{"id":1956402,"date":"2023-06-25T05:36:02","date_gmt":"2023-06-25T09:36:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/any-major-dude-will-tell-you-steely-dan-rocks-in-a-creepy-jazzy-kind-of-way\/"},"modified":"2023-06-25T05:41:40","modified_gmt":"2023-06-25T09:41:40","slug":"any-major-dude-will-tell-you-steely-dan-rocks-in-a-creepy-jazzy-kind-of-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/any-major-dude-will-tell-you-steely-dan-rocks-in-a-creepy-jazzy-kind-of-way\/","title":{"rendered":"Steely Dan rocks with a creepy, jazzy vibe."},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">16<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fany-major-dude-will-tell-you-steely-dan-rocks-in-a-creepy-jazzy-kind-of-way%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1956402&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><h2>The Enduring Appeal of Steely Dan: A Danaissance<\/h2>\n<p>With apologies to <em>The Big Lebowski<\/em> and the Dude\u2019s disdain for the Eagles, no 1970s American rock band is as polarizing as Steely Dan. Movie dialogue and sitcom quips have expressed the competing passions the group inspires. Friendships have frayed over the weirdos and loners, perverts and druggies who populate the songs. Siblings have sparred over the highly polished music itself, which migrated from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/any-major-dude-will-tell-you-steely-dan-rocks-in-a-creepy-jazzy-kind-of-way\/\" title=\"Steely Dan rocks with a creepy, jazzy vibe.\">horn-heavy guitar jams<\/a> to Yacht Rock to something <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/canadian-pastor-who-faces-4-year-jail-sentence-for-inciting-church-warns-americans-the-enemy-is-not-hiding-anymore\/\" title=\"Canadian Pastor Who Faces 4-Year Jail Sentence For \u2018Inciting\u2019 Church Warns Americans: \u2018The Enemy Is Not Hiding Anymore\u2019\">precariously close<\/a> to smooth jazz.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Yet just as the Dude abides, the Dan endures. In fact, Alex Pappademas argues in <em>Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan<\/em> that we\u2019re in the midst of a Danaissance. Pappademas, whose &#8220;liner notes&#8221; (as the title page calls them) are accompanied by vivid paintings by Joan LeMay, contends that because younger Americans &#8220;grew up \u2026 in an age when a grasp of ontological slipperiness became a prerequisite for decoding pop culture,&#8221; they are primed for the group\u2019s &#8220;unreliable narrators and unlikable protagonists.&#8221; Part of the band\u2019s own slipperiness is its ability to get you singing along to lyrics about unsettling topics and people. The band, Pappademas says, shows &#8220;how much you can get away with if you serve up socially unacceptable ideas on a platter shined to perfection by top-drawer session dudes.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Steely Dan\u2019s core duo of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen began making music together as students at Bard College in the 1960s. They went on to Manhattan\u2019s legendary Brill Building to write songs for other artists before moving to Los Angeles to record their first album as Steely Dan, <em>Can\u2019t Buy a Thrill<\/em> (1972). Pappademas suggests their debut single, &#8220;Do It Again,&#8221; set the course the band would follow for the rest of its career, &#8220;sing[ing] about people who can\u2019t help driving headlong toward one form of destruction or another.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Impatient with touring and uninterested in working with a consistent lineup, Becker and Fagen became perfectionists who\u2019d audition a score of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/the-monkees-last-survivor-sues-fbi-for-secret-files-on-band\/\" title=\"The Monkees\u2019 Last Survivor Sues FBI For Secret Files On Band\">session musicians<\/a> just for a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/tapping-into-greatness\/\" title=\"Tapping Into Greatness\">guitar solo<\/a>. (A handful of supporting members went on to have impressive careers of their own: guitarist Jeff &#8220;Skunk&#8221; Baxter and singer Michael McDonald with <a href=\"https:\/\/freebeacon.com\/culture\/the-doobies-are-just-alright\/\">the Doobie Brothers<\/a>, drummer Jeff Porcaro with Toto.) Their sound became more refined or, for critics, too fussy and sterile. &#8220;Sounds like it was recorded in a hospital ward,&#8221; wrote one wag. They broke up after releasing their seventh album, <em>Gaucho<\/em> (1980), resumed touring in 1993, and then won the Grammy for Record of the Year when they returned to the studio for <em>Two Against Nature<\/em> in 2000. That album\u2019s first single, &#8220;Cousin Dupree,&#8221; is classic Dan: a bouncy account of a loser\u2019s lust for his relative. Against nature, indeed. They released their last album in 2003 but continue to tour, even though Becker died in 2017.<\/p>\n<p><em>Quantum Criminals<\/em> is less a biography than a series of idiosyncratic essays about the group\u2019s members and the characters from their songs. Pappademas reacquaints us with Peg, Deacon Blues, Kid Charlemagne, and creepy Dupree, plus guest stars like the crying squonk from &#8220;Any Major Dude Will Tell You,&#8221; White House Plumber G. Gordon Liddy, the model whose profile graces the cover of <em>Aja<\/em>, and the sex toy from William S. Burroughs\u2019s novel <em>Naked Lunch<\/em> that inspired the band\u2019s name. LeMay\u2019s paintings complement the writing with bold depictions of the often seedy and discomfiting speakers and subjects. Some of these portraits beg to be hung above the orange shag carpet of a conversation pit.<\/p>\n<p>Pappademas\u2019s style is lively and allusive, and his analysis is consistently both surprising and convincing. He has a knack for identifying threads that run through the band\u2019s work and the themes of particular albums. &#8220;Most of the characters in the songs of Steely Dan\u2019s \u201970s albums,&#8221; he writes, &#8220;are either longing for some vanished past or too busy losing themselves in drugs or crackpot spirituality or grasping sexual neediness to even communicate with each other, much less get it together to try to change the world.&#8221; Similarly, Pappademas elsewhere refers to &#8220;the tension between [Becker and Fagen\u2019s] fascination with contemporary perversion and violence and their conservative yearning for an idealized past,&#8221; which is indeed an underrated aspect of the band\u2019s creative output. They\u2019re the kinky Kinks, yearning not for little shops and china cups but teenage girls who remember Aretha Franklin.<\/p>\n<p>Of one of the band\u2019s most unsettling songs, &#8220;Everyone\u2019s Gone to the Movies,&#8221; Pappademas writes that it &#8220;spin[s] the unspeakable into transgressive comedy&#8221; even as it demands &#8220;us to formulate an ethical response to what we\u2019re hearing.&#8221; In short, the moral dynamics of these songs are sometimes as sophisticated as the music. But the band\u2019s irony meter wasn\u2019t always well calibrated. There\u2019s something cruel about releasing a single (&#8220;Time Out of Mind&#8221;) praising the pleasures of heroin barely a year after Becker\u2019s girlfriend died of a drug overdose in his apartment.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_1755351\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1755351\"><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-1755351\">&#8220;Major Dude.&#8221; Illustrations by Joan LeMay, from <a href=\"https:\/\/utpress.utexas.edu\/9781477324998\/quantum-criminals\/\">Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan<\/a> \u00a9 2023. Used with permission from the University of Texas Press.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Pappademas traces the band\u2019s influences\u2014jazz musicians, novelists, peers\u2014as well as admirers and spiritual heirs like Minutemen, Rickie Lee Jones, LCD Soundsystem, The Hold Steady, and Eminem. A remarkable aspect of the band\u2019s influence is how many artists sampled their catalogue, including De La Soul, Joe Public, Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz, MF Doom, Super Furry Animals, and Kanye. Pappademas\u2019s notes on this element of the band\u2019s legacy\u2014including how merciless the band could be with sampling deals\u2014are especially good.<\/p>\n<p>Although the book is expansive, there are some notable omissions. I would have loved an essay about &#8220;Only A Fool Would Say That,&#8221; the anti-utopian song from 1972, perhaps accompanied by a painting of John Lennon, who subjected us to &#8220;Imagine&#8221; the previous year. And where in the world is &#8220;Barrytown&#8221;? Does Pappademas hear this number, which bears the name of a place near Becker and Fagen\u2019s college, as a snarky put-down of the speaker\u2019s hipster neighbors, or is it a denunciation of the speaker\u2019s provincialism? He could have had fun with the song\u2019s remarkable afterlife, too. Roddy Doyle set a trilogy of novels in a section of Dublin he called Barrytown, and Nick Hornby\u2019s novel <em>High Fidelity<\/em> features a band with the same name. The 2000 film adaptation of that novel omitted the reference, but another 2000 film, <em>Me, Myself, and Irene<\/em>, featured popular artists covering Steely Dan songs\u2014including &#8220;Barrytown.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>As for Pappademas\u2019s claim that Steely Dan\u2019s point of view is especially suited for Zoomers and Millennials, older fans will hear history\u2019s rhyme. In an essay for the band\u2019s 1993 boxed set, Chris Willman proposed that Steely Dan deserved &#8220;the title of \u2018Band of the \u201990s,\u2019 \u2026 so fluently does their oeuvre fit the temper of the times.&#8221; Fagen and Becker\u2019s &#8220;brilliantly veiled sarcasm and revolutionary lack of sentimentality,&#8221; Willman wrote, &#8220;anticipat[ed] the contemporary irony craze.&#8221; Pappademas seems to hint as much when he identifies Larry David as torch-bearer of the &#8220;Dan-like spirit of cultural dyspepsia and deliberate anti-charisma.&#8221; (It\u2019s a shame he doesn\u2019t point out that the subject of another essay, the actress Jill St. John, appeared in &#8220;The Yada-Yada&#8221; episode of <em>Seinfeld<\/em>.)<\/p>\n<p>Whether you count the current Danaissance as something entirely new or another turn in a recurring cycle, and even if you\u2019re among those who find the band too weird or jazzy, it\u2019s undeniable the Dan endures. <em>Quantum Criminals<\/em> is an entertaining and insightful account of why.<\/p>\n<p><em>Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan<\/em> by Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay<br \/> University of Texas Press, 280 pp., $35<\/p>\n<p><em>Christopher J. Scalia is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over Steely Dan, a 70s rock band, opinions clash like in The Big Lebowski. Their songs, filled with oddballs and addicts, have strained friendships and sparked debates. The band&#8217;s divisive nature is comparable to the Dude&#8217;s hatred for the Eagles. Siblings have even fought over their music, making them truly polarizing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":138,"featured_media":1956403,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[544],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1956402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-free-beacon"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1956402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/138"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1956402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1956402\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1956403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1956402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1956402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1956402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}