1 LP

“Acid casualty with a repossessed car,” croaks Beck Hansen. “Vietnam vet playin’ air guitar…”Odelaywould later herald Beck as pre-Millennial jester without compare, but 1993’sMellow Goldfinds Beck slumming in The City of Angels, working in a video store for four dollars an hour.

Quite rightly, he’s got the blues, but there’s plenty more besides.Mellow Goldis a grimy Polaroid of fried white-trash invention. Reconciling the painfully fashionable grunge aesthetic with the drunken verbiage of the Beat Generation,Mellow Goldfounded the slacker generation, and “Loser”–the opening track–became its unofficial anthem.

A concept album of sorts,Mellow Goldnarrated the backdrop of Los Angeles as seen from the bottom of the dustbin, framed with the impoverished strains of fractured, missing-stringed folk and ramshackle white-boy hip-hop. Time would prove, though, that Beck was no slacker;Mellow Goldprovided the scrawled blueprint for Beck’s next major label album,Odelaywhich would prove one of the defining albums of the 1990s. —Louis Pattison