Primer: Beck Part 1- Stereopathetic Soulmanure

Everyone has that one album or artist that really got them into music. Certainly even as kids we liked music, but it was an indiscriminate and child-ish form of liking something. But then--sometime in our adolescence--there's an experience we have where we realize there's more to this whole "music" thing than just thinking a song or music video is neat. For me, it was Beck, and the song was 'Tropicalia' from a TV commercial around the time of the release of Mutations. I had liked music before, sure; I even had bought a few CDs. But I had never heard anything like 'Tropicalia' before, and when I got the CD I figured out it was the guy who did that funny 'Loser' song years earlier, and so on. But my appreciation for Beck went much deeper than a simple "hey, I like this song, I should get the CD so I can listen to it." No, Beck was the first person I saw as an artist and not just a 'musician', and who's every album I had to have.

So I got them all, and learned the lesson that sometimes even your favorite artists can, have, and will release something that you don't like. Even back when I first heard Stereopathetic Soulmanure, I knew it was crap. As a young man my critical faculties weren't as--ahem--advanced as they are now, so something was either 'awesome' or 'stupid.' Well, Stereopathetic was stupid, and remains so. It was only a year or so ago that I revisited this album, wondering if my juvenile self had gone through a violent reaction. After all, it's always hard when your hero lets you down and produces something less than perfect...maybe I was brash and cast it down for being less than pefect. After all, if there's one thing Americans are good at it's tearing down a hero as easily as we build them up. But....no, Stereopathetic is, more or less, as underwhelming as I remember.

Though only released a week or so before Mellow Gold, the music that makes up Stereopathetic Soulmanure largely predates that album, the breakout 'Loser' single, and the contemporaneous One Foot In The Grave album. Actually, I've always been a bit confused as to the chronology of just when all this stuff was recorded, though ultimately it doesn't matter because 99% of the population didn't know anything about Stereopathetic or One Foot and only hardcore fans are likely to care even today, when Beck is a pseudo-celebrity. But I digress. Anyone coming to this album is going to come to it after having heard any of his other albums, just as I did. In fact, I didn't even know this album existed until I saw it circa 1998 at the store and wondered if it was a bootleg or a secret new album.

I may as well come out and say that Stereopathetic Soulmanure is unequivocally Beck's worst album, and even for an artist known for wild stylistic jumps and genre bending conceits, it's horribly disjointed and amateurishly indulgent. While one can forgive this kind of thing in an odds-and-ends compilation from an artist who has established his or her greatness, Stereopathetic is, unfortunately, the opposite case: an odds-and-ends slab from an artist who had yet to prove himself. Among its 25 (or 26, depending on the pressing you get) tracks and over an hour runtime, you get decent folk ('Rowboat', 'Puttin It Down'), silly nonsense ('Ozzy', the weird alien voice spokenword pieces), silly-but-kind-of-good songs ('Cut 1/2 Blues', 'Satan Gave Me a Taco'), god awful noise and noise rock ('Pink Noise', the interludes between some songs, 'Rollins Power Sauce', the hidden bonus track), bluesy hobo busking field recordings ('Waitin' For A Train', 'No Money No Honey', 'Aphid Manure Heist'), and, err, an accordion instrumental ('Jagermeister Pie').

And that's the main crux of it: a long winded mess of an album that doesn't cohere enough to really be called an album but isn't a compilation, either. To be fair, there is something undeniably charming in listening to this album, knowing Beck like we do now. One must also keep in mind that, at the time, it wasn't played out to write a song about Ozzy Osbourne or to pose for the liner art in front of an ice cream truck playing a banjo and wearing a Star Wars Stormtrooper helmet. This kind of absurdism, irony, and self-aware-winking-to-the-audience was relatively fresh. However, the main interest that anyone is likely to have in the album is as time capsule from a time before Beck Hansen was Beck The Rock Star.

I have to admit that in re-revisiting the album, my feelings have swayed back and forth between summing it up as "my least favorite Beck album, but not a bad album necessarily" and "a bad album who's sins I can forgive because I love Beck." But aren't those the same thing?? In the end, once you giggle at a few of the songs and extract the few decent ones for mixtapes or whatever, there simply isn't anything here you'll want to come back to. If this was from any other artist I would think it was a big joke on the listener; if I had heard this before any of Beck's other albums, I would have no reason to believe he was worth any more of my time.