Modern Rock No. 1s: Beck and "Loser"

Beck Hanson oversees a seismic shift in the Billboard charts with "Loser," a song that inadvertently defined a generation by mixing folk stylings with a hip-hop beat and terrible rapping

Beck - “Loser”

Weeks atop the Billboard Modern Rock chart: 5 weeks (February 5 to March 5, 1994)

Previous Modern Rock #1 hit: Nirvana - “All Apologies”

Next Modern Rock #1 hit: Crash Test Dummies - “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm”

Billboard Hot 100 chart toppers during this time:

• Bryan Adams, Rod Stewart & Sting - “All For Love” (3 total weeks, 1/22/94 to 2/5/94)

• Celine Dion - “The Power Of Love” (4 total weeks, 2/12/94 to 3/5/94)

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All things change, including the Billboard charts. From the beginning, Billboard magazine managed to cobble together data from myriad sources to generate their industry-standard Hot 100 chart, a mainstay for tracking song sales and airplay since 1958. Many other genre charts have come and gone in the years since the Hot 100 launched, and for a good long time, the data Billboard compiled for those charts largely came from word-of-mouth and manual record keeping.

This was a system which based its numbers on sales data phoned in from record stores, and radio airplay, which was phoned in by radio stations and production managers. In other words, the charts were largely determined by a handful of individuals across the country, gatekeeping the sales and airplay of songs. For the time, the system worked, but as scanning technology became more ubiquitous in the late ‘80s into the ‘90s, Billboard leveraged that innovation to provide better accuracy in its charting.

Famously, in November 1991, Billboard shifted to Nielsen SoundScan, which accurately tracked record sales, and Nielsen Broadcast Data Systems (BDS), which accurately tracked each time a song was played on the radio. The ability to derive data from actual sales and actual airplay — rather than relying on individuals phoning in potentially inaccurate data — fundamentally changed the Hot 100 forever. Case in point: The Hot 100 #1 hit from Nov. 23, 1991, was “When A Man Loves A Woman” by Michael Bolton. On Nov. 30, 1991, when Billboard flipped the switch to include Nielsen data, the #1 hit became P.M. Dawn’s “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss,” a banger of a song, but completely different from what the expected #1 hit would be based on the “old” method.

Billboard didn’t completely convert all of its charts to this new technology at the same time; as more record stores and radio stations began to bring this system on board, the data started to trickle down into the other genre charts. For the Modern Rock Tracks chart, that conversion didn’t happen until Jan. 22, 1994, the chart we just referenced when Nirvana hit #1 for the third time with “All Apologies.”

I mention this now because we’ve reached a historic landmark in my chronological review of the history of the MRT chart. Before this, a handful of radio stations played a significant role in reporting their airplay lists to generate the chart. Being completely dependent on airplay data to determine a song’s placement on the chart meant these select few outlets drove the data for the first five years of the chart. Now, with the Nielsen BDS data providing accurate information on radio airplay trends and patterns, alternative rock for the first time was deriving its charts from more than just a handful of sources.

This long-winded explanation of the Billboard chart methodology serves as the last turning point away from what the Modern Rock Tracks chart was, and solidified what the chart would become from January 1994 onward. Prior to this, the chart was dominated by legacy acts from the U.K., Ireland, and Australia. From here on out, coupled with the now-exploding grunge movement, the shift toward U.S.- and Canada-based alternative rock groups would forever take over and shape the direction of the genre going forward.

Which leads us to Beck Hanson.

I don’t mean to suggest that Beck’s meteoric rise into the forefront of alternative rock wouldn’t have happened without the Nielsen BDS data. “Loser,” Beck’s first #1 Modern Rock Tracks hit, was on a steady climb to the top when the switch flipped on Jan. 22, 1994. That said, Beck’s trip to the top of the charts may well have been aided by a continued push by radio stations to cram in anything that fit the aesthetic of “grunge,” a purely U.S.-based movement. While I question that correlation, it’s pretty clear that Beck is something unique to American alternative rock that was not reflective of the type of music coming out in the U.K. or Australia.

Indeed, U.S.-based alternative rock at this time was becoming increasingly self-deprecating and poetic in its imagery underscoring that deprecation. Nirvana was all over this with their In Utero alt-rock chart toppers in the recent past, but even going back to 1992, Cracker was telling the world about how angsty we all were in the U.S. Beck managed to capture all of that energy and angst into a rollicking, nonsensical mish-mash of imagery and languages, and as a result, “Loser” became the unofficial anthem of Generation X. In one song, Beck captured the moment in a self-reflective, guitar-driven-yet-hip-hop-derived ditty that somehow captured the image of this generation as a group of aimless slackers aimlessly slacking about, raging against popular things but yet not quite mustering the energy to come up with something better.

So shave your face with some mace in the dark
Savin' all your food stamps and burnin' down the trailer park
Yo, cut it
Soy un perdedor
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me?

Interestingly, Beck didn’t view “Loser” through the lens of defining a generation’s culture. In an interview with Far Out magazine in 2022, Beck noted that the lyrics are exclusively about him — and his inability to rap.

Hanson went to the house of Rap-A-Lot Records producer Carl Stephenson to see if they could collaborate on a song. Stephenson didn’t know what to make of the material … (but he) liked one thing: a slide guitar riff that Hanson had. He paired it with a looped drum break, added some of his own samples, and presented it to Hanson. The singer was inspired, and decided to emulate Public Enemy’s Chuck D.

The results didn’t go well.

“When he played it back, I thought, ‘Man, I’m the worst rapper in the world, I’m just a loser,'” Hanson recalled in 2000. “So I started singing ‘I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me.'”

So for all the ink spilled on Beck and his transcendent take on the state of Generation X, it turns out he really just wanted to do folk-inspired rap. In retrospect, that’s pretty amusing.

Similarly amusing are the song’s lyrics, which range from cynical and sad to weird and absurd. The imagery that always stood out to me (and the part of the song I seem to take the most pleasure out of singing) is the breakdown of wood and wax affecting a common pest insect:

You can't write if you can't relate
Trade the cash for the beef for the body for the hate
And my time is a piece of wax falling on a termite
That's choking on the splinters

If you take a quick gander at the explanations people provide for what “Loser” is actually about on sites like Song Meanings, it can get pretty intense. Some folks will tell you that Beck is doing a folk-rap about troubled times in his life and how he views himself as various farm animals and monkeys. They’ll say Beck is the termite, and he’s choking on the wax of failed records that get melted away. Some will point to him railing against the signage on New York City streets telling him it’s OK to park somewhere, only to end up getting a ticket and being destitute, thus causing maggots to appear on your shirt. Or something.

At the end of the day, it’s just Beck being silly, and he actually took significant personal offense to his song reflecting on him as a loser. From the Far Out article:

“Slacker my ass. I never had any slack,” Hanson shot back during his 1995 Rolling Stone interview. “I was working a $4-an-hour job trying to stay alive. That slacker stuff is for people who have the time to be depressed about everything.” Hanson never intended to make a statement or define a generation. He was just singing nonsense and commenting on his own skills as a rapper.

And I almost hate to say it, given the cultural touchstone this song became for my generation and for the musical movement at the time, but “Loser” is not the best song, even though it topped the MRT chart for five weeks and peaked at #10 on the Hot 100. Beck is right: his rapping skills do leave a lot to be desired, especially given the rise of really great rappers during this same time period: Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Notorious B.I.G., Warren G, Nate Dogg, etc. In this particular song, Beck isn’t great at rapping, and he’s not great at creating folk rock, either.

The only thing maintaining this song’s omnipresence 30+ years later is its landmark status as an homage to a movement that began to solidify right as bands like Nirvana and Stone Temple Pilots hit their cultural apex. And that status is built on a misinterpretation, which feels on point when describing Gen X: constantly misinterpreted and misunderstood.

We’re going to talk about Beck again in this space, though it’s criminal that he won’t be a featured #1 artist during the release of the follow-up album to Mellow Gold — his sublime masterpiece Odelay — which further defined and redefined the direction of alternative music for the rest of the decade. “Loser” may not be, in my estimation, a song that deserves to be in constant rotation on ‘90s alternative rock stations, but it gave us Beck Hanson, and thanks in large part to the shift in the Billboard charts, the songs he inspired continue to drive the zeitgeist of alternative music to this day.

Just don’t shave your face with mace in the dark. You’re asking for trouble.

Rating: 5/10

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Chart Check

Other notable MRT chart songs from this time period

In today’s edition of “Chart Check,” we explore a couple of debut singles from bands who would have different trajectories through the ‘90s and beyond. In addition to superb tracks from Counting Crows and Possum Dixon, we get one of the last big hits from The Lemonheads and Cracker’s last top-10 attempt to get people off their butts to change the world.

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“Mr. Jones” by Counting Crows (#2):

I almost broke out a “Modern Rock Tracks … No. 2s” column for “Mr. Jones,” the first track off Counting Crows’ debut album August and Everything After. In the same stylistic vein as Gin Blossoms, Counting Crows emerged onto the U.S. alternative rock scene with a catchy, up-tempo pop-rock crossover, a song lead singer Adam Duritz said reflects the feelings he had about what it would be like to become a big rock star after watching his friend Marty Jones’ dad play songs at a bar in New Amsterdam. We’ll see Counting Crows in the top spot on Chart Chat in relatively short order, but “Mr. Jones” had to settle for a #2 peak behind Beck.

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“Get Off This” by Cracker (#6):

Cracker makes its last appearance in the top 10 of the Modern Rock Tracks chart with “Get Off This,” another song in the band’s continuing series on what they think people should be doing to make the world a better place. This has a catchy tempo and a wall-of-sound wah-wah guitar backdrop, and is overall not a terrible track, but not quite on the level of “Teen Angst” or “Low.” This one peaked at #6 behind “Loser.”

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“Watch The Girl Destroy Me” by Possum Dixon (#9):

I can’t for the life of me remember which Possum Dixon track we played as college radio disc jockeys in 1998, but the band name always stuck with me (probably because my DJ partner and lifelong friend “Apex” and I riffed on the band name similar to what Howard Stern did in the movie “Private Parts”). So I was surprised to see that they actually nabbed a top-10 hit on the MRT chart with “Watch The Girl Destroy Me.” And, credit where credit is due: This is a really good track! It peaked at #9 behind Beck, and would be the highwater mark for the band, which broke up in 1999.

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“The Great Big No” by The Lemonheads (#15):

The final single off Come on Feel the Lemonheads, “The Great Big No” is a decent track with the usual stylings that made former MRT chart #1 artist The Lemonheads popular. This track was underwhelming from a chart perspective, peaking at #15 behind Beck, but is still regarded as a solid deep cut. We’ll see them in this space one more time, but this song was the beginning of the end of the band’s presence near the top of the alt-rock scene.

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