*The following segment is from "Beck - Dumpster-Divin' Man" - an MTV Music Feature Story by Sue Cummings*

Orale is a Mexican-Spanish colloquialism. Use it to express agreement, encouragement, or as a greeting.

"I don't know how it got started," Beck says about the word he twisted into Odelay for the title of his new album, a misspelling that mimics an English speaker's clumsy tongue. In Beck's hometown of Los Angeles, where Spanish is the second language of choice, every white band attuned to the sound of the atmosphere, from Juana's Addici�n to Bufadora, has a little bad Spanish rattling around in their brains. "It's Chicano slang," he explains. "Just growing up, I heard it."

"It's more of a feeling," Beck gestures. "It's not really translatable. Odelay. The feeling is, everything's alright. It's sort of exclamatory, saying everything's good--smooth, maybe? It's an all-purpose word. It's good to have all-purpose words."

Striking a note of exasperation on the album's title track, Odelay's all-purpose meaning comes closer to "whatever":

� April 2000 [email protected]