, but nah. And "Loser" was everywhere, man. It was the slackest slacker song that ever slacked, and stations like WFNX and WBCN were all over that shizz, not to mention MTV. So much so that I got really sick of it and didn't pay no mind to the rest of the album it was on, Mellow Gold. I heard "Beer Can," which was also on the radio a lot, but nothing else (probably because the other songs had a lot of swear words and such). He was painted as this pseudo-ironic hipster doofus and I was sick of him.
But when his next album Odelay came out in '96, I was in. "Where It's At," "Devil's Haircut," "The New Pollution"...all total fucking jams. I still regret not getting tickets to see him at Avalon in Boston on that tour. The album was terrific and thanks to the Dust Brothers, it was very different from the Mellow Gold acoustic-psycho folk sound. It also led me to finally get Mellow Gold and I realized I was stupid to write Beck off because he had a popular song.
Since then, I've been hot and cold on him. His next three albums (Mutations, Midnite Vultures, Sea Change) were legit great. The following three (Guero, The Information, Modern Guilt) were decent. And the last three (Morning Phase, Colors, Hyperspace) haven't done anything for me at all.
I've been listening to Mellow Gold the last few weeks for no particular reason other than I just decided to, and man, it's so goddamn great. I'm going with "Pay No Mind (Snoozer)" for the first song o' the day because it's understated and pissed off. Sure, it's a statement about anticommercialism from a guy whose dad worked in the music industry, but it sounds like he scraped around and supposedly it was written when he was a struggling musician in his late teens. Whatever, it's a vibe and it still rings true, even if Beck is probably pretty well off by now.
Okay, let's see if I can keep this thing going.
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