"Where It's At" (Beck)

In journalist Gavin Edwards’s 2008 article “Beck’s Odelay: The Secret History” for Rolling Stone, Beck reveals that, back in 1996, he was keenly aware that people thought of him as a one-hit wonder.  In fact, he figured his nascent recording career was pretty much done.
“I thought Odelay might be the last time I got a chance to make a record.”
With his record company not really expecting much of a followup to 1994’s Mellow Gold and most of the world viewing the song “Loser” as a one-off novelty track, Beck was free to make whatever album he wanted.  
After abandoning an attempt at a very lo-fi acoustic album, Beck joined up with Mike Simpson and John King, who are better known as the Dust Brothers—the California-based production team behind The Beastie Boys’ 1989 masterpiece, Paul’s Boutique.  The trio ended up crafting an album that drew from their collective eclectic tastes, tossing everything from rap to Mariachi music into the blender.
While it's true that Odelay has tons of obscure samples and snippets from rare vinyl, a lot of what sounds like vintage samples are actually original loops created by Beck.  As Simpson recalls in a March 2011 musicradar article, “The making of Beck’s Odelay”:

“We’d always been forced to sample from records. Whereas with Beck he’d say, ‘I’ve got some ideas,’ and plug in his guitar and just start riffing. He’d play a bar or a measure, and we’d take that and loop it up, and he’d be like, ‘Oh, that’s incredible. Wow, I don’t even remember playing that!’ We were of like minds, had the same goals and were looking to make the same kind of music.”

This is how “Where It’s At”--a track that lyrically gives props to early hip-hop and reflects on Beck's early career, doing odd jobs and busking for his supper (Pulling out jives and jamboree handouts)--got its start.  He was tinkering around with a Wurlitzer electric piano in the studio and came up with the jazzy little riff that underpins the whole song.  From there, it became a riff in search of the right beat.
Says Beck in Edwards’s interview, “We didn’t really have the means to record drums, and at the time, drums were recorded in a particular style that I just didn’t care for: boomy, kind of ringy.”
So he and the Dust Brothers went looking for a drum break with an appropriate 60s/70s funk feel and landed on Allen Toussaint’s New Orleans funk classic “Get Out of My Life, Woman,” as performed by Lee Dorsey.
A few other vinyl samples also help make the song what it is.  The whole motif of two turntables and a microphone is borrowed from the track “Needle to the Groove” (1985) by hip-hop/electro-funk group Mantronix.  (The sample actually pops up after the first chorus.)
Last but not least, there’s the source of the song’s title: a really obscure sex-ed album from 1969 called Sex for Teens (Where It’s At) by Stanley Z. Daniels, MD—a “hip,” “with-it” attempt to talk about bow chicka wow wow with teenagers.  (It’s where the hilarious What about those who swing both ways, AC/DC’s? sample comes from.)
In all, Simpson sums up what I love about this song.
“It was a nice blend of Beck sounding really good rapping, but then lots of nice musical elements…It’s one of those riffs that makes you reminisce back to your childhood.”