The Olympia, Wash., trio Beat Happening were a band often labelled "twee" or "love rock" because of their stripped-down instrumentation and childlike art direction and song titles, but their music had a darker cast. I remember seeing them perform at Wetlands in New York City in the 1990s, and how unnerving it was when bandleader and K Records cofounder Calvin Johnson made eye contact with the crowd and held you in his gaze while he rubbed his belly and sang in his deep baritone. Johnson's presence carried weight. Beat Happening toured with Fugazi and were covered by Seaweed. Kurt Cobain gave himself a stick-and-poke tattoo of the logo for K Records. There was an edge to this music, and it’s still there.
Beat Happening's lyrics, which included images of hand-holding and hot chocolate, scan as innocent, but the guy in "Hot Chocolate Boy" got his name because he’s "deep sweet and bitter," watching TV alone and wishing he had a girlfriend. The songs are populated with zombies, witches, blood sucking. Even on their most famous song, "Indian Summer", with its idyllic sense of longing, they are eating their breakfast of apples and cherry blossoms in a cemetery.
History is never complete, which is why compilations like Look Around are helpful. Easy downloads and streaming can definitely bring into question the need for compilations—why buy a collection of previously released songs when you can find most of them online? But what you’re paying for—or at least scanning the track list for—is the curation. The 23-song Look Around is perfect in that regard. There will always be favorites missing—it’s the nature of compilations—but there are no major oversights or head-scratching inclusions here. It’s a great primer for new Beat Happening fans, and as it turns out, an excellent reminder for those of us who’d kind of forgotten about them. The songs are presented in chronological order, so it feels like a distilled time capsule, and it offers a chance to watch patterns emerge and themes continue in time-lapse.
It’s not the first compilation to focus on the band. There was the now out-of-print 7xCD Crashing Through box set contained all their albums, plus some rarities. The 15-song Music to Climb the Apple Tree By, which focused on just B-sides, felt a bit thin. Here we get a taste of each era. The selections are pretty evenly distributed, with a few songs from 1985’s self-titled debut (the one with the cartoon cat driving a rocket ship on the cover), 1988’s Jamboree (featuring a drawing of a heart-shaped strawberry), 1989’s Black Candy (a simple drawing of black candy), 1991’s Dreamy (the only album featuring the band on the cover), and 1992’s You Turn Me On (which featured a tasteful artistic nude). They’ve also appended 2000’s "Angel Gone", from a single produced by Phil Elverum (the B-side, "Zombie Limbo Time", appeared on Music to Climb the Apple Tree By). These songs still sound fresh. Maybe because the arrangements are so basic and stripped down, without any overzealous studio tricks or instrumentation that ties it to a particular year, they feel timeless. Or, more accurately, out of time. I think the emotion is important, too, because these lyrics focus on simple human situations most of us have probably experienced.
For a lot of people, 1991’s International Pop Underground Convention in Olympia, a six-day festival organized by Johnson and his K co-founder Candace Pedersen that featured performances from Fugazi, Bikini Kill, Built to Spill, Unwound, L7, Bratmobile, Mecca Normal, and others, made more sense, and had more of a mythology to it, than Nevermind, which first hit later that same year. Beat Happening and their cohorts represented a part of the Pacific Northwest scene that was less interested in playing bigger venues or making it on MTV.
And this still matters now, in part, because 30 years after the release of their debut, there’s a lot of music that hearkens to the band and the K scene they helped spearhead. You can hear them in Girlpool, Frankie Cosmos, Quarterbacks, and in other bands who release a couple of songs and then disappear. You’ll hear them name-dropped in interviews by artists like Carrie Brownstein. This collection contains many of their best and most memorable songs, but their real legacy is found in basement venues and DIY spaces and groups just learning how to play but not being afraid to do so in public.
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