Loser

Loser was recorded in Beck Hansen's living room with a four-track and a slide guitar — built on a Dr. John sample and a lyric combining slacker nonsense with something that sounded like an actual cry for help. It became the defining song of a specific early-1990s sensibility: ironic, self-deprecating, technically amateurish in ways that turned out to be production choices.

The song's success was partly an accident — Beck was not trying to make a statement, just making a song. The "slacker" label that attached to it missed what was actually happening: a twenty-two-year-old with enormous range making the record he could with the resources he had.

Beck's subsequent career — from Odelay to Sea Change to Morning Phase — is one of American music's most consistent acts of reinvention.