The Monday Long Player #16
Odelay - Beck
Do you have comfort listens? Albums or songs that you go back to in times of stress or anxiety? I definitely do - and despite sitting in a room with a few thousand records lining the shelves there are a handful that get pulled for more often than the rest. Lately I’ve found myself drawn to records from a particular era - the mid 90s. This isn’t surprising given my age; I noted, with mild horror, that this year marks 30 years since I left school, something that seems scarcely believable to me. It appears I’m not alone in this fixation on nostalgia; the 90s has become a source of reverence even for those who weren’t alive at the time. Part of my kids’ generation’s love of that period is that it was the last decade without mobile phones; immeasurably different from today due to that singular change, but recognisable enough culturally that it still resonates today. Side-note: I got my first phone in 1997 but used to leave it in the car as it was a) a bit embarrassing to have and b) there was no-one to call.
Britpop has been a big driver of the current throwback to the 90s, but arguably that was the least interesting or innovative musical movement of the decade. Hip Hop, Jungle, Trip Hop, Garage, Grunge and dozens of other scenes exploded in my secondary school years and it’s easy to forget how revolutionary this all felt. A video of Omni Trio’s Renegade Snares being played in a 1994 club was doing the rounds on instagram last month leading a friend of mine to wonder if that time really was the peak - musically, but maybe in other ways too.
The daily horror that we’re fed through our phones has led me back to that time a lot lately. The music is part of it, but it’s so much more than that. The period between ’93 and ’98 was an amazing era to live through, and what has happened to the world since has only added to the rose-tinted hue through which I see it. I suppose (or hope) most people would look back at their late teens with similar warm feelings, but I can’t imagine that the teens of today would feel the same sense of hope that I felt then. So whilst it’s normal (and even slightly cliched), for a man approaching fifty to reach back through the decades to a time before responsibilities and all the rest, this contrast with our current situation gives it a few extra layers of meaning. I’ve never experienced a longing for a particular time in the way that I do now - I honestly wish I could snap my fingers and take us back so we could do things a little differently. But I know that’s not possible, and we’re not going to get through and beyond the moment that we’re going through now by wishing the years away.
That said it’s nice to live back in simpler times for an hour or so while a record plays, and it was with that in mind that I put on Odelay - a record that I’ve not listened to in years. It was released on June 18th 1996 - a day that weirdly I know exactly what I was doing on, as it was the same day that England beat the Netherlands 4-1 in Euro ’96. When I unearthed this fact something didn’t sit right as I was fairly sure the game wasn’t on a Friday. I then remembered that the Friday release day is a relatively modern phenomenon and Mondays were the norm until just over a decade ago. In those times it was commonplace to have your favourite band release an album but not be able to listen to it until Saturday when you could get to a record shop. This added layer of friction is in stark contrast to today and it makes me wonder how long it was before I actually heard the record beyond first single Where It’s At. Being limited to as long as you could muster on a listening booth, plus whatever radio play you might have heard before committing your £12 to buying a CD did make you stick with records more - the illusion of infinite choice isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
My guess is that I picked this up over that post A-Levels summer, and consequently this album was the soundtrack to my year at sixth form college (my A-Levels didn’t quite go to plan). Listening back I was surprised at how much of it I didn’t really remember that well, but the spirit of it was etched in my mind perfectly. It’s a free-wheeling, open-genre blast of an LP - I’d forgotten that it was produced by The Dust Brothers and it shares a lot in common with another of their records - The Beastie Boys’ sophomore effort Paul’s Boutique. Like the Beasties, Beck had risen to fame very rapidly and after the unexpected success of Loser was keen to prove that he had more to him musically than his best known track would lead the public to believe. Also in common with the Beasties, Beck was part of the first generation of artists who grew up with hip hop, and more specifically sampling as something as normal and familiar as picking up a guitar and strumming a few chords.
Reeling through noise rock, hip hop, melodic folk and country-tinged blues it certainly achieved what Beck wanted it to and set him on a path to be able to do pretty much what he wanted in the intervening decades. I saw him perform in 2000 at Leeds Festival and it was a riot - at one point he was holding airplane landing lights and climbing the stage rigging whilst his band re-emerged for their encore dressed in cricket pads and trailing surgical drips behind them.
It’s a great album by any reckoning, but for me it has the added effect of stripping away the years to a time in my life that was filled with magic. If I close my eyes I’m back in my first car, driving through sun-bleached country roads, a life of endless summers ahead of me. It sounds like possibility and hope. And we could all use a bit of that right now.
The Monday Long Player is a weekly newsletter from me, Aly Gillani aka Gilla. I’m a radio host, DJ, A&R and writer. I run First Word Records and am the Artist and Label Outreach Lead at Bandcamp. You can listen to my latest radio show on Rinse FM just here, check out my fortnightly Bandcamp Selects show here and buy my zine The Long Player just here. Subscribe to get a weekly write up of a record I’ve been listening to this week as well as news from my musical world.