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

I honestly don't think I will ever like this band. Lord knows I've given them chance after chance, usually upon having someone recommend one song or another as the one that stands out above the pack. I remain unconvinced. Others on the board have managed, at long last, to help me begin to understand what they appreciate about them, but SD sounds deeply, fundamentally wrong to my ears. But I suppose that much of the music that I enjoy would likely provoke that reaction in others. To each their own, yeah?

quit being such a hater.

love,
music

I love you. I truly do. And it is with love that I ask: exactly how much Scotchgard did you huff before giving birth to that flipper baby that you call Steely Dan?

LYLAS,
Deric

Oh, now that was just unfair of me...

how exactly do they sound deeply, fundamentally wrong?

(Now before anyone shows up to pummel me with anecdotes about Fagen and Becker's eternally sunny dispositions and how this informed their music ironically, please note that I'm operating from a non-fan perspective here. By which I mean that I don't know a lot of the background details, but that I'm simply relating what seems to me to be the case.)

In short: (almost) everything of theirs I've heard sounds like elevator music. Which is not the type of thing I enjoy listening to. I'm still willing to be convinced otherwise, but the Dan Fans are batting a big fat goose egg in that arena thus far.

I think that I can at least respect them on the basis of their obsessiveness, which is something that often fascinates me and attracts me to music/art in general. There's something in the quality of their obsession, though, that seems to suggest that they don't know when or where to quit (much like myself w/r/t this thread). Just because you can achieve a high-gloss sheen through obsessive attention to detail doesn't mean it's necessarily advisable.

I think that the latter part of the paragraph shows the writer was at least a little self-deprecating about punk rock and its cultural strength. That said, Steely Dan is pretty cool.

Wait til summer. Find a nice place outside, then go there with a portable listening device, Aja and a fattie. Smoke it, press play, and sprawl out on the grass.

Then everything'll be clear-- Steely Dan are fucking awesome.

Actually, I think the notion that most of their stuff is completely couched in irony is a mistaken one; I mean, there is definitely irony present quite often in the lyrics themselves as well as in their delivery; but that doesn't subtract from the fact that even on what is considered their "slickest" records, Aja and Gaucho, lotsa the material is actually pretty dang down-to-earth...to give just two examples, Black Cow is a pretty straightfoward kissoff song, and Hey Nineteen is pretty much about precisely what the lyrics state: "we got nothing in common..." Yah, I guess there's something to be said about the fact that the latter is a song about sexing and coking it up with near-jailbait which musically happens to fit pretty comfortably into a smooth jazz format, but if that kinda thing bugs you about Steely Dan, it's kinda like objecting to the Beach Boys because you don't like falsetto singing-- the pattern of wedding lyrics about kinda-transgressive stuff to loverly jazzy music is sorta unavoidable throughout their stuff...at least from Pretzel Logic onwards. Anyway, for what it's worth, I think the narrator as well as Fagen himself's emotions in those two songs are genuine and easily identified with...I don't think that they're smirking at either of the narrators in those songs or looking at them from some far, far remove-- the first one is basically "see ya- i'm not gonna stick around any longer to endure any more of the grief that you've been giving me" (a pretty universal sentiment for most of us at one time or another) and the second one is "i'm disillusioned by the results of my pre-midlife crisis quest for nubile flesh" (a revelation most dudes likely undergo at some point)

I love Steely Dan's music, but the one thing that always bugged me about them is Do It Again. For a band which has a reputation for making use of sophisticated chord changes and other complixicated stuff one associates more with jazz than rock, they sure managed in that one to come up with one unbearably monotonous song. I always want to clunk Fagen over the head when I hear that one in hopes that he'll spice up the vocal melody a bit. It doesn't help that the verses seem to go on forever! Eleventeen and twenty bars or so...

What does peoples think of Razor Boy? I think that's a great one that no one ever seems to mention. Totally beautiful haunting lonesome pedal steel and all...there really needs to be more songs that incorporate both vibraphone and pedal steel guitar. Man, that's a good 'un.

I said in another thread something to the effect of Steely Dan's music reminding me of the hairdos on Knots Landing. It recalls the sterile tastelessness of the eighties that always makes me cringe when I see it. I concede that this may be for entirely personal reasons that have nothing to do with the relative quality of Steely Dan's music.

But I continue to sample songs as you folks recommend them, figuring surely I'll find a diamond in the rough. Vibraphone and pedal steel certainly does sound like an enticing combination...

But alas, therein lies the error of your displeasure, o writer of stilted prose. For Steely Dan be smooth jazz only inasmuch as Silver Jews be folk music of the singer/songwriter variety.

she finally said she still didn't like them but my defense of them was "poetic." i went home alone and the cab driver made fun of me.

and then we did in fact have to go back to school for our classes after lunch break.

This calls for a little detective work,
Miss Batersby.

"Fucked by Monty." indeed!

Men died! Died!

Maybe the problem is that I'd been listening to real jazz right before it, but the smoove was overpowering. Pleasant, and I don't have any hate for it, but like baby food. Like jazz pre-chewed.
I liked Deacon Blues OK, and I thought Josie was pretty cool. I like the bass sound that they've got, warm and mid-'70s. But things like the disco-ish beat on Black Cow and the endless vapid crooning (I know, I know, everyone loves the lyrics. But Home At Last is pretty damn empty, at least to me). Too much pretention in this yacht rock. If I'm going to listen to smoov, I want something a little more fun and a little less late night AM radio. Too much REO Speedwagon. Too much Hall and Oates ballad. And I know, I know, those guys didn't do it as meticulously (or something). And Steely Dan passes on the practical scale— you can tell that they succeeded at putting out albums that sounded like they wanted them to sound, even if that meant saxophones so slick that they glisten like slug trails. And if the argument is going to be that you simply need to be a musician to comprehend their consumate skill, well, I'll cop to feeling a little more populist on that front (while acknowledging the contradiction between that and eschewing 'smooth,' 'accessible' music).
I'm not even going to bother with the real/memorex distinction about whether or not anyone here's crush on Steely Dan is genuine/backlash, except to say that the endless hype did make me expect something more. Sorry, I'll take my Sex Pistols album over Aja any day, and rating the other way seems to be more contrarianism than conviction.
Weirdly enough, the "slick disco" isn't as much of a problem for me as the slick jazz. I've been tussling with my dad (also an ILMer) over Donna Summer and my growing appreciation for her this last week, but he loves Steely Dan in a way that I don't get. It sounds too much like the theme from 'Taxi.'
And, given the choice of studio lunacy, I'll take 10cc any day. At least they seemed like they were having fun, rather than placing a coke-fueled chrome polish onto Randy Newman song suites. Out of 10, I'd put it Aja at 5.5 or so, a bit above "I'm Your Captain." Maybe I'm wrong, and maybe I'll listen to it again in five years.

this is almost a Steely Dan song in itself... of the four Dan albums I have Aja is far and away my least favorite (don't give up js)