No `Loser'

Beck's new Odelay (DGC, in stores June 18) was produced in part by the Dust Brothers, who also produced the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique. Like that album's namesake, Odelay is a thrift shop of leftover styles and hand-me-down effects. There seems to be nothing in American popular music that Beck hasn't absorbed -- or at least partly digested -- before regurgitating it into song. He's come of age as a solo folkie playing in New York and LA, and there's been plenty of simple folk strumming on all of his albums. (In one hilarious opening to HBO's The Larry Sanders Show, the talk show's producer, played by Rip Torn, goes into near apoplexy as he watches on the studio monitor and tries, with fist-pumping, shoulder-hunched body English, to will Beck through the final chords of a slacker folk ditty.) One album, Stereopathic Soulmanure (Flipside, 1994), had plenty of sweet pedal-steel C&W. Beck's style also embraces rap, hardcore punk, and country blues. On his new album he adds plenty of '60s and '70s funk and soul, old-school rap, the "lounge" exotica of bossa nova, plus spy-movie music, Sun Ra keyboard noise, sitars, and the Beatles.

If Paul's Boutique is the Beasties' self-explanation, then Odelay's "Readymade" is Beck's. Like the Beasties and other hip-hop artists, he uses sampling and collage as an expansive technique, transforming the "readymades" of pop-cultural detritus into art. If a musical passage isn't a sample, he records and processes it so it will sound like one -- a whistled melody that recalls Otis Redding's "Dock of the Bay," a guitar riff that could be from an old Them single ("Gloria"?), a drum rhythm track possibly lifted from the Beatles' "Taxman." On Odelay, the familiar business of sampling and appropriating styles comes to represent Beck himself -- an infinitely adaptable persona, the trickster always ready to transform himself at a moment's notice and slip out of town before the authorities catch up with him. "Loser" identified him as a shrugging slacker, and there's plenty of nihilism to go around on Odelay ("Something's wrong 'cause my mind is fading/Everywhere I look there's a dead end waiting," from "Devil's Haircut"). But it's also impossible to overlook his endless inventiveness, a pop-song craftiness that puts him in a league with lo-fi heroes like Sebadoh and Guided by Voices.

On the single "Where It's At," the easy flow of Beck's persona accommodates everything with Zen-like ease -- a funky intro of Fender Rhodes piano and organ, light-soul horn fanfares, and variously sampled rap styles; there's even a nice jazz sax solo. The goal is the mythic juke joint, the "destination a little up the road" where everyone's style is accepted and "two turntables and a microphone" are all you could need or want from life ("Shine your shoes with your microphone blues"). It's a house party where everyone in the house joins in the refrain. On "Hotwax," he's a studly hitmaker getting by on ripped-off riffs ("Hijack flavors that I'm flippin' like birds") and, as on "Loser," his junior-high-school Spanish: "Yo soy disco quebrado/Yo tengo chicle en me cerebro" ("I'm a broken record/I've got bubblegum on my brain"?).

Although Beck has no hope, his resourcefulness knows no bounds. On the pedal-steel-accompanied chorus of the funk-driven "Sissyneck" he's got a "stolen wife and a rhinestone life" (the signifiers of living large, Nashville style), and he makes the ultimate slacker boast: "Everybody knows my name/At the recreation center." In "Readymade," "stuck together like a readymade," he faces "an open road where I can breathe." He talks about "canceled rations" and "empty boxes in a pawnshop brain." The music gropes along with a lugubrious rhythm track dusted with vinyl static. A bit of the bossa nova classic "Desafinado" floats into the mix and gets answered by queasy dissonant organ fills and an African harp. A dab of samba acoustic guitar segues into "High 5," a noise-infested rap that seems to be taking place in a retirement vacation community in Hell (with the refrain "Rockin' the Catskills like a man from a casket"). And then the album ends (not counting the requisite "hidden track" of noise) with the sweet, mournful "Ramshackle," its acoustic guitars and light percussion backing Beck's warped benediction: "So take off your coat/Put a song in your throat."

On Larry Sanders, Artie dismissed Beck as "a hillbilly from outer space." On Odelay, you get the feeling that's not such a bad thing to be.