Paste interviews Beck: “I hear a lot of bad TV commercials that try to sound like ‘Where It’s At.’ That pretty much turned me off from using the electric piano for a lot of years.”

“It’s pretty much impossible to clear samples now. We had to stay away from samples as much as possible. The ones that we did use were just absolutely integral to the feeling or rhythm of the song. But, back then, it was basically me writing chord changes and melodies and stuff, and then endless records being scratched and little sounds coming off the turntable. Now it’s prohibitively difficult and expensive to justify your one weird little horn blare that happens for half of a second one time in a song and makes you give away 70 percent of the song and $50,000,” he laughs. “That’s where sampling has gone, and that’s why hip-hop sounds the way it does now.”