"Loser" (Beck)

I didn't know what to make of Beck's "Loser" when it first hit MTV in 1994.  Between the D.I.Y.-feel of the video and the bizarre lyrics, my gut reaction was that it was a parody.  But a parody of what?  It had a slight hip-hop feel, what with that funky breakbeat churning away on the track.  The acoustic slide guitar kind of put it in the territory of the delta blues.  But then there also was a "my dog died, and my wife left me" stoned Country Western vibe to it, too.
After hearing it a few (hundred) times, I realized that it wasn't poking fun at any one thing; it was poking fun at everything, and it was doing so using this grab bag of misfit motifs in a way that masked just how intelligent Beck was.  (More on that in a sec.)
Story is, the song came about by chance.  Back in the early 90s, Beck moved to L.A. after a stint in New York, where he'd spent several years trying to make it as a folk/punk musician.  He was living hand-to-mouth, working odd jobs for very little money and then playing acoustic shows at bars and coffeehouses in between, whenever someone was willing to let him on stage.  In order to get people's attention, he'd make up bizarre stuff on the spot, just to see if people were listening.
As he told Rolling Stone in 1994, "I would always sing my goofy stuff, because everybody was drunk, and I'd only have two minutes."
Anyway, in 1992, his goofing around caught the attention of Tom Rothrock of indie label Bong Load Records, who ended up inviting Beck to hang out with hip-hop producer Karl Stephenson.  Long story short, Beck and Stephenson came up with "Loser" at the latter's house by fooling around with different sounds, loops, and improvised lyrics.
The song sat on the shelf for well over a year (Beck didn't think it was particularly noteworthy), when Bong Load finally released it in 1993.  To Beck's surprise (and eventual dismay), it took off as a "slacker anthem" on West Coast indie radio, which drew the attention of music mogul David Geffen, who came calling with an offer to sign Beck to his DGC label.  In 1994, DGC re-released the single, and it famously became a hit across the country.
The feeling at the time (and I admit, I felt this way, too) was that Beck was some jokey one-hit-wonder who had nothing else to say.  Apparently, he also knew the public's perception, and it bothered him.  A lot.  
As he told Entertainment Weekly in 1997, "Being attached to a highly disposable segment of the popular culture—the one-hit wonders, the cartoon slackers, the video phantoms—it's a little troublesome."
He ultimately had the last laugh by releasing the unexpected, brilliant Odelay in 1996.  
In fact, if it weren't for Odelay and his consistently solid career since, I don't think I'd be able to look so fondly upon "Loser."  It's kind of like being able to go back and laugh at your old, awkward photos from 7th grade because you know that everything turned out okay.

"The Golden Age" (Beck)

Beck Hansen had spent the better part of the 90s making a name for himself as a purveyor of alternative hip-hop and off-kilter funk.  So when the aptly-titled album Sea Change came along in 2002, it threw everyone for a loop.
Here was an album that didn't shake with unbridled energy.  Instead, it quaked under the weight of the world.  
It was introspective, mournful.  There were no obscure samples.  No references to turntables and microphones.  Just heartfelt compositions that leaned toward deep blue alt-country on the musical spectrum, all largely built around delicate guitar melodies with pillowy layers of vintage keyboards, airy synths, steel guitar, and cinematic strings.
The album came on the heels of a breakup with his girlfriend of nine years, clothing designer Leigh Limon, after he discovered that she had been cheating on him.  What's more, the events of 9/11/01 were still very fresh on everyone's minds here in the US.  So, under the circumstances, it was the right set of songs at a time when many people, including Beck, needed to heal.
The album opener, "The Golden Age," sounds like the first steps to recovery.  The song begins slowly with folky acoustic guitar strumming and watercolor splashes of ambient noise over a deliberate beat.  As it unfolds, with Beck proclaiming (or trying to convince himself) Put your hands on the wheel / Let the golden age begin, elements like slide guitar, glockenspiel, harmonium, and electric keyboard float in, creating a sense of quiet desolation.  Sonically, it's a thread of open highway running through a vast, open desert, inviting you to leave your current state behind as you drive into the benevolent moonlight.
Even as he confesses These days, I barely get by, the feeling is that everything will turn out alright.  Which is why this song is always a favorite of mine when I'm seeking a momentary escape from the world.

"The New Pollution" (Beck)

I won't say the lyrics to "The New Pollution" mean nothing, but they're pretty nonsensical.  (Ex: She's got a carburetor tied to the moon.)  
According to Beck, he was just tossing out random word pictures in an attempt to "evoke the 60s glamour of femme fatales" to match the hippy-shake vibe of the song.  As he told Gavin Edwards of Rolling Stone in 2008, "A lot of these tracks, we made the music really quick, and there would be an atmosphere to it, and then lyrically, I would try to convey the pictures that it gave me."
Speaking of the music, the backing track is just another great example of The Dust Brothers' prowess in unearthing/weaving together random samples to create something bigger than the sum of its parts.  
So, what's in the mix?  

• The drum sample comes from the track "Hallelujah, Alright, Amen!" from an obscure soul-jazz record called Soul Revolution (1970) by organist Gus Poole.  
• The sax line comes from the baby makin'/smooth jazz song "Venus" from the 1976 album Feelin's from Within by saxophonist Joe Thomas.
• And that über square, Wonder Bread 'n' mayo intro comes from a still-unidentified recording that Dust Brother Mike Simpson stumbled upon at a used record shop in Florida.  Says Simpson on MusicRadar.com, "This family of religious singers had pressed their own record, and one of the songs started with that sound...It had nothing to do with the musical notes of 'The New Pollution,' but it just seemed like a crazy way to start a song."

"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.”

"Venom Confection" (Beck)

The song "E-Pro" from Beck's Guero (2005) wasn't a bad opening track.  The "na-na" chant in the chorus was fairly catchy.  The crunchy riff was pretty good.  But the rhythm sample from The Beastie Boys' "So Whatcha Want?" (itself a sample) felt like a lazy cop out.  It was a rare occasion of The Dust Brothers phoning it in.

Then about a year after Guero dropped, I was watching something online, and I heard a different version of the song in the background of the video.  "Venom Confection," as I discovered the remixed track was called, had the same lyrics and same catchy "na-na" nursery rhyme chorus, only with this fresh new melody and "groovy" feel--like the theme song for some long-forgotten ABC serial drama from the early 70s.  (Premise: an ex-KGB agent defects to the States and joins the LAPD to help fight organized crime with his new partner: a hot-headed, un-hip ginger with a heart of gold.  Red Square - Thursdays at 9pm, following the Mod Squad.)

The remix didn't just alter the beat or loop one portion of the song, over and over, ad nauseam.  It completely transformed it into a new song, stripping away the original sampled beat and distorted guitar and replacing them with new piano, synths, chimes, and funky bass and drums.  Even Beck's vocal takes on a layered, Beach Boys-like feel that is completely lacking in the original.

Lyrically, I'm still not sure what it's about.  I'm thinking maybe it's about environmental protection and the politicians/corporations who talk a lot but do nothing to change the status quo.  Or, maybe it's just a bunch of words that he thought sounded badass.  This is Beck, after all.  The man who once rapped, Get crazy with the cheez whiz.  

So... y'know.

[There was a video for this song, but it was removed from YouTube.]

"Sexx Laws" (Beck)

My high school friends and I made up a word to describe when someone was trying too hard to be sexy and/or was purposely being overtly kinky for comedic effect: snexxy (as in, "so not sexy.")
Our creation of that word actually pre-dated Beck's "Sexx Laws" and the tongue-in-cheek album Midnite Vultures (1999) by about 4 years.  But if there ever were an anthem for "snexxiness," this track is it.
As usual, Beck doesn't disappoint with his abstract, Magnetic Poetry-esque lyrics.  (I'm not exactly sure what a "hepatitis contact lens" is, but those words alone somehow conjure up images of obese American salesmen in cheap suits traveling on business in Southeast Asia, looking for weirdo nookie once the sun goes down--which I am pretty sure is what the song is about...)  But it's the backing track that really sells the whole affair.  It's one part 1960s hippy shake and one part Jerry Reed-style countrified swamp rock à la the Smokey and the Bandit soundtrack, tumbled vigorously in a neon pink cocktail shaker, and then poured into a "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" keepsake plastic tumbler.
No one but Beck could pull off a song that sounds like a coked-up Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass joining the cast of Hee Haw for a key party.  And make you want to listen to it, again and again.  
(Plus the video was absolute genius, too.)

"Earthquake Weather" (Beck)

Maybe it's because I'm an East Coast guy.  But the term "earthquake weather" never meant anything to me.  I'd never heard the phrase before this song.  But apparently, it is a longstanding belief (dating to the Ancient Greeks) that long periods of hot, dry weather always precede seismic activity.  
Umm.  Yyyyyeah.
(Research has debunked this myth, by the way.)
As with 95% of his songs, Beck's lyrics are pretty abstract on this track, too.  My best guess is that he was probably commenting on the state of politics and the world in 2005 when Guero was released.  The words have an air of uncertainty and worry about them.  The chorus seems to be a sly reference to the old macabre joke about California tumbling into the ocean when the "big one" strikes, with the notion that small-minded people would see this type of event as an easy "cure" for anyone who dares question the status quo.
I believe this fits with the whole myth versus fact/truth versus perception vibe of the lyrics.
But enough literary analysis.
You couldn't ask for a better bedrock foundation to build a groove upon than the drum/soul clapping break from The Temptations' "What It Is."  (Yeah, Kimye West used it for Common's "The Corner," too, around the same time.  And, no, I'm not sure who used it first.  And, yeah, Common spits raw fire on his track.  But since West is a puffed up asshat with dueling Napoleon and God complexes, I'm gonna award this one to the Dust Brothers and move on.)  Then when you mix in seemingly disparate elements, like Beck's Delta blues-style riff on his busted-ass acoustic guitar and a 70s cop show clavinet, it becomes this funky cocktail that's not-quite-alternative/not-quite-hip hop.  Actually, that's kind of the recipe (I won't call it a "formula," because Beck is anything but formulaic) of Beck's best songs.  The Dust Brothers', too, for that matter.