Zimmy and The Loser
The shock of it was said to have “electrified one half of his audience, and electrocuted the other” when Bob Dylan brought out a full band and famously went electric for the first time. Looking back, it is perhaps not a surprise that the audience at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival may have included more than its fair share of unabashed purists about the form of folk music - purists after all are notoriously fickle when challenged by novelty. But what is indisputable is that Dylan set himself up as an stylistic fall guy partly as a way to bring about the evolution of folk as a modality, and he used the experience as a springboard to dabble in other arenas after his claim to the throne of folk was all but certified by both public opinion and critical consensus. The rest is music history.
Nearly thirty years later it would take a bit more to piss off the traditional fanbases in music. In that time culture had seen the rise of David Bowie, a legend who seemed to take on identities the way most people put on shoes; it had seen the end of the Cold War and other pivotal sociopolitical moments; and it had seen the rise of digital technology that had both grown the world immeasurably and made it infinitely smaller at the same time, access was allowed at an unprecedented level that would only keep growing. What could an artist do to position themselves as a true lightning rod the way Dylan had in a time that seemed a lifetime ago?
As with most things in the nineties, the answer involved selling out.
Beck Hansen rode a wave of goodwill to radio and MTV stardom on the back of the lead single from his third LP, Mellow Gold. “Loser” was unapologetically of its time while sounding ahead of the curve: mish-mashed field recordings crashed up against drum loops, discordant guitars created arthritic spines for torch songs, and Hansen’s deceptively juvenile voice glided above all delivering lyrics in multiple styles that had just the right amount of realness in them that listeners could never really determine if they were truly meant or if they were just effective one-liners. It’s even possible that part of the artist’s charm and songwriting affability relied on an affectation that somewhat mirrored the freewheelin’ folk man himself (what is “Nitemare Hippy Girl” if not Dylan v2.0, punchdrunk slacker-rock for nascent computer nerds and alterna-lifestyle practitioners?).
Along the way we get samples from under-appreciated cinema, children’s voices from Saturday morning cartoons, and even a rowdy call to action regarding America’s favorite cheese-type food, Cheez Whiz. What towers above all the whackadoodle moving parts though is a feeling that Hansen knows what he is creating here. For him at this time, the whole idea of “selling out” was in itself a silly joke: he had very little clout in the industry, his style didn’t seem profitable (until the moment it emphatically became so), his aesthetic tended to alienate instead of creating the big tent needed for grassroots expansion. Beck had no illusions that selling out could work for him, so he did the next best thing: he used his platform to poke fun at the idea. And he did so mercilessly.
American rock was a tricky place to plant a flag at this time in history. Mellow Gold hit the street almost exactly one month before grunge/alternative music tragically lost its most loved poet-prophet, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. One of Cobain’s worries was that he might be growing too famous to continue being what he considered a “real” artist - he thought that selling out might happen by osmosis or when he wasn’t looking, a punishment for trying too hard…or for not trying hard enough. His self-inflicted ending led a generation of artists to re-evaluate their own goals and decide just what their authenticity was truly worth in the larger scheme of their own well-being. For many of them over the next few years, what had been termed “selling out” stopped being an unforgivable defeat and started being a way to finance recording or gain financial freedom for a year. (The Shins’ story is perhaps instructive for how this dynamic played out near the turn of the century.)
Hansen’s thought process seemed to be that if selling out could be spun into comedy, then perhaps it could also be defanged. “Pay No Mind (Snoozer)” features an intro that includes the wonderfully meta line “This is the album right here. Burn the album.” First-half highlight “Soul Suckin’ Jerk” recounts the harrowing drama of quitting one’s job in a big-box restaurant, only to be harangued on all sides by street lifers and law enforcement. The parenthetical in “F***in’ With My Head (Mountain Dew Rock)” speaks for itself and serves as both laugh line and repudiation in one fell swoop.
Beck displays an irreverence throughout Mellow Gold that invigorates like being hit with a bucket of ice-cold Natty Light. His most profound statements can read as nonsensical (see the so-weird-it’s-brilliant triplet, “Can’t complain about the mess / Mama killed her only dress / Now she’s longing for the pines”); his most nonsensical statements are just that, nonsense, but proffered with an absurdist’s knowledge of how to deploy gibberish in the service of higher thought.
The other currency that Mellow Gold successfully deals in is one that was perfected in the age of Kenny G and Walker, Texas Ranger: irony. Beck’s deft hand at smoothing the edges out of his snideness to make it fit into his music goes well beyond the purely lyrical. Witness “Truckdrivin Neighbors Downstairs (Yellow Sweat)” whose opening showcases a recording of an argument that wouldn’t be out of place in the “Pepto Bismol Palace” audio vérité recordings that became a minor cult sensation around this time. The opening of the album, Beck’s shot across the bow as it were, is a glibly hilarious take on being a loser…but that designation is never frowned upon in the context of the art, if anything it is lauded. Ironically, of course.
Given the more forthright blues and folk leanings on Hansen’s first two records, Golden Feelings and Stereopathic Soulmanure, we can dispense with the notion that Beck’s self-education didn’t involve some heavy Dylan study in his formative years. The divergence lies in how Dylan’s confrontation of his audience was driven by inner desires: he made the choice he wanted to make to suit himself and his music without a (real) care for how he might look in the moment. But Beck using culture as part-bong, part-piñata and then passing out from laughing at his own jokes seems, conversely, to be driven by a need to say something about society and fandom - or a need to say nothing in a meaningful way. The message couldn’t have been clearer if he had signed off the album with a spoken-word missive along the lines of “All this is bullshit. Fame is an illusion. Money is a construct. Let’s stop worrying.”
Can we then say that Beck tried to position himself artistically as the next (or updated) Dylan, a pre-millennial hitchhiker on a dilapidated Highway 61? Did he opt to “go ironic” as an answer or callback to Dylan’s generational iconoclasm and his having “gone electric”? Did he try to shock an audience into waking up from the guitar-rock stupor they were in? Did he see an ironic existence as a salve to the seriousness of overthinking? The answers to these questions lie mostly inside Beck Hansen’s own mind, but it feels like they are present in some nebulous form if one is willing to search them out inside the 48 minutes of Mellow Gold.
Beck’s trajectory veered into a somewhat contrived chameleonic cycle that shifted every few years. His Grammy-winning next effort Odelay seemed to solidify in him the idea that novelty is the best policy. Later output seemed to take on different stylistic focal points with varying levels of success. His ongoing relevance is predicated these days upon how much a given record jibes with the era and its zeitgeist, but he is still a figure that trades in jokes as often as he does in sincerity.
The next time Bob Dylan performed at Newport, 37 years had passed. He had been in supergroups, created big-C Classic albums, tried on life as a country-western star, been married and divorced and attached and unattached to various partners. The Dylan who had “electrocuted” half a crowd of folk fans was arguably no more, as each atom in his identity had been reconfigured and transmogrified over the years. But he knew where he was when he took the stage there again in 2002: this was the festival that had forged his legacy in the twin fires of fulfillment and hatred. For no reason anyone can definitively name, he chose to play his first performance back at the festival in a disguise consisting of a fake wig and beard.
At a certain point, one just has to take a victory lap. There is a certain satisfaction in thinking that the disguise was merely there to obscure his smile.
