Cyanide Breath Mint

Beck’s single and video for “Loser” had a seismic and immediate impact on the culture, but it didn’t hit everyone the same way. For a lot of music critics I was reading at the time, the impact was a mile-wide and an inch deep. Beck was a one-hit wonder; a meme. A signifier of slacker culture whose laconic, absurdist imagery could now be redeployed in funny ads aimed at Gen X. In some respects, this was accurate. This was RUN-DMC and Aerosmith again. Beck’s monster hit seemed to repackage Beastie Boys rap with classic rock tropes, mashing together thrift-store hipster nonsense in the verses with a monster chorus that sounded like a Rodney Dangerfield / Weird Al cowrite. The song was massive and influential. But disposable.

And because Beck’s success was so sudden and silly, there was a swift and mean-spirited Beck-lash. After Kurt Cobain died, one critic mused that when he heard police were confirming a blonde musician in his 20s had committed suicide, he hoped it was Beck. He was the voice of a generation for slacker idiots, and it was a characterization he memorably rejected a 1994 cover story in Spin Magazine:

“I’ve always tried to get money to eat and pay my rent and shit, and it’s always been real hard for me,” he says, affecting a certain amount of B-boy swagger. “I’ve never had the money or time to slack.”

To people paying close attention, the dude writing dejected ballads about the string of low-paid jobs he’d endured in New York and LA couldn’t be a one-hit wonder. For one thing, “Loser” wasn’t even the best song on the album.

The best song on Mellow Gold was the gleeful amphetamine boogie, “Beercan.” Or the psychedelic raver “Fuckin’ With My Head”. Or the droning, dooming stoner dirge, “Steal My Body Home.” Or the whimsical, yet tender Father John Misty precursor, “Nitemare HIppy Girl.” Beck had too much to say to be limited to one hit. Indeed, in 1994 it felt like like there was a new Beck album or EP every time I went to the store. Me and my pals would go to CD Warehouse and there would magically appear a recently released Beck CD traded in by someone who was probably expecting another “Loser.”

Thanks to a unique feature of his major label deal with DGC records, Beck was permitted to put out independent records on his own schedule without regard to whether they might interfere with his Mellow Gold album cycle. These records were DIY affairs that were not going to make it to the Buzz Bin. Beck put out three albums in 1994, and the other two were full of four-track noise jams and lo-fi dustbowl folk songs.

His first album of 1994, Stereopathetic Soulmanure, is sometimes unlistenable and sometimes pastoral (see, e.g., “Rowboat” and “Modesto”), but it’s also where you’ll find one of his best early songs, “Satan Gave Me a Taco.” “One Foot in the Grave” was his third album of 1994, and it was my favorite of the three. It might be my favorite album of his, period (although some days it’s Sea Change and some days it’s* Midnite Vultures*).

Listening to One Foot in the Grave, the Beck who rejected the slacker label and who lived paycheck to meager paycheck comes into focus. Beck wasn’t trying to get on the radio with slick rap/rock confections. He was deconstructing depression-era protest songs using stream-of-conscious imagery reported from early 90s East LA. He was getting high, riding a lawn mower through a Hieronymus Bosch landscape of capitalist atrocities. The album was recorded, and in some cases cowritten, by K Records impresario and indie rock icon Calvin Johnson, with guest appearances by members of Built to Spill and Presidents of the United States of America (!!). It’s sparely and simply presented with a focus on the vocal arrangements and unadorned instruments. It includes at least three interpolations of old blues and gospel standards. The shoestring slide guitar, haphazard harmonica, and shoe-stomp percussion make it sound like it’s from another time. And that is the point.

Beck’s lyrics on the album (and much of his early work) are about skewering modern life and all the store-bought things and sideshow busywork that make it unbearable. My favorite song, “Cyanide Breath Mint,” is a dead-serious call to reject all the things we have to do to make ourselves safe and marketable. It’s a song for people born out of time; for whom the mid-90s was, “definitely…the wrong place to be.” On “Cyanide Breath Mint,” Beck is preaching resistance to corporate messaging and fever pitch consumerism, insisting “there’s nothing to tell you / there’s nothing to sell you.” Unbelievably, he also predicts our national horror of forever chemicals in a throwaway aside: “I got a funny feeling / they got plastic in the afterlife.”

I’m not sure which song has my favorite lyrics of all time. It’s either this song or Camper van Beethoven’s “All Her Favorite Fruit.” But I sing the ending verse of “Cyanide Breath Mint” to myself once a week at least. I don’t really pray, but sometimes think about this song, and whether I’m on right path. Whether any of us are. A great song can do that without even trying. But Beck was. Trying, I mean.

Fave lyrics:

When they want you to cry Leap into the sky When they suck your mind Like a pigeon you'll fly I know, I know It's the positive people Running from their time Looking for some feeling