Steely Dan: "Steely Dan's name has been popping up as a hip musical crush. Remember, this glossy bop-pop was the indifferent aristocracy to punk rock's stone-throwing in the late 70's. People fought

"got to be funky" is a Lee Dorsey reference

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e8t908XhVI

objectively the best

oh yeah, right. The Bormann girl is got to have soul. My bad.

xxpost not a JB/"Make It Funky" reference?

Make it Funky is post-Lee Dorsey. also the full lyric in the dorsey song is "every single thing I do gonh be funky FROM NOW ON" which matches up to Fagen's "from now on, everything Donald does has got to be funky"

c'mon guys

listening to morph the cat right now and this is a goddamn chorus:

Its kind of like an arctic mindbath
Cool and sweet and slightly rough
Liquid light on New York City
Like Christmas without the chintzy stuff

I just couldn't penetrate the carapace of the expert Luv 94 love jazz, and Fagen himself doesn't do much to make those (good) lyrics signify.

i liked morph well enough.

Get off the stage, son
Unless you're ready for a kickfight!

'H Gang' was huge for me when it came out. Always look forward to new Donald music.

@steelydanlyrics is over 400 followers on twitter

When Black Friday comes
I'm gonna stake my claim
I'll guess I'll change my name

I didn't even know he'd made an album after Kamakiriad. Sounds like I didn't miss much.

I think Bourdain and Marc Maron talked shit about the Dan on WTF. i almost had to stop listening to that podcast

i like both these dudes but every time either one talks about music i'm all *sigh*

I added Kamakiriad and Morph the Cat to my spotify list. Don't think I've heard Kamakiriad since it came out, but I recall liking it well enough. Haven't ever heard Morph the Cat.

How are the two post-reunion Steely Dan studio albums?

I'm not at all fan of TAN but fellow skeptics were persuaded by EMG.

last 2 albums are not great but "Jack of Speed" and "Pixeleen" are in my personal pantheon of classic SD tracks

feels silly to get hyped about a tribute band, especially since i saw the real thing live last year, but apparently one of the guys from Crack The Sky has a 10-piece SD cover band called Technicolor Motor Home that plays around Baltimore, kinda really wanna check them out

I just got EMG. It's good! Looser than TAN. Those two are keepers, as are "Slang of Ages," the title track, and "Godwhacker."

"GodWhacker" was fun at the show i saw last summer

https://twitter.com/iamrashidajones/status/242784475107454977/photo/1

Rob lowe's version would be "hey fifteen"

hey-ooooo

too soon?

http://www.dostandupcomedy.com/images/male.jpg?1287959172

too soon?

― omar little, Wednesday, September 5, 2012 8:18 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

if there's grass on the field

new song is awesome

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/song-premiere-donald-fagen-im-not-the-same-without-you-20120917

ha – I just revived a Fagen thread

good plan, i was just trying to remember where we were discussing morph the cat recently

Day Glow Freaks is a collection of 12 original songs created entirely from the sampled works of Steely Dan. This homage, built from hundreds of samples of the band’s 82 studio tracks, is the result of a yearlong personal endeavor and is an expression of gratitude for a career of captivating music.

In May 2012, two additional songs from the Day Glow Freaks sessions were shared. The pair, called Low Rent Friends, can be download for free here.

http://www.gabeisthedevil.com/

this is pretty awful.

i was feeling it for the first track up to a point where i realized it was the same thing over and over again and it has zero steely dan funk.

it sounds like something from '99.

Frankenstein house

Cex's album of SD samples Dannibal is pretty awesome imo: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Cex/Dannibal/

http://www.npr.org/blogs/allsongs/2013/01/29/170552631/why-ive-never-liked-fleetwood-macs-rumours

That should be cross-posted to the worst music writing thread.

I'm dubious of American writers who play up the firm 1977=punk angle. If it took him until 1977 to find an alternative to MOR rock, especially working at a record store, it's entirely his fault. What he's really doing is complaining in retrospect about hearing that album too much at the time, which is a different argument. People coming up to him in his '20s who did not live through that album's ubiquity are hearing it with fresh ears, which is why they love it. Because "Rumours" rules. It rocks, too. Only people who have heard it too much would confuse a band this tense for easy listening.

but isn't that what he says in the last paragraphs?

that his 77 experience was colored by a bunch of things (overexposure, interest in punk, etc.) while kids today don't have that baggage (also, compared to music today the Mac sound like Pavement)

why is this on the Steely Dan thread btw?

No writer should ever take the "kids today ..." approach.

xgau:

As you've probably gathered already, what they think is Sex Pistols. As you probably haven't guessed, this both surprised and disappointed me. I was rooting for Fleetwood Mac. For one thing, as you can ascertain by perusing my personal top 30 below, I think Rumours is a (slightly) better record than Never Mind the Bollocks. But I also think it's remarkable historically. As 1978 began, it had been number one in Record World for 32 weeks and seemed quite certain to become the best-selling album of all time, passing not only Frampton Comes Alive!, the Rumours of 1976, but all-time biggies like Bridge Over Troubled Water and Tapestry. More remarkable, Rumours is honest, courageous, even formula-defying music--so much so that when Greil Marcus reviewed it here he predicted that its toughness and passion would cost it millions of customers craving the sweetness of the group's breakthrough LP, Fleetwood Mac.

I've never heard "Frampton Comes Alive!" or "Tapestry," but I have my doubts they're anywhere near as good as "Rumours."

Xgau:

Frampton Comes Alive! [A&M, 1976]
All right, Peter, you've made your point--tour enough and smile enough and the tunes sink in. I'll rate your fucking album--it's been in the top five all year. Now will you please leave? B-

Tapestry is pretty damned good.

Still not clear what the Steely Dan connection is....

Alive! isn't awful, but live Frampton is best heard on Humble Pie's Performance: Rockin' the Fillmore.

i just got angry at this review all over again

Here's a question for y'all: Who's the current (new) Becker & Fagen? I'm thinking it might be folks like Rufus Wainwright; that's the first name that comes to mind, anyway, someone who's not afraid of being slick but isn't JUST slick, has plenty else going on underneath that glossy surface. But I'm not being exact, I'm just coming off the cuff. Any others? Any at all?
― Matos W.K. (M Matos), Friday, February 13, 2004 12:32 PM (9 years ago) Bookmark

who knew it would be DAFT PUNK

it is totally NOT daft punk