Lyrics:

The Song:

This somewhat demented folk song, originally released in 1997 on the "Deadweight" single, is an outtake from Odelay. It was recorded with Mario C at the same 1995 Odelay sessions that produced "Minus." The Dust Brothers were not involved, but Joey Waronker was there. Not that Beck needed the help! He played the acoustic guitar, bass, piano, harmonica, and synthesizer on the song himself.

You may notice that "Diamond Bollocks" on 1998's Mutations and "Erase the Sun" share numerous lyrics. Why Beck went back to this song when putting "Diamond Bollocks" together is unknown. The lyrics are quite odd! He probably just reached into his notebook, found some he was attracted to, and pulled out them out again. Did he even realize they'd been recorded already? "Fisticuffs and zithers of Zanzibar / Body pills that shiver the caviar" may be one of Beck's weirdest lines. All the instrumentation, especially the heavy acoustic guitar, somewhat drowns out Beck's vocals, so perhaps he felt it was safe to reuse them.

Anyway, the song begins with a jolt, as Beck immediately starts singing. Beck's first verse seems to be sarcastic praise for someone: "Offices and fountains they named for you / Hari-kari's barely a tear for you." Beck throws a twist into the rhyming too, even though it would have rhymed with "hari-kari's barely," he sings "tear" as in "cry," not "tear" as in "rip." He follows that twist by returning to the original rhyme with "hairy fairies." He's got such a natural flow with words, here and always.

My favorite part of the song is the "doooo" bridge between all the verses and choruses. Then what follows is one of Beck's strangest choruses. "Wake up the ghosts and lepers / Aching in their slavery smoke" evokes a mysterious, haunting history. The song feels like a whirlwind of images and ideas, even if their focus is hazy. "Delinquent hygienes atrocious" is another Beck phrase of note, especially since he uses it again a few years later on "Static": "Delinquent hygienes are so abrasive." The next line, repeated twice, is the point of the song and is of course ambiguous: "We'll shoot out the great white crescent." Presumably, this is where the name of the song comes from, though a "great white crescent" would more normally be associated with the moon, not the sun.

Then when Beck released the Deluxe version of Odelay, he included a disc of b-sides from the time. He included "Erase The Sun," however it appears to have been a previously-unknown mix. As far as I can tell, it is the same track... just sped up slightly. This ends up making the song sound a bit less hazy, somehow a bit more normal (if at all possible to call this song "normal").