Premier Rock Forum

Christopher J. McGarvey wrote:Someone needs to fly a plane into these guys.

vockins wrote:I requested this a year ago. Worth the wait.

Pibroch wrote:Someone explain this, plz:

tmidgett wrote:
I find the "[fill in the blank] FOR FAGS" or "gay-ass pedophile jazz" kind of criticisms to be telling.

One thing Steely Dan does supremely well is make people uncomfortable.

You might think "well, they make me uncomfortable because the music drives me up the fucking wall," and that's fine.

But they have a way of essaying various creepy subjects casually, amorally, and in great detail.

It's that particular combination that is unsettling.

It gives you nowhere to go with it. At least when William Bennett is going on about coming up your ass etc., there's nothing casual about it. You feel OK being kind of amped up about it to some degree.

But these guys will write about rough trade or whiling away one's life drunk and drugged or pedophilia or whatever, and take no position on it whatsoever. Yet they are tremendously invested in it--they detail it obsessively, and they keep going into the same wells, the same way someone who was feeding a perversion or had some ax to grind would.

The music is jarring for exactly the same reasons. The sounds are rounded off and the arrangements are just-so, but it's so impeccably played that it attains a sharpness that other music 'like this' (no one else has ever sounded like them) never ever gets. There's a malicious glint to it that is unexpected.

And what they do is resolutely in its own space. It never, ever comes out to get you--you have to go to it. It gets under your skin real quick if you don't take to it.

I love Steely Dan because I take to it for whatever reason, and I always have. But a nice side effect is the fact that, despite its round edges and professionalism, it inspires such venom. It's not forgettable music, in any case.

itchy mcgoo wrote:I just had to hear about twenty seconds of this shit ass band while in line at the bank.

It's the soundtrack to opening your package from the Hair Club for Men commercial.

HATE.