A Winning Beck Opens ‘Odelay’ Tour

Beck is the slight, boyish, clueless-looking kid from Los Angeles who arrived in 1993 with “Loser,” a hit whose refrain--”I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me?”--was taken as the epitome of slacker-generation aimlessness.

Now he is purposefully firing heavy ammo at the walls of stylistic segregation and deliberate audience fragmentation that have defined the marketing of pop music for more than 20 years.

One hesitates to anoint a sweet-natured goofball like Beck as a revolutionary--revolutions generally take a lot of inner steel. But maybe musical revolutions are best carried out in the playful spirit that marked his performance on Thursday at the Galaxy Theatre in Santa Ana, the inaugural show of the tour for his new album-of-the-year candidate, “Odelay.”

Playful, yes, but not scattered, like past shows when he engaged in kid-in-a-sandbox self-amusement, or zig-zagged between his various guises as rapper, acoustic folkie and alterna-rock noisemaker, unable to hammer his disparate materials into a coherent shape.

That problem is solved, judging from this focused, well-conceived and perfectly paced 80-minute performance, which exuded intensity without sacrificing Beck’s goofiness.

With the aid of his flexible, four-piece band, Beck was able to do justice to the density and diversity of his “Odelay” material, which established canny, historically conscious and sonically enticing linkages between rap, blues, country-rock and traditional R&B;, along with acoustic folk and bursts of hammering alternative rock.