The Magnificent Seven: Odelay
This is the fifth in a series of articles that looks at seven albums the authors appreciate. In terms of criteria: they must be albums listened to only in their entirety…content and form together like houses in motion. They also must have enormous personal relevance: they are corner stones. They may not be cool, but they are us.
#5
Odelay, Beck
I was a strange adolescent (pretty sure I still am). At 10 or 11, I was starting to get a sense of just how weird I was. I wore bowling shirts. And kangols. Basically, anything that made me more like my hero, Max Fischer, and less like the other girls I went to school with who were leaning hard into the changes that were happening to our bodies and hormones that scared me.
I must have heard “Loser" on the radio (I actually remember singing “Soy un perdedor” on the way to a classmate’s birthday in what must have been the end of fourth grade) but it was Odelay ("Odelay, Odelay, Odelay, Odelay, Odelay, Ooooodelaaay, just passin' through") that let the light in. It felt like my strange, jumpy brain, as interested in African wildlife as the civil war as the Rolling Stones as Stevie Wonder as the Tour de France as riding waves in the ocean as Anne of Green Gables had finally found a spirit guide. It was ok, actually, it was cool to be weird. A tangle of incongruous ideas could actually be logical, funny and beautiful. My artist Mom and her friends had been telling me this for years, I just didn't listen.
Odelay is a soundscape, an avalanche of references, skipping all over the place: Jobim samples, monkey sound effects, hot dog dances and profundity side by side. The transitions were like nothing I had ever heard before, completely disparate songs running into each other, linked by screaming, feedback and 1960s interstellar funk. Kicking off with the scalding buzz of "Devil’s Haircut,” Beck leads you into a groovy space desert of “Hotwax,” rich with layered fragments. “Lord Only Knows” is a bizzaro cowboy-almost surf ballad with a mournful feel right into “New Pollution,” a swinging, percussive bossa nova jam. Then, out of nowhere, you’re in the barren jungle (dissonant, yet accurate) of “Derelict.” When I hear “Novacane,” I’m instantly 10, back jumping on my bed yelling the chorus and rocking out. It took getting older to appreciate “Jack-Ass,” now one my favorite tracks with a profound opening line: “I’ve been drifting along in the same, stay old shoes. Loose ends tying a noose in the back of my mind.” I remember grooving to "Where It’s At" as the ending music of a backyard play, parents patiently waiting for my cousins and I to lose our shit at the smooth jazz breakdown 3:32 in. The driving bass line of “Minus” paves the way for the laid back cool of “Sissyneck,” hiding some surprising samples and lyrics (“cause my neck is broken and my pants ain’t getting much bigger”). Picking a best track is tough but the one that typifies the aesthetic of Odelay most to me is “Readymade:" driving back beat, jangly guitar, an unmistakable Jobim undertone (and sample), dystopic lyrics (backed with killer organ vamps) and an abrupt ending. I remember not knowing what to think of "High 5 (Rock the Catskills)" when I first heard Odelay (I love it now) and feeling distinctly sad when the slow roll of “Ramshackle" (a sound that foreshadowed Mutations) would come on because it meant the ride was over…though not without Beck surprising you one last time after two minutes of silence, something that still makes me jump out of my skin.
I can still sing along with every word and instrumental and beat drop and random sound bite on the entire album, familiar and as worn as the neural pathways in my own brain. Coming back to Odelay is coming home to an old friend, one knows you in your core and gives you a foundation on which to grow and change.
Beck remains an auteur, reinventing himself on every album. He’s been with me every step of the way: Mutations and Sexx Laws provided the perfect A Side and B Side to adolescence, Guero and Sea Change the same yin and yang to high school and beyond. I just heard Bruce Springsteen describe performing as equal parts "self realization and self erasure,” which immediately called Beck to mind. I don’t know anyone else who creates so compellingly by revision, his likeness the still-visible line of a hundred-times erased pencil drawing. With David Bowie as is his patron saint, Beck is a cipher, a walking tribute to the possibility, power and promise of change.
Emma Impink appreciates the vegetable man in the vegetable van, selfish ways to lose, and stepping inside your Hyundai.