Doing It Again 1993 Steely Dan

Consumer Guide: User's Guide Grades 1990- Grades 1969-89 And It Don't End

Books: Book Reports Is It Nonetheless Good to Ya? Going Into the City Consumer Guide: 90s Grown Up All Wrong Consumer Guide: 80s Consumer Guide: 70s Any Old Way You Choose It Don't Terminate 'til Yous Get Enough

Xgau Sez

Writings: And It Don't Cease CG Columns Rock&Roll& [new] Rock&Roll& [quondam] Music Essays Music Reviews Book Reviews NAJP Blog Playboy Blender Rolling Stone Billboard Video Reviews Pazz & Jop Recyclables Newsprint Lists Miscellany

Bibliography

NPR

Spider web Site: Domicile Site Map Contact What's New?   RSS

Carola Dibbell: Carola'southward Website Archive

CG Search:

Google Search:

Twitter:

Follow @rxgau

Doing It Once more

In 1980, topping off the active phase of their strange career as pop interlopers turned AOR powerhouses, Steely Dan scored their tertiary and concluding Pinnacle x hit: "Hey Xix," in which a grade-of-'67 "great of Gamma Chi" came on to a girl as well young to remember Aretha Franklin. As music, information technology was smoothly seductive, all tasty off-harmonies and jazz-low-cal pulse. Every bit seduction, however, it was slightly sickening--half whine, half ransom. Lamented singer and lyricist Donald Fagen: "She thinks I'thou crazy/But I'yard but growing former." Fagen was 32 at the time.

Shortly thereafter, Fagen and his chum Walter Becker showed but how old they felt by retiring. They'd always hated the stone life anyhow--not just touring, the whole mess of having a band. Holing up for months diddling sonic details they dug, merely not the interpersonal stuff. Having bestowed upon united states ii Doobie Brothers and a clean-cut blond vocalist who was never heard from again, they abandoned all pretensions to collective camaraderie by contracting out the priciest studio guns in El Lay--swinging perfectionists from the Crusaders to Toto, typified for me by pet guitarist Larry Carlton, who tin can say cypher with more taste and dexterity than whatsoever alleged jazzman ever to lick his chops. But if yous want to arraign Carlton for 1977'due south Aja, the band's blandest and about commercially decisive anthology, you'll have to explain how come up he'south all over Fagen's wonderful 1982 The Nightfly. Steely Dan is Fagen and Becker--everyone else is an instrument. They need snazzy ones considering they specialize in chords most rock and rollers can't play. Then rock covers of their perverse low-life lyrics and scrumptious melodies are almost nonexistent. Merely Doc Severinsen did 1 one time, and next time yous're stuck in an elevator, keep your ears peeled. Muzak loves these guys.

Muzak has no doubt helped proceed them flush since 1981, along with songwriting and production work, sampling royalties, a grand total of three solo albums, and the ii tours they ventured in the '90s. But for twenty years Fagen and Becker have lived primarily off their minor, lovingly tended catalogue of sound recordings: 7 albums, a few compilations, and in 1993 a meticulously remastered box, Citizen Steely Dan, that rather than dangling the usual add-on dreck upheld their sonic principles by making room for merely four nonalbum cuts, simply one previously unreleased--and that has since been surpassed, for reasons they'll happily particular, by the reremastered single albums they put out later. Their exacting, clear, flush cult is loaded with audiophiles as well every bit supporting schools of exegetes who'll go to their graves pondering the subconscious meaning of "Brooklyn owes the charmer under me."

And in this new millennium the exegetes finally accept something new to dissect, because for the first fourth dimension since 1980's dispirited Gaucho Steely Dan has finalized some new fabric: an album chosen Two Confronting Nature, non a bad slogan for a matched pair of urban cynics. There'southward zip expedient, rote, or stillborn about this return to the racks. As a Steely Dan fan from the moment the vicious cycle that is "Do It Once more" snuck onto AM radio in 1972, I hear it as near a rebirth, closer in mood to the elitist effrontery of their first iv albums than the accomplished slickness that gradually took over. But it's unlike from both, as later on 20 years it had better exist. The music turns Aja'due south fusion-pop fashion jumpier and snappier, sourer and trickier and less soothing--postfunk, whether anyone will admit it or not. Even more important, the bulletproof lyrics take moved decisively toward the literal. Sure y'all tin debate the precise pregnant of "Who makes the traffic interesting?"; they're doing information technology in the chat rooms right now. But Ii Against Nature is so thematically unified it almost has a concept, ane familiar to admirers of "Hey Nineteen"--and a dandy for a rock comeback, too. Clearly and explicitly, Two Against Nature is an album almost old men trying to get laid.

Rocking past your prescribed time doesn't oblige you to feign "youth," peculiarly if you weren't and then crazy about either rock or youth to begin with. But for damn sure the possibility is going to occur to y'all. And now that Fagen and Becker take passed 50 it becomes clear that they have a unique solution to this trouble. Thrown together, they're permanent college boys, tied to the roots of their relationship at small, arty, expensive Bard. The bull-session one-upsmanship of their synergy suggests nothing and then much equally a less slapstick version of National Lampoon, which was very much a reflection of the same '60s worldview (meaning early '60s worldview) the solo Fagen celebrated--rather more lyrically than he always gets with Becker--in The Nightfly. And they're premature pseudosophisticates to this day. Their cynicism, their obscurantism, their compulsive cleverness, their devotion to agreed-upon totems of musical cool--all are hallmarks of the kind of bond that develops betwixt too-smart sophomores who aren't as sure of themselves every bit they pretend to be, especially around women.

There are nine songs on the new anthology. In the relatively ambiguous opener, loosely based on an one-time Ingrid Bergman moving-picture show, hubby and "ripe and ready" new flame bulldoze married woman crazy by the body of water. So a fortysomething clerk at the Strand doesn't have the gumption to go dwelling house with the movie star he went out with in college. Then the title tune, about voodoo, the exception to the theme. And then a painter rejuvenated past jailbait Janie angles for a iii-way with her friend Melanie. Then a sloe-eyed Little Eva of Bleecker Street has our protagonist "sizzling similar an isotope." Then he'southward saving a honey from a speed freak, sex activity only a subtext in this one. Then Dupree gets turned down by his all-grown-upward little cousin Janine in the near savory lines of the record: "She said maybe information technology'south the sleazy expect in your eyes/Or that your mind has turned to absurdity/The dreary compages of your soul/I said--only what is information technology exactly turns you off?" Then another mercurial narcissist jerks our man around. And finally a hot affair between Kid Make clean and Anne de Siecle slips "below the horizon line"--apparently into therapy, which the Kid apparently needs big time. Do you still call back I'm making this concept stuff up?

OK, not concept--that was the silly sci-fi of Fagen'due south Kamakiriad. Say instead that sex hither is somewhere between controlling metaphor and shared obsession. The likelihood that the songs are fictions, based like most fictions on ascertainment--the music concern is a petri dish for such stories--doesn't mean they aren't also fueled, like most fictions, by personal experience. But who knows whose autobiography ended up where? Certainly not us exegetes. Although convention attributes all Steely Dan lyrics to Fagen, whose solo albums are far more than literary than the plain-spoken Becker confessional xi Tracks of Whack, Becker is plenty verbal--his 1996 tour letters at world wide web.steelydan.com prepare the band's sardonic public tone, full of false leads and backhanded putdowns of people you didn't know existed. And while Fagen married the formidable singer-scenester Libby Titus in 1994, Becker seems something of a man about town. So I tin't escape the feeling that a lot of the content is Becker'southward fifty-fifty if the words and details aren't. This ring isn't just a working partnership, CSNY sans absurdity. Information technology'south a collaboration at a very deep level.

Though the songs are fictions, they're besides revelations--glimpses of eye-aged sophomores looking for validation and the kind of excitement they always held at a distance in the cease. Far removed classwise from the piffling loserdom of Katy Lied and Can't Purchase a Thrill, they're full of heady infatuations and random acts of cruelty, self-involvement and cocky-hate, vicious cycles blowing hot and common cold. Precise, hip, worried, waiting by the phone for a negative girl or brimming with pedophile please at a runaway's cute sexy means, Fagen e'er conveys the urgency of allure. Whether the objects of desire are young or not, which is usually left unspecified, they got the juice, so that the metaphor is less beingness able to get it upward than beingness unable to restrain yourself, which is the first thing fiftysomethings miss when their libidos begin to run down--and as well the departure between a rote comeback and a near rebirth.

If the price of making a good record is looking like dingy old men, Fagen and Becker have no qualms about paying. Long agone they began their careers as staff songwriters, and for all their jazzy proclivities, vocal is their chemical element. Imagine the incredibly skilled and through-equanimous music solitary and it's pretty annoying--Medeski Martin & Wood without that band'south showoff eccentricity, which in this context would come up every bit a relief. Contemplate the lyrics just as writing and they're also pretty abrasive--the superannuated sex fantasies of the rich and neurotic. Put the 2 together and you lot take the stuff of not bad rock and roll that no i has e'er come shut to duplicating--not even worthy inheritors like Tom Ze and Freedy Johnston. Male person computer nerds who've mastered a culture of affluence without making sense of their sex activity lives should listen up. They won't larn a damn thing, that's not really the idea. Merely they'll feel a little less lone.

Village Voice, Mar. fourteen, 2000

copplesonconat1951.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/rock/steely-00.php

Share this post