Video: Beck- Loser

I tend to think of the 1990s as one long afternoon in late summer. I have no explanation for why I feel this way, aside from the fact that many of my memories of the decade revolve around just such a time. And one of the best things about later summer afternoons in the 90s was watching MTV, because they played all sorts of videos back then--rap, alt rock, R&B, metal, punk, and sometimes even techno.

The 90s style of music video for the alt rock/indie crowd was usually to be as obtuse and strange as possible, while simultaneously having as little to do with the song as possible. With all of this in mind, I present to you the video for 'Loser', which opens with Beck in a blurred out Stormtrooper helmet, and only gets stranger and stranger from there.

My favorite parts of the video are Death cleaning blood off a windshield, girls doing aerobics in a graveyard through a polarized filter, and live footage of Beck cleaning off a stage with a leafblower.

This is the kind of stuff you'd typically see on those late summer 90s afternoons, and it made sense, somehow, even if you were a kid and knew nothing about absurdism, surrealism, and irony. Though Beck's subsequent videos are all "better" by any metric, this first bolt out of the blue simultaneously puts the lid on his first phase as a no-name anti-folk/junkyard singer/songwriter and points the way to his next phase as the superstar David Bowie-ish artist who tries on many hats, sometimes at the same time.