The Alternative Number Ones: Beck’s “Loser”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

In the time of chimpanzees, he was a monkey. Or maybe we were the monkeys. Maybe the divisions between chimpanzee and monkey are made-up and meaningless, like the mega-publicized generation gaps in which entire swaths of the American population are depicted as apathetic schlubs who spend all day sitting around, watching '70s sitcom reruns with Cheeto dust all over their fingers. Maybe the phrase "in the time of chimpanzees, I was a monkey" is crucial for understanding the popular culture of the 1990s, or maybe decades are just an arbitrary way of measuring time telling us nothing of value. Maybe time is a piece of wax falling on a termite, and it's choking on a splinter. There are so many possibilities to consider. If you think about Beck's "Loser" too hard, you might break your brain.

The magic of Beck's "Loser" is that Beck never thought about "Loser" too hard. In many ways, "Loser" is the most influential song that's appeared in this column since "Smells Like Teen Spirit." In many ways, it's the antithesis of that song, even though Beck and Kurt Cobain had the same haircut. Today, "Loser" might as well be "Smells Like Teen Spirit," since both songs are so overplayed and historically significant that I'll never be able to properly enjoy either of them again, even though I loved them both when they popped up in radio rotation during my middle-school years. Cobain never had any inkling that "Teen Spirit" would be as huge as it was, but he was still trying to write a successful rock 'n' roll song. Beck was just fucking around in somebody's kitchen, and the success of "Loser" surprised him more than anyone.