Great changes in music happen in unexpected places: in bedrooms and barrooms, in front of thousands of fans, or in the presence of no one at all. The year Beck Hansen arrived on the scene, Kurt Cobain killed himself in Seattle and the Beastie Boys were throwing down their Ill Communication. Music, it was evident, was making radical changes. The world was ready for Beck, a singer/songwriter who fashioned himself as the voice of the slacker generation, an artist fusing folk and hip-hop with the glue of simper. For a while, you couldn't get away from "Loser," and the Mellow Gold release established Beck as a mouthpiece for a new movement.

"Total Soul Future" harks back to that crazy first year, when Beck was struggling to find his artistic center. Beck comes from a family of artists - his grandfather was a member of New York's Fluxus movement, and Mom ran a glam club in L.A. when he was little. His pedigree qualifies him as a kid who grew up with futurism in his blood. His folk-hop style, like Dylan's move to electric guitar in the 1960s, revitalized two previously disparate genres, short-circuiting listeners' (and other artists') expectations and liberating two contradictory sounds from eternal estrangement.