1995

Lacquer Cut By - Bernard Grundman

Rolling Stone: "Like the Beasties, Beck is among the few white-boy hip-hop wanna-be's with a clue. He truly understands the tenuous thread that connects funk to punk, hip-hop to art rock, and jazz to country blues, and is able to cram his encyclopedic knowledge of 20th-century musical styles into three- and four-minute nuggets of pure pop. But as "Loser" made clear, Beck's avant-garde, mix-and-mingle approach is not just an intellectual exercise. When he chants, "I got two turntables and a microphone, " over a funky keyboard line and a midtempo drum track on Odelay's "Where It's At, " he does so with such giddy enthusiasm you can practically see him rifling through his electro-funk collection for the perfect Afrika Bambaataa groove. It's nothing short of the sort of passionate fandom that emanates from Keith Richards' country- and blues-inspired guitar licks on Exile on Main St. or from Bob Dylan's Jack Kerouac-by-way-of-Woody Guthrie crooning on Highway 61 Revisited.