Editing Beck (section)

===Early performances and first releases (1988–1993)===
Beck began as a [[Folk music|folk]] musician, switching between [[country blues]], [[Delta blues]], and more traditional rural folk music in his teenage years.<ref name=q97>{{cite news| last=Cavanagh| first=David| title=The Devil Inside |work=[[Q magazine|Q]]| date=July 1997| pages =92–99| publisher =[[Bauer Media Group]]| location =London }}</ref> He began performing on city buses, often covering Mississippi John Hurt alongside original, sometimes improvisational compositions.<ref name="rs94"/> "I'd get on the bus and start playing Mississippi John Hurt with totally improvised lyrics. Some drunk would start yelling at me, calling me [[Axl Rose]]. So I'd start singing about Axl Rose and the levee and bus passes and strychnine, mixing the whole thing up", he later recalled.<ref name="rs94"/> He was also in a band called Youthless that hosted [[Dada]]ist-inspired freeform events at city coffee shops.<ref name="q97"/> "We had [[Radio Shack]] mics and this homemade speaker and we'd draft people in the audience to recite comic books or do a [[beatbox]] thing, or we'd tie the whole audience up in masking tape," Beck recalled.<ref name="q97"/>

In 1989, Beck caught a bus to New York City with little more than $8.00 and a guitar.<ref name="rs94"/> He spent the summer attempting to find a job and a place to live with little success.<ref name="rs94"/> Beck eventually began to frequent [[Manhattan]]'s [[Lower East Side]] and stumbled upon the tail end of the [[East Village, Manhattan|East Village]]'s [[anti-folk]] scene's first wave.<ref name="rsencyclopedia"/> Beck became involved in a loose posse of acoustic musicians—including [[Cindy Lee Berryhill]], [[Kirk Kelly]], [[Paleface (musician)|Paleface]], and [[Lach (musician)|Lach]] headed by [[Roger Manning]]—whose raggedness and eccentricity placed them well outside the acoustic mainstream.<ref name="lat94"/><ref name="gp94"/> "The whole mission was to destroy all the clichés and make up some new ones," said Beck of his New York years. "Everybody knew each other. You could go up onstage and say anything, and you wouldn't feel weird or feel any pressure."<ref name="gp94"/> Inspired by that freedom and by the local spoken-word performers, Beck began to write free-associative, [[surrealism|surrealistic]] songs about pizza, [[MTV]], and working at [[McDonald's]], turning mundane thoughts into songs.<ref name=gp94>{{cite news| last=Rotondi| first=James| title=Beck & Roger Manning: "Set Your Guitars and Banjos on Fire" |work=[[Guitar Player]]| date=September 1994|volume=28| issue =9| pages =113–116| publisher =[[New Bay Media]]| location =[[San Bruno, California|San Bruno]] | issn = 0017-5463}}</ref> Beck was roommates with [[Paleface (musician)|Paleface]], sleeping on his couch and attending open mic nights together.<ref>Leibovitz, Annie. ''American Music''. New York: Random House, 264 pp. First edition, 2003. {{ISBN|978-0-375-50507-2}}.</ref> Daunted by the prospect of another homeless New York winter, Beck returned to his home of Los Angeles in early 1991.<ref name="lat94"/><ref>Palacios, Julian. ''Beck: Beautiful Monstrosity'', p.67. Boxtree, 2000. {{ISBN|978-0-7522-7143-9}}.</ref> "I was tired of being cold, tired of getting beat up," he later remarked. "It was hard to be in New York with no money, no place ... I kinda used up all the friends I had. Everyone on the scene got sick of me."<ref name="rs94"/>

Back in Los Angeles, Beck began to work at a [[Video rental shop|video store]] in the [[Silver Lake, Los Angeles|Silver Lake]] neighborhood, "doing things like alphabetizing the pornography section".<ref name="rs94"/> He began performing in arthouse clubs and coffeehouses such as Al's Bar and [[Raji's]].<ref name="rsencyclopedia"/><ref name="rs94"/><ref name="lat94"/> In order to keep indifferent audiences engaged in his music, Beck would play in a spontaneous, joking manner.<ref>Palacios 2000, p. 71</ref> "I'd be banging away on a [[Son House]] tune and the whole audience would be talking. So maybe out of desperation or boredom, or the audience's boredom, I'd make up these ridiculous songs just to see if people were listening," he later remarked.<ref name=ew97>{{Cite magazine| last=Browne| first=David| author-link=David Browne (journalist)| title=Beck in the High Life| magazine=[[Entertainment Weekly]]| issue =366| pages =32–35| date=February 14, 1997| publisher =[[Time Inc.]]| location =New York City | issn = 1049-0434}}</ref> Virtually an unknown to the public and an enigma to those who met him, Beck would hop onstage between acts in local clubs and play "strange folk songs", accompanied by "what could best be described as [[performance art]]" while sometimes wearing a ''[[Star Wars]]'' [[Stormtrooper (Star Wars)|stormtrooper]] mask.<ref name=lat94>{{cite news| url=https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-02-20-ca-25047-story.html| title=Don't Get Bitter on Us, Beck| work=[[Los Angeles Times]]| date=February 20, 1994| access-date=July 11, 2013| author=Hochman, Steve| location=Los Angeles| issn=0458-3035| archive-date=October 29, 2013| archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131029200830/http://articles.latimes.com/1994-02-20/entertainment/ca-25047_1_folk-songs| url-status=live}}</ref> Beck met someone who offered to help record [[Demo (music)|demos]] in his living room, and he began to pass [[Compact Cassette|cassette tapes]] around.<ref name="lat94"/>

Eventually, Beck gained key boosters in Margaret Mittleman, the West Coast's director of talent acquisitions for [[BMG Music Publishing]], and the partners behind [[independent record label]] [[Bong Load Custom Records]]: [[Tom Rothrock]], [[Rob Schnapf]], and Brad Lambert.<ref name="rsencyclopedia"/> Schnapf saw Beck perform at Jabberjaw and felt he would suit their small venture.<ref name="lat94"/> Beck expressed a loose interest in [[hip hop]] and Rothrock introduced him to Carl Stephenson, a record producer for [[Rap-A-Lot Records]].<ref name="lat94"/><ref>Palacios 2000, p. 72</ref> In 1992, Beck visited Stephenson's home to collaborate with him. The result—the [[slide guitar|slide]]-[[sampling (music)|sampling]] hip hop track "[[Loser (Beck song)|Loser]]"—was a one-off experiment that Beck set aside, going back to his folk songs, making his home tapes such as ''[[Golden Feelings]]'', and releasing several independent singles.<ref name="lat94"/>