JANUARY 18, 1994
Here's what really happened when MTV played Beck's "Loser" for the first time, in 1994: The culture inverted itself, weirdness was instantaneously mainstreamed, everyone stopped combing their hair, people slept more and purchased broken turntables at stoop sales, dirtbags began using the word art in casual conversation, Michael Cera entered kindergarten.
Here's what nobody said when MTV played "Loser" for the first time: "Well, I guess this is what we're doing now." Here's what everybody realized when MTV played "Loser" for the first time: Well, I guess this is what we're doing now.
When a collective history of the 1990s is written (or, more likely, tweeted) in some distant future, all of the pop historians will mention the impact of "Smells Like Teen Spirit." That song will become the linchpin for whatever supposedly happened in that chasm between Gordon Gekko and Mohamed Atta. Someday, filmmakers will use the opening riff of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" to signify the '90s in the same way we use "The Entertainer" as shorthand for the '20s.
In a hundred years, it might be the only song from the '90s the average American will recognize; the title and the artist will be lost, but its abstract sound will be emblematic of a bygone era. Its caricature grungeness will survive, and all those future humans who think about the not-so-distant past will care about that. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was overproduced and impenetrable, but its impact was organic and interpretative -- it was an unanticipated watershed whose meaning changed over time. And that makes it completely unlike "Loser," a song that galvanized how 1994 felt in a most unnatural way.
When you listen to "Loser" now (or, even better, if you watch the video), it seems like an engaging, strange song. Not a truly strange song, but a conventionally strange song. The lyrics are faux-Dylan surreal, the music is primitive, and the hook is immediate. The images from the video are like a 16-millimeter art-school project: stock cars from the '60s, a musician dragging a casket to nowhere, unsexy cheerleaders, a super-rad Rastaman getting high. The experience of watching this in 2010 is like watching Slacker on VHS -- the aesthetic has now been duplicated so often it's impossible to remember how different it once seemed.
