So why is Beck’s One Foot in the Grave on this best 1,000 albums ever thing?
Why do I love this album so damned much?
It’s a question where the answer comes much easier for some albums versus others. For example, with Foo Fighters (#32 of best 1,000 albums ever) it was simple whereas with The Beatles’ Rubber Soul (#28), it was much harder. Both are clearly brilliant.
The answer with One Foot in the Grave comes down to the notion of Beck in “anti-folk” mode, a term I needed to spend some time untangling.
To take a step back, 1994 was a miraculous year of Beck album releases. Not only did Mellow Gold (#45) descend upon the Gen X masses thanks to the breakthrough hit of “Loser,” but we also got two additional releases: a huge palette of Beck modes in the fabulous Stereopathetic Soul Manure (#98), and the scruffy, lo-fi, and mostly acoustic One Foot in the Grave.
The latter was released on K Records, in collaboration with Calvin Johnson of Beat Happening. You can feel Johnson’s influence throughout the album, which is where “anti-folk” comes into play. Johnson founded K Records out of Olympia, Washington, a hotbed of counterculture art-commune energy, and a city a pre-Nirvana Kurt Cobain lived in for a spell.
Anti-folk is jangly, minimalist, quirky, homemade in feel, but with ultra-smart and serious intent. To bring it down a level: it’s weird but really freaking cool, like punk rock recorded in your bedroom at a volume that won’t wake up your parents.
It’s important to note too that by 1994, record companies and producers weren’t just exploiting “grunge music” in every way possible, they were exploiting grunge culture, which meant clothing (read = flannels as fashion, for example), merch, you name it.
The anti-folk movement was a turn away from all of that while maintaining a fiercely independent and DIY spirit. Beck is in his deepest anti-folk throes on One Foot in the Grave, but you can hear it channeled through his quieter efforts throughout his career.
I wasn’t necessarily even planning on talking about this specific song, but “Outcome” is as good a representative of the anti-folk as I can think of.
And an even quieter example is the gorgeous and as earnest as Beck ever gets “Girl Dreams.”
When I use terms like DIY and homemade, I’m reminded that I’ve had a lifelong fascination with the creative process, with getting a sense of the why and the when and the how of art being conjured from the first hint of an idea to something that exists outside of the artist’s mind, something that’s out in the world.
It’s why Stephen King’s On Writing is one of my favorite books, and it’s why I’ve fantasized throughout my life about having a time machine simply so that I could see The Doors at the Whiskey A Go Go in 1966 or the Ramones at CBGB’s in 1974.
So if Mellow Gold is Beck’s ironic genre-bending coming out party and Stereopathetic Soul Manure his basement tapes treasure chest, One Foot in the Grave is Beck’s origin myth explained, his stripped-down anti-folk ethos unfurled, and with Calvin Johnson’s help crystallized into a lo-fi masterpiece.
But unlike Beck albums like Sea Change (#259) or Mutations (#217) where he more or less sticks to the same mode or genre throughout the album, we also get the fuzzed-up weirdo punk of “Burnt Orange Peel,” which happens to be one of my favorite songs of all time. Note though here that even though the amps get turned up, the guitars remain acoustic and the entire vibe remains lo-fi, tactile, rough-cut by design.
I’ve used “Outcome” and “Girl Dreams” versus “Burnt Orange Peel” to frame up the boundaries of the album, and it’s possible to use the same frame as taking the yearning and blissful acoustic grunge of “Asshole” and “Cyanide Breath Mint” against “Atmospheric Conditions – the latter featuring both Johnson and Beck – which might well be the best and weirdest song that hardly anyone has ever heard.
I’ll add that “Cyanide Breath Mint” could have easily stood in as the best quieter track on either Mellow Gold or Mutations.
And then “Sleeping Bag” shows off wonderful hints of alt country, yet another color on Beck’s palette that he’d later dial up for very different (and super fun) use on Odelay (#24).
I’ll end on “Piss on the Door.” It only appears on the “deluxe reissue” of One Foot in the Grave, but it’s both a bizarro, sizzling gem and an incredible example of all of the Beck modes I talk about above packaged in a single two-minute track.
The lyrics on this one are an “origin myth exposed” time capsule of its own – Beck as prankster, word collage artist, anti-folk iconoclast, deeply original:
Everything’s ugly, kissing my honey
Pickles and pie, can’t wait to die
Reach up around, sick as a town
Donuts and tea, don’t talk to me
Self-right chicken, Mojo Nixon
Thick as a stick and burning crap
Not to mention: funny! Funny always lands in my book.
It sounds like Beck is having the time of his life with this one, and it never fails to make me happy.
I mean, the song title alone, right?
Writing this piece helped me to figure out why I love One Foot in the Grave so much: it’s Beck’s origin myth, his anti-folk manifesto, but it also manages to pull in his scarily wide array of influences and oddball inclinations into one coherent musical statement.
That’s one piss on the door that I can get with.
Some stats & info about Beck – One Foot in the Grave
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? Alternative Pop, Rock Music, Indie Rock, Lo-Fi
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – not ranked!
- All Music’s rating – 4 out of 5 stars
- When was One Foot in the Grave released? 1994
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #18 out of 1,000
Beck’s One Foot in the Grave on Spotify
A lyrical snippet from Beck’s One Foot in the Grave that’s evocative of the album in some way, maybe
I got time on my hands.
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective review of what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.