Lizie Beck

Every Album, Every Song
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-78952-630-1
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

Reihe: On Track

Beck Hansen has enjoyed three decades of success, creating an unprecedented variety of music across a labyrinth of releases that challenge conventions and push pop music boundaries. He's been individually pigeonholed as folk, anti-folk, lo-fi, alternative, hip-hop, rock, R&B, rap, country, noise, dance-pop, and electronica - by critics of only one album. Mainly, he's just Beck.
Beck's free-range approach to music and art was fostered at an early age. His father is a classically trained musician, his mother lived life as art, and his grandfather was a central figure in the experimental Fluxus scene. Beck absorbed these influences, then dropped out of school at age 14 to forge his own path. Just nine years later, he became an 'overnight success' with the so-called slacker anthem 'Loser'.
This book provides meticulous, chronological organization to Beck's seemingly overwhelming official recorded output, from the indie experimentation of Stereopathetic Soulmanure and One Foot in the Grave, through the commercial and critical heights of Odelay and Morning Phase, and into the mainstream successes of Guero, The Information, and Colors. Along the way, details of more than 300 songs include the expected ('Where It's At'), the underappreciated ('Rental Car'), and the obscure ('Brandon Nevins').

Arthur Lizie is the author of numerous music books, including Prince FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Purple Reign, Prince on Prince, and Neil Young on Neil Young, the latter two both in the popular 'Interviews and Encounters' series. His next book is the story of Stevie Wonder told through 11 songs. His most story-worthy rock memory is attending the original Live Aid concert in Philadelphia. He is a professor of communication and lives in the southern suburbs of Boston, USA, perpetually searching for ingredients for the perfect curry.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lizie, Arthur

Leseproben

Chapter 1

Golden Feelings (1993)

Personnel

Beck Hansen: vocals, acoustic guitar, harmonica, percussion, bass

Steve Hanft: spoken vocals on ‘Heartland Feeling’

Produced by: Beck Hansen

US Release Date: January 1993

Label: Sonic Enemy

Highest chart places: did not chart

Running Time: 42:35

Sonic Enemy was a Claremont, CA-based label that issued about a dozen cassettes and a vinyl 7” in an early 1990s incarnation. Among those tapes was Beck’s debut album, Golden Feelings. The label catalog advertised the collection of four-track recordings as such:

‘Like Neil Young on cough syrup’ says his lawyer, and who am I to differ? Genuine and genuinely fucked-up, straight from the heart of spooky folky noisy unaffected tales of poverty and lucklessness, fast food & bad trips. Thirty-five or more minutes … $3.00

Sonic Enemy released a few thousand copies, then went out of business in 1995. The label returned in 1999 and pressed 2000 CDs. Beck was not amused, and Sonic Enemy shut down production, sharing this website message:

Hey, where’s Beck?

Beck doesn’t live here anymore. Mommy says the mean lawyer people took him away to live with his other family, even though he lived with us first. Mommy says I’ll understand someday.

The cover art is a black-and-white picture of Raggedy Ann and Teddy Bears at a tea party. The j-card includes the song titles and an untitled verse. Original versions included a piece of paper stating: ‘EVERYTHING IN THIS BOX IS FALSE’.

Beck ran out of copies of the tape and duplicated it privately for his 1 April 1994 show at New York City’s The Grand, opening for Evel Knievel. Two titles, referenced below, were misspelled.

It’s unclear if the album was reviewed at the time of release, but multiple Beck album-ranking articles place it among his least successful LPs. Neither Golden Feelings nor Stereopathetic Soulmanure are acknowledged on Beck.com.

‘The Fucked Up Blues’ 2:11

This song sets the pace for the whole album. There are two snippets of found sound, followed by two minutes of barely hanging together reverbed drums, guitar, and vocals, eventually tagged by a short harmonica solo. The lyrics mainly repeat the title with a few existential lamentations thrown in. As with many early projects, this is meta-Beck: the song IS fucked-up blues.

‘Special People’ 1:42

This chorus-less acapella is, more-or-less, 16 rhyming couplets featuring monotone, high-and-low non-harmonizing Beck vocal tracks. It’s the type of song that makes people say either ‘turn this off, it’s not even music’! or ‘there’s a whole album on this stuff? – Great!’ This is one of three Golden Feelings tracks ‘evacuated’ onto 1994’s ‘Pay No Mind’ UK maxi-single.

‘Magic Stationwagon’ 1:36

If someone’s walking down the Tesco aisle humming Beck, it’s probably not this song. The core is a call-and-response battle of throbbing, percussive guitars alongside some screechy vocals lurking under the surface. The title evokes an idyllic California youth, but the lyrics evoke confusion.

‘No Money No Honey’ 2:35

It’s an earworm as Beck nonchalantly repeats the title phrase over an increasingly distorted and gradually more mariachi-like guitar. The last portion of the track is a sound collage, including the ‘c’mon motherfucker’ clip that would be extended on ‘Truckdrivin’ Neighbors Downstairs’, some classical music, and some rock music. An alternate version appears on Stereopathetic Soulmanure.

‘Trouble All My Days’ 2:07

This menacing track features percussive, foot-stomping blues. Lyrically it doesn’t venture far beyond the title, but opens with extended dialogue from Los Angeles-area TV pitchman Ed Vanton about the past as a ‘cancelled check’ that Beck would find lyrically memorable. This version appeared on singles and the Odelay deluxe edition.

‘Bad Energy’ 1:39

This loosely assembled track begins with an unidentified song sample over which Beck eventually strums a guitar and mumbles. No one can dispute his assertion that it’s like ‘a big empty city full of toasters’.

‘Schmoozer’ 2:38

This guitar/bass/drums number with harmonica and double-tracked Beck vocals recalls numerous churning pleasures from Velvet Underground and reverberates in contemporaneous Beck tracks such as ‘Thunder Peel’. The lyrics seem like a standard kiss-off to a girlfriend. Beck’s second run of the cassette alternatively called this track ‘Feeling Hurter’. There appears no connection with the ‘Snoozer’ subtitle of ‘Pay No Mind’, although it is the title Weird Al Yankovic wanted to use for a rejected ‘Loser’ parody.

‘Heartland Feeling’ 7:11

After a minute-long opening that includes a Steve Hanft monologue about a heartland feeling (it involves the true American music of Mellencamp, Springsteen, and Seger), Beck delivers the collection’s centerpiece. In five mock-strident verses, Beck offers snapshot biographies of heartland people before concluding each observation with the rejoinder chorus: ‘only a person / who didn’t know shit / anything happening / that’s about it’. The song features Beck and acoustic guitar with multi-tracked vocals on the choruses and a distorted fadeout, which is followed by a sound collage that includes a portion of The Tokens’ ‘I Hear Trumpets Blow’ (1966). Beck opened a 1995 episode of The Larry Sanders Show with a performance of the song.

‘Super Golden Black Sunchild’ 2:11

This echoey number about scepters, flames and fate recalls portentous late 1960s/early 1970s English acoustic folk-rock tunes by the likes of Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, and Pentangle. Not to mention Tenacious D, the faux-metal duo featuring Jack Black, brother-in-law of Beck-collaborators Rachel and Petra Haden. The track appears on the ‘Pay No Mind’ UK maxi-single as ‘Supergolden (Sunchild)’.

‘Soul Sucked Dry’ 1:50

The serene, fey leanings of the previous song are joined here by hard rock acoustic blues – Zeppelin or a touch of Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. There’s a second Beck deep in the mix of this brief, dark yowl. The second edition cassette titled the track ‘Sould Sucked Dry’.

‘Feelings’ 1:35

The title emotions aren’t of the golden variety in this lighter acoustic track which, in retrospect, almost seems like a Sea Change parody.

‘Gettin’ Home’ 4:15

Pretty, untarnished acoustic Delta blues, this is one of the few songs in which you can’t hear Beck’s tongue in his cheek. Although lacking their complexity lyrically or musically, it points toward more mature songs from Mutations onwards. Beck recorded multiple versions, most without the long guitar intro.

‘Will I Be Ignored by the Lord?’ 2:00

Gospel/blues acapella with some occasional tapping, this is a fairly serious, if not typically cryptic rhyming exercise – until the third verse when ‘the flapjacks will flap back / Off the ceiling on to my head’.

‘Bogus Soul’ 1:14

The near-sanctimoniousness of the previous few tracks is quickly dissipated with the in medias res appearance of perhaps the most strained falsetto ever recorded. Chugging along like the 16th minute of a half-hour version of VU’s ‘Heroin’, the lyrically distressed song also cuts out mid-thought.

‘Totally Confused’ 2:00

A slight, loping acoustic track that doesn’t develop lyrically beyond its title. A marginally different version appears on demos, but the song would be reworked to greater effect on A Western Harvest Field by Moonlight.

‘Mutherfuker’ 2:16

Although it’s common for fans to favor non-Geffen versions of songs for their perceived authenticity, here authenticity is good only as far as it goes, with the sludgy, compressed sound failing to match the manic dynamics of the Mellow Gold version.

‘People Gettin’ Busy’ 2:34

A bass-heavy, multi-tracked vocal goof, this is the closest that Beck gets to the funk he’d start exploring in earnest on Midnite Vultures – it’s fun.

Related Tracks

‘To See That Woman of Mine’ 2:22

Often discussed as Beck’s first commercial release, it shares the A-side with the following song on a limited edition flipside 7” vinyl, with actor Steve Moramarco’s band Bean holding down the B-side. Played straight, it’s a driving folk rock song that bears more than a passing resemblance to ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’, among other Chuck Berry tunes.

‘MTV Makes Me Want to Smoke Crack’ 3:49

One of Beck’s best early songs, it’s a funny, upbeat acoustic folk song with harmonica. Beck...