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

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

unabashed steely dan stan but it's hard to think of any analogue to becker and fagen

i'm sure i'm in the minority here but i kind of love this!!

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

looks like they covered the whole album

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KO0O_sCxQAo&list=PLAE8BBCDBAC026884

I have mixed feelings about those. The arrangements are pretty cool, but I'm not liking the singing. It's too somnambulant, doesn't have the same emotional intensity that Fagan brings, which is a weird thing to realize since I don't necessarily consider Don to be a particularly demonstrative singer.

unabashed steely dan stan but it's hard to think of any analogue to becker and fagen

― emo canon in twee major (BradNelson),

dan and ned?

all we need to do is hook them up with some hot shit session musicians

you couldn't really have a steely dan without the jazz chops/roots - one thing the 33.3 book is really good at demonstrating is that to have a couple of young dudes who were immersed in jazz but interested enough by rock to see what happened when you expressed the latter in terms more common to the former was partly attributable to a moment in history. that moment's gone. if there were going to be any new Becker and Fagan, I think it would at this point rise from hip-hop and intersect with some newer form/genre. but I also think that that's where jazz sort of helped there be such a thing as a Becker and Fagan - lyricists working with songwriters (rogers/hammerstein, rogers/hart, lerner & lowe though not jazz there) in a really collaborative way, songwriters whose chops were just ridiculous. you have relationships like that between producers and rappers maybe?? or you could?? so I can imagine there being a Becker/Fagan rap team but I don't really think there is one at the moment

When I think of someone young with jazz chops, who writes snarky pop songs, has a voice that is a bit of an acquired taste, and records with studio musician hired guns, the only person I can think of is Nellie McKay, but it's hard to imagine her in the same category as Becker/Fagen, since she lacks a certain cool reserve.

She's more like a contemporary Randy Newman perhaps.

you have relationships like that between producers and rappers maybe??

as noted on the rolling rap thread, unfortunately this practice is pretty much dead now in hip hop

ie rappers just getting data dump of beats from flavor-of-the-month producer, rapping over anything and everything provided, then on to the next one

Destroyer, clearly.

No. Being smart and canny and literate isn't the same as being Steely Dan. Bejar's whole journey-of-self-reference is a whole different (genre-bound, imo) exercise, imo

I am down w/that exercise for the most part but I don't think it compares

I've always thought of Malkmus as the unwilling heir to Fagen--the aloofness and detachment, cynicism, irony (right word?), snottiness in the early years, the love of collegiate/post-collegiate insider-y lingo and banter--though I'm sure Malkmus hates the Dan

I wouldn't be so sure about that

you couldn't come up with a more non-jazz-chops player than him tho. w/o going to, like, johnny ramone

altho I think lyrically/vocally yeah there's some connective lineage there, Malkmus has never had a decent writing partner nor surrounded himself with virtuoso musicians (it's pretty clear he wouldn't tolerate the former, and has no use for the latter, or at least didn't for a long time I haven't listened to anything he's done lately)

what makes you think Malkmus would hate the Dan

Malkmus' guitar chops are underrated! I dunno if I'd call them jazz chops, they're more like prog chops. but he did a lot to obscure how creative he is as a guitarist with his perpetual "I DON'T GIVE A SHIT WHY AM I EVEN HERE" live performances

xp

for a while outkast were the new steely dan

every generation gets the Steely Dan it deserves

it is totally NOT daft punk

It blows my mind that people think this Daft Punk album is at all Dan-y. Just because it is smooth and played with instruments?

bears and long hair, hoss

DP's mantra:

Throw out the software, let's do it right.

I think I've read quotes from SM dissin' the Dan but maybe he was just kidding around. The connection to Fagen I mentioned is all lyric/voice based but there's a teeny bit of jazz in the weird time signatures and sometimes off-kilter-ness (cf. Brighten the Corners name checking Monk's Brilliant Corners)

it's all in the artwork for mirror traffic.

Brighten the Corners name checking Monk's Brilliant Corners

I thought Brighten the Corners was a direct quote from some poet Malkmus was into (name escapes me at the moment)

this thread and its revives really make me think all of ILM should go into therapy for constantly and willfully subjecting themselves to horrible music writing

or horrible post writing

was that an insult? i can never tell around here