A brief list of the greatest first lines in songs:
"I read the news today, oh boy..."
“Hello darkness, my old friend…”
“Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine…”
“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life…”
Okay, so the Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, Patti Smith, and Prince. - legends all. You know what, we got it. I got it. I understand. It’s too easy. Let me dig a little deeper.
“Jeremiah was a bullfrog….”
“I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand…”
“What’s with these homies dissin’ my girl?”
“Ooga-chaka, ooga-ooga, ooga-chaka, ooga-ooga, ooga-chaka, ooga-ooga ooga-chaka, ooga-ooga…”
My personal favorite though is this masterful lyric about being completely out of place in your own time:
In the time of the chimpanzees, I was a monkey.
And then everything changed.
When Beck wrote that lyric to open the kaleidoscopic junkyard masterpiece that is Loser, he may well have been a dissociated and isolated monkey in the time of chimpanzees. By the time 20 million teenagers saw the video on MTV, he was the inmate running the asylum. The song made no direct sense. Funny, sure, but nowhere approximating sensical. This is the part where I should mention journalistic bullshit like slacker ennui and Generation X and work desperately to apply those terms to Beck himself and Loser. I refuse. Beck was always in on the joke. He may have played the role, but he did it with a smirk that went undetectable to oh-so-serious critics of the music and film of the era. “Ohhhh no! Kurt Cobain is gone, so who’s going to embody slacker ennui for Generation X now???” That’s the sort of overly serious rubbish concocted by writers painfully trying to push an angle so they have something more to write about. At its peak, Spin magazine writers would have jacked off Cobain, swallowed a gop of spit from Radiohead, and gargled Beck’s balls if they could write more think pieces about popular music and how these artists represent a generation’s ideology. As if through some miracle of language a fucking think piece could be written about:
The forces of evil in a bozo nightmare
Ban all the music with the phony gas chamber
'Cause one's got a weasel, and the other's got a flag
One's on the pole, shove the other in a bagI know, I know… he calls himself a loser in English AND Spanish. That has to mean something. His self-deprecation MUST be the voice of a lost generation. Rodney Dangerfield made a career out of self-deprecation. For fucks sake, NPR would fellate David Sedaris because he’s made a career out of calling himself awkward. (Side note: Every Sedaris story runs like this: I was awkward. The situation was awkward. My presence made everything more awkward. Then NPR massages his prostate and exalts him.) Dangerfield and Sedaris don’t personify slacker ennui or either of their generations because they’re in on the joke. Beck wasn’t trying to be self-deprecating or profound.
Soy un perdedor. I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill me?
-Beck, Loser
Beck was, in his words, trying to sound like Chuck D of Public Enemy and making fun of his own lousy Chuck D impersonation. He wasn’t speaking on behalf of an entire generation. (And what a ridiculous thing for journalists to burden him with.) He was clowning himself for trying to be a good rapper. It happened during a stream-of-consciousness moment on an outtake recording. It was a fucking joke. What was not a joke was Beck’s ability to cross-pollinate Rock, Hip-Hop, Country, Folk, and psychedelia. He gleefully blurred boundaries and set the stage for music creators who love music to demonstrate exactly how much music they love.
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I just heard the story about how Beck was trying to sound like Chuck D. Great song!