Loser

Beck wrote Loser with Carl (Karl) Stephenson, and the two produced it with Tom Rothrock at Stephenson's home. Rothrock said it was largely finished in about six and a half hours, with two minor overdubs added months later. Beck said the chorus came from his feeling that he was a poor rapper, and he denied that it was a comment on Generation X slackers. He also called its success accidental but the result of something he had worked toward for a long time. The drums are sampled from Johnny Jenkins' I Walk on Guilded Splinters, and the dialogue comes from Steve Hanft's 1991 film Kill the Moonlight. Stephenson looped a short guitar part from one of Beck's songs on an 8-track, added a drum track and his own sitar, and Beck improvised lyrics over it, trying to rap like Chuck D. Beck has said the raps and vocals were first takes. The catalogue number of the Bong Load single is BL5.

It came out as a 12-inch on Bong Load on 8 March 1993 in 500 copies, was reissued by DGC in January 1994, and appeared on Mellow Gold. It reached number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 1 on Alternative Airplay, topped the chart in Norway, and reached 15 in the United Kingdom. Hanft's video cost $14,300 and premiered on MTV's 120 Minutes on 30 January 1994. Weird Al Yankovic wanted to parody it as Schmoozer, and Beck refused. It went gold in the United States with about 600,000 copies sold, and reached the top ten in Australia, Austria, Canada, Iceland, New Zealand and Sweden. Beck turned down a request to use it as the theme of the film Dumb and Dumber. Hanft had asked for a $300 budget and Geffen later paid $14,000 to process and finish the footage, which was shot across California including Arcata. The video was nominated for a Billboard Music Video Award in 1994. It topped the 1994 Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics' poll, and Rolling Stone placed it at 200 on its 2004 list of the 500 greatest songs. Pitchfork put it ninth on its list of the top 200 tracks of the 1990s, and The Guardian ranked it third among Beck's songs. Beck said in 2022 that he wished he had let Yankovic make the parody, and Yankovic later used part of the song in his Alternative Polka.

Live

Beck played it on KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic on 23 July 1993, his first worldwide live radio performance. Setlist.fm logs it 843 times.