2025-09-19
Beck - Mellow Gold
Original release: 1994
Back in the mid-’90s someone handed me a tape and said, “you gotta hear this!” I heard it and I was completely mesmerized by what I was hearing. Now, it was not Mellow Gold but it was Beck on the tape. I spent years (literally) trying to figure out what the hell those songs on the tape were. Only a decade later or so I found out that it was a compilation of songs mostly from Golden Feelings and some other songs like MTV Makes Me Wanna Smoke Crack and Corvette Bummer, both of which had only been released as B-sides at the time. How my friend ever got a hold of a copy of those songs at that time, I have no idea, but it completely sold me on the whole lo-fi, psychedelic anti-folk idea that he was brewing on. And then Loser reached the Danish airwaves. Holy shit, that shit was the shit! Shit!
Mellow Gold recently got a re-release on vinyl. It has had a bunch of bootleg/unofficial releases over the years but the last official release (except for a pretty limited release in 2016 celebrating Bong Load’s 25th anniversary) was in 2000—a quarter century ago.
As much as I dislike Beck’s involvement with Scientology, it would be stupid not to recognize the impact he has had on music in the 1990s. He took the slacker/anti-folk movement to the disco (and the radio) and popularized a way of using sampling that was different from what most other people were doing back then. Loser, Beercan and Soul Suckin Jerk are prime examples of that. And he helped legitimize “bedroom recordings”, not that he was the first or the only one to do them, but most that did back then, did not usually make it to the top-10 on the radio.
Really, it is just an absolute gem of an album if you are into all the things I just said. Or lyrics. I have not even touched upon those, but they are about as brilliant as the music.
Listen
- Pay No Mind (Snoozer): https://youtu.be/yHjjqYQpBQg
- Soul Suckin Jerk: https://youtu.be/PTZd8dq2iGI