I was always into the Delta blues and playing slide guitar, and I had always heard that Delta-blues rhythm in hip-hop. When he played it back, I thought, ‘Man, I’m the worst rapper in the world – I’m just a loser.’ So I started singing, ‘I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me.’ I’m always kinda putting myself down like that.īeck explained the genesis of the music for the song: I started writing these lyrics to the verse part. He put a drum track to it and it was, you know, the ‘Loser’ riff. Then I started playing this slide guitar part and he started taping it.
I said, 'Oh yeah, well sometimes I rap between songs and get people from the audience to do the beat-box thing into the mike.’ So we went to this guy’s house and I played him a few of my folk songs. Tom had called up and said, ‘Hey, I know this guy who does hip-hop beats and stuff. Many people saw the chorus as a parody of slacker culture.
It not only launched Beck’s career into the mainstream but remains one of his signature songs, with Rolling Stone naming it one of the greatest songs of all time in 2011. Overseas it was a top 20 hit in several countries including hitting #1 in Norway. It also spent 5 weeks at #1 on the Modern Rock chart. Geffen’s reissue of “Loser” became Beck’s breakout hit, reaching #10 on the US pop chart and becoming a Gold-certified single. It quickly became popular on college radio and some alternative stations, and Geffen Records took interest in him. Originally recorded in 1991 as a “fluke that I’d done messing around at a guy’s house”, it was not released until 1993 as a limited pressing of 500 copies on the independent label Bong Load. Beck, however, has said that the rap began merely as an improvised poem recorded in his kitchen as a filler track. But some feel he juxtaposes imagery of poverty with pop culture imagery, characterized by glamour and excess.
The verses of Beck’s breakout hit seem to be mainly a stream of consciousness consisting of nonsense while announcing to the world he’s just a slacker.
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