Today is the 30th anniversary of Odelay, released June 18, 1996, and “Minus” is the track on it that owes the least to how that record usually gets described. Most of Odelay came out of Beck’s sessions with the Dust Brothers, the production team known for building songs out of samples the way they had for the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique. “Minus” is one of only a handful of songs on the album with no other credited writer. Beck wrote it alone, and the way it was recorded shows it.

The track came together away from the Dust Brothers’ sample collages entirely. Brian Paulson produced it, and Mario Caldato Jr., the engineer behind the Beastie Boys’ Check Your Head and Ill Communication, mixed it. Joey Waronker, who would go on to drum for R.E.M. and Atoms for Peace, plays drums, percussion, and chimes on the finished version. None of the sample-based machinery that defines “Where It’s At” or “Devils Haircut” shows up here. It is a band playing a song, fast and a little ragged, on a record mostly built out of loops.

“Minus” was a known quantity to anyone following Beck around in 1994 and 1995, long before Odelay existed as a finished record. He played it live as early as June 27 of that year, and kept performing it through Lollapalooza in the summer of 1995, changing the lyrics almost every time. Some early reviews of Odelay listed the song under the title “Minus (Karaoke Bloodperm),” a phrase that disappeared by the time the album shipped and has never been explained. A bootleg from a September 1994 show in Hawaii has Beck closing the song by shouting a line that never made the album at all, “it’s a graduation from their brains,” which is as close as any surviving version comes to a key for what the title means.

One reading of the song traces its first verse back to Fluxus, the experimental art movement Beck’s grandfather Al Hansen helped found in the early 1960s. Al Hansen built collage art out of trash and taught at art schools in Germany, and listeners have connected his work to lines like “the janitor vandals” and “garbage classes with the crutches of force.” Beck has spoken often about learning to make art under his grandfather’s guidance as a kid, and of the family’s musicians and artists, Al Hansen is the one Beck credits most.

The album around “Minus” went on to win the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album in 1997, with “Where It’s At” separately picking up Best Male Rock Vocal Performance. Odelay went gold within two months of release, platinum within seven, and double platinum by 1998. “Minus” was never released as a single and never got a video, but it stayed in Beck’s live sets for over twenty years, played close to 200 times through tours behind Midnite Vultures, Guero, and Modern Guilt, usually faster and rougher than the studio version ever was. Thirty years on, it remains the moment on Odelay where the whole carefully built collage threatens to come apart into noise, then doesn't.