I wasn't claiming that in comments, rosy-fingered Alameida.
Hooray for alameida! (I was claiming the opposite as well.)
1: I thought it was "rosy-toed Alameida."
Everything about alameida is in rosy bloom when I'm around.
Sucky music, when played with irony, still sucks.
No arguing with taste, but Steely Dan always sounds to me like noon of the day after the good time.
My reaction to them is similar to, but not as intense as, my reaction to Jeff Koons' work. Which is something like "Oh ha ha can we go now?"
who else can I pick a fight with?
I don't get how Steely Dan's music is sucky. As I said on the other thread I don't love it or care passionately about it (note -- this may change if I get stoned); but it seems pleasant to listen to/froove on. I just don't get how somebody could find it offensive.
No worries Matt, I think you've already got it down. (ATM)
No arguing with taste, but Steely Dan always sounds to me like noon of the day after the good time.
And why should noon of the day after the good time not have its own glorious soundtrack?
No, it sounds like the feeling of noon the day after. When the flies are buzzing around the coffee table with all the sticky bottles on it. And you wish you were dead.
Because all you want is silence and for someone to bring you a nice plate of greasy food and some coffee without talking to you?
yeah, that's like the complaint in the thread below that steely dan sounds like the tail end of an overly-coked out party. is that a bad thing? on clownaesthesiologist's point, I can actually understand haters more than passive froovers wrt steely dan. I mean, if you don't actively like that sort of thing, it seems like you might well hate it, as I used to. the sound is very agressively like itself: souless, ironic, technical, brilliantly produced, californian sleaze. in a good way, though. kid charlemagne! how can you not love that? if you hate the voice you could all try listening to can't buy a thrill and come in through the classic rock back door, so to speak. I freaked my brother out bad one time with a mix tape that started "felonious my old friend..."
Is the in-earnest thing which Steely Dan is parodying (to some approximation) The Eagles?
didn't post fast enough; 15 to 12. but again, right, it sounds despairing and like you want to die and glazed with cold hard awfulness, plus horns and weird sleazy special keyboards they invented just for that song. it reminds me of beautiful california days when I wanted to throw myself under a bus. I'm still not seeing the problem. it doesn't have to be apples in stereo happy fun sunshine time all the damn time, musically, right?
-- I am thinking no, it's probably not. But I would be interested to know if anyone has a better candidate.
OT I'm having Anthony over to eat tomorrow. what do you guys think I should feed him? what would you request?
Yes, Modesto kid, get with the hatin' program.
Steely Dan always seemed like "Too cool to have fun", and I'm not even a fun guy.
Frank Zappa always was telling people how much better he was than stoners like Hendrix, but Hendrix did bring something new, whereas Zappa was rehash. I mean, Dada was 1920. He ended up at the intersection of jazz, avant-garde classical, Brecht, Dada, and rock n roll, but not in a good way.
Zappa vs. Ms. Gore was sort of funny, because Zappa was Mr Clean Family Values in actual life. Only his lyrics were weird.
Something with pork in it. Black bean paste is nice too.
14: Right. and the only other person in the house is still high and won't shut up about who actually shot JFK.
17: it doesn't have to be happy fun sunshine time all the damn time
It's not a binary choice. But a matter of taste, as I said. I prefer Neil Young in his coked-out wreck phase when I want to nostalge for the bad times. For the Turnstiles!
What's the weather like in Singapore right now? If it's hot, you mentioned making mango ceviche a while back, which sounded wonderfully refreshing.
Or you could just make a nice big stew of rancid bat.
-- Er, uh, actually if I were dining chez Alameida and were (outrageous thought!) planning the menu, I think I would request that lovely French stew with the duck and the white beans, that I can never remember the name of. I think Alameida would cook a truly kick-ass rendition of that. And something with puff pastry and seasonal fruit and interesting dairy products, for dessert.
The Eagles were later than SD. Maybe they reverse-engineered SD without the irony and without the downer effect.
Hating the Eagles is one of my intergenerational-bonding resources with my son and his friends. On the other hand, Chet Baker's singing totally gives me the creeps, like Peewee Herman, so we don't talk about him much.
okay, I'm going to download some steely dan and see if I still hate it.
My son has noted that I don't like guy singers with quavery voices. I don't think I like chick singers with quavery voices either, though I can't think of any.
I really don't like Elton John, Barbara Streisand, and Madonna at all either, so my son says I should avoid excessively gay-friendly venues just for my safety's sake.
25 -- Didn't really have the chronology in mind but The Eagles could still be an instance of a phenomenon that Steely Dan is parodying, without preceding Steely Dan in time.
Hendrix did bring something new, whereas Zappa was rehash
Pshaw. All rock is rehash.
(But as I said in 18 I think I was mostly wrong in suggesting The Eagles. Just that I have a sort-of-similar relationship to The Eagles, a band I know many people hate, of frooving passively to their tunes without really getting much spiritual from them.)
Not Hendrix's way with the electric guitar. Segovia didn't approve, but Hendrix did something new.
Agreed about the tunes and the lyrics. I am not an admirer of Hendrix's lyrics.
(But I can understand pretty well why someone would hate The Eagles, whereas Steely Dan, not so much.)
24: Cassoulet? That's winter food -- I can't see eating in a tropical summer.
26: Seek out "Godwhacker" off of "Everything Must Go." I would thing that anyone who enjoys hanging out at the Mineshaft would have, at the very least, some form of respect for the kind of quirky genius it takes to produce a song like that.
34, yeah, cassoulet; and you're right, I wasn't really thinking about the climate, just sort of imagining myself over at the Alameidas' place with no locale- or date-specific info. So back to pork and black bean paste.
It is really, really good though. Since I've been making goose for Christmas dinner, I've been making cassoulet from the leftovers. Mmmm.
But I'm sticking with puff pastry + seasonal fruit (mangos maybe?) + interesting dairy products, for dessert.
Is the in-earnest thing which Steely Dan is parodying
I seriously don't think Steely Dan is a parody of anything. It seems very fitting that they took their name from Burroughs' Naked Lunch. SD's music is not parody in the same way that Burroughs writing is not parody. Rather, it is the seeking out of everything that is sick and depraved, taking it to the extreme, and wraping it up in a kind of ironic sentimentality. SD's songs are populated by junkies, pushers, pimps, prostitutes, con artists, bookies, players, thugs, gentleman losers, third-world dictators, and even the Devil himself. And these slimy characters are to a certain degree glorified, or at least taken on their own terms. What's not to love about that?
39 is missing an apostrophe, and I think I know who took it.
Tom Waits does the same, but I like Tom Waits. Maybe it's just the quavery voices. Tom Waits' music is also opener and rougher, and doesn't have that tight cool jazz / lounge sound.
Chet Baker's singing totally gives me the creeps
Chet Baker sounds like a saxophone with lips.
39 -- I am always intensely envious when I hear people talking about music this way. At the risk of exposing myself as a dilettante -- music is for me a hedonistic experience (speaking here only of music I enjoy) -- I don't get the spiritual part of it, well with a couple of exceptions like Dylan and R. Hitchcock, but these are situations where I am responding I think to the lyrics, my response to the music is still just frooving.
A very quavery saxophone. On the instrumentals he sounds like he's always asking himself whether it's really worth bothering to play the next note.
The Italian pirate Mango Ceviche CD is really great, but the American release ruined it by hiring a Swedish producer to add production values.
since the weather insingapore is always hot, it's hot, which nixes the cassoulet. mango seviche? OK. and BBQ ribs; everybody likes ribs, right? plus I've already got ribs in the freezer. litchi in ginger syrup and little butter cookies with crackly sugar bits on the edges? that's nice. also 39 gets it exactly right, even without the apostrophe. puff pastrywise I was already thinking parmesan cheese snacky sticks, so there you go.
If I were at chez Alameida, I'd want southern cooking--I've never really had authentic southern cooking (barbecue, yes, collards, yes, but not like a meal of souther specialties).
"don't try to tell me I don't like Frank Zappa or I'm going to get really angry."
I wouldn't think of telling you that, darlin'. A grrrl who likes FZ? That's a dream date!
cjs
39 kind of makes me suspect that a lot of Steely Dan's appeal is in the lyrics. NTTAWTT, I like Brecht and Elvis Costello and TMBG, but Steely Dan's music doesn't much appeal to me, so I never have the incentive to listen to the lyrics to figure out what's going on with these slimy characters. Part of it may be that it takes a lot of effort for me to process sung lyrics, at least when they're mixed as the Dan is. And lots of people whose musical taste I respect like SD, so I'm thinking that I'm missing out on something.
45: That's what I like about him, especially on the instrumentals. I actually prefer strung-out toothless Chet (the good stuff, anyway).
Apropos of nothing, this is not at all surprising. My middle school is retroactively mourning.
NTTAWTT s/b/ "not that there's anything wrong with that"
The link in 51 has a lovely photo.
39 kind of makes me suspect that a lot of Steely Dan's appeal is in the lyrics. NTTAWTT, I like Brecht and Elvis Costello and TMBG, but Steely Dan's music doesn't much appeal to me, so I never have the incentive to listen to the lyrics to figure out what's going on with these slimy characters. Part of it may be that it takes a lot of effort for me to process sung lyrics, at least when they're mixed as the Dan is.
I'd say this is true. Of course, I would be into Steely Dan's music even if it were instrumental, but the lyrics are what push it past the realm of technically proficient and into the realm of genius. I like listening to a song like "Janie Runaway" for the first time and not really getting the lyrics but digging the music; then, as I listen a few more times, my brain starts to process the lyrics and I gradually realize, "Hey, this song is written from the perspective of a guy who picks up some teenage runaway girl and dazzles her with his wealth and taste in order to turn her into his sex toy."
Looking back on what I've just written, I can see how some people might not be into that.
Weiner, you don't think Elvis Costello is good musically? I've never been that into him, but I've been listening to "Less Than Zero" a lot lately, and it's a great track both lyrically and otherwise. General and shocking musical ignorance disclaimer applies.
50: It's a generational thing, kid.
So what about Captain Beefheart?
50 - What initially hooked me on the Dan was the lazy brilliance of the musicianship. It sounded like Steely Dan was where all the virtuosic studio musicians went in the middle of the night to show off the chops they really had, when they weren't being asked to sound like somebody else. To a certain extent this is true, except when it's revealed how many takes there were and how much production went into making it sound like they didn't care about whether those notes actually made the album or not. It wasn't until after the music had hooked me that I knew the words to anything other than "Ricki Don't Lose That Number."
That said, I think that full enjoyment of Steely Dan involves both appreciating the musicianship (and production, for that matter) and getting into the subtle (and not-so-subtle) irony in the lyrics. And they've sort of made that clear from the first album ("I am another gentleman loser / Drive me to Harlem, or somewhere the same"). If you find the music or the lyrics off-putting, it's going to be pretty difficult to enjoy the whole.
Speaking of Elvis Costello, this is totally worth setting the TiVo to capture.
55: I think Costello is good musically, but also that a lot of the appeal is in the lyrics. "The chairman of this boredom is a compliment collector/I'd like to be his funeral director," blam! It wouldn't be nearly as enjoyable without savoring the nasty. That applies to the other musicians I mentioned.
I like Beefheart.
I think of Steely Dan as a weird parody of Brill Building songwriting (since, IIRC, they started out trying to write songs for other people).
Think of generic Carole King; Songs that have glorious hooks but are so universal in there references that they're bland.
Speaking of the Steely Dan sound I had a (female) acquaintance use them as an example of how different drugs effect music sounds. She was saying that reggae sounds the way it does partially because when eveyone's stoned they're just like, "I'm not sure if that take is perfect, but let's just leave it like that." While the speedfreaks are all, "I can't stand that note. That note right there. We have to fix that."
The Elvis Costello song "I Want You" is fucking amazing.
While the speedfreaks are all, "I can't stand that note. That note right there. We have to fix that."
I'm not sure that this can account for Lou Reed.
And for the other quadrant, marijuana + studio obsessive, I give you Bongwater. (Though it may not be that note kind of obsession.)
62,63 -- I'm not saying her comment was comprehensive, or even correct, but it made me laugh. That does capture some of the Steely Dan feel.
I have heard that Steely Dan would bring in musicians to record a track, bring in another set of musicians to record along with the first set of tracks and then bring the first musicians back to re-record their tracks while listening to the second set of tracks. An odd, time-delayed form of cooperative music making.
I know a woman who would get stoned on weed and houseclean obsessively at 2 AM on a work night, even when the doctor had told her to avoid using her dominant arm. The rule I came up with is that "marijuana makes you even more the way you already are".
62 -- speaking of Lou Reed I have always appreciated this comment about metal machine music (to which I have probably linked before).
"I actually have this, I actually listened to it all the way through, and I actually liked it. I don't know why - there's something about all those squeals and squelches and mechanical drones and fast mini-melodies I found interesting. Which isn't to say I've listened to it again. Someday soon, I'll get the urge and I'll probably like it again. For an album that's nothing but God-awful atonal noise, it's pretty good. It's certainly more of an artistic statement than my wife's vacuum cleaner although I had a Buick that was much more expressive and heartfelt ...
Note to those who read reader's comments for additional viewpoints on an album - odds are near 100% you'll really hate every second of this ..."
Followed, two comments later by this
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT NOISE!!!!!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAH! GOD THAT IS THE WORST ALBUM I EVER HEARD IN MY LIFE MORE THAN SATAN! MORE THAN SHITTING TOILETS! AY! I RATHER DIE THAN TOO HEAR THAT AGAIN EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEYYYYYYYAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"
Reading this thread, I'm realizing that William Gibson must be a huge Steely Dan fan.
For an album that's nothing but God-awful atonal noise, it's pretty good.
Ha. I'm listening to this right now. Not loud enough, though, I should really have headphones on.
The Elvis Costello song ________ is fucking amazing.
Many, many titles fill that blank nicely.
"marijuana makes you even more the way you already are".
This is not my experience with marihuana.
Hey how does King Crimson tie into this discussion? At all?
70: You probably aren't the way you already are yet.
Pat Metheny, who does wimpy smooth jazz and weird avant garde both, did something called "Zero Tolerance for Silence" which I'd like to see compared to Metal Machine Music (which I haven't heard yet -- I'd also like to hear the 2-LP version of "Sister Ray". Once.)
Metheny runs his guitar through a synthesizer with lots of repeating loops and shit.
Reading this thread, I'm realizing that William Gibson must be a huge Steely Dan fan.
You probably aren't the way you already are yet.
Bravo, JE, bravo.
I haven't heard Zero Tolerance for Silence, but someone who has compared it to Sonny Sharrock's Guitar, which is awesome. Distorted and reverbed guitar, overdubbed with drone backgrounds, and melodies on top. Sharrock was known for using fuzz, reverb, and fast picking (a sound not entirely unlike Dick Dale) to simulate an overblown saxophone. He did some great stuff with Pharoah Sanders and some other free jazz guys.
Sonny Sharrock's Guitar, which is awesome
I second this motion. Incredible album.
"Ask the Ages" with Sharrock, Sanders, and Elvin Jones is an all-time great. All three of them need someone strong to play off of -- I especially don't like Sanders as a leader.
James Blood Ulmer does some fantastic stuff with spazz guitar, for example "After Dark" and "Khalid of Space" (with Larry Young).
I have to tell you that I absolutely love Steely Dan's sound. It's virtually the only music I've ever found that's actually conducive to studying.
Also, I find it almost impossible to follow what the singer's saying. I know that there's a song that's supposed to be about child pornography...and one that's about sex tourism...and one about cocaine...but I don't know which is which. I've heard "Kid Charlemagne" dozens of times and can't remember a single word from it other than "kid", "Charlemagne", and "get". I have no idea what its lyrics are about. And the few songs that I've paid attention to the lyrics are pretty polite and inoffensive. I guess "Deacon Blues" is about drunk driving, and "Peg" is insulting a pretentious woman, but they're still very polite.
Hey, Elvis Costello! Music I actually sincerely like!
79: Then be sure to catch the show I linked in 58. It's top notch.
Emerson, if you get a chance, check out Derek Bailey's power trio stuff -- Arcana's The Last Wave, with Bill Laswell and Tony Williams, and Mirakle, with Jamaaladeen Tacuma and Grant Calvin Weston. I bet you'd like it.
Metheny said ZTFS was inspired by Bailey, though these albums came after it. And most of Bailey's stuff doesn't sound like this, except insofar as he always sounds unmistakably like himself (maybe he smoked a lot of pot?). Most of his other stuff is much more abstract; not that these albums have tunes or anything, or even regular beats for the most part, but they're too in-your-face to be abstract.
"Khalid of Space" is awesome.
Hey how does King Crimson tie into this discussion? At all?
The only connections between KC and SD that spring to mind are a certain level of technical proficiency and the fact that I like them both.
re: 81
Didn't Bailey die recently? Checking wikipedia, yes, he did.
I've never really gotten into Pharoah Saunders although he's on a couple of Alice Coltrane albums I really like.
It sounded like Steely Dan was where all the virtuosic studio musicians went in the middle of the night to show off the chops they really had, when they weren't being asked to sound like somebody else.
Is a really great description of the way they sound. But as others have remarked, not quite how they worked. I watched a TV documentary on the making of one of their albums and they had several complete bands of top-notch studio guys on call and, as mentioned above, would swap out entire bands and have them doing multiple takes until they got the best one.
78 - "Kid Charlemagne" is the one about cocaine ("On the hill the stuff was laced with kerosene / But yours was kitchen clean" and "Clean this mess up else we'll all end up in jail / Those test tubes and the scale / Just get them all out of here" make this one pretty clear), "Deacon Blues" is about a guy who always fails at every venture but is setting out on another one ("You call me a fool / You say it's a crazy scheme / This one's for real / I already bought the dream") -- although it's true that this venture could be the final one, suicide-by-alcohol-and-auto, and "Peg" is what passes for a love song in the Steely Dan oeuvre ("I like your pin shot / I keep it with your letter"), a farewell to a love who's gone on to something bigger.
61: I don't know how many hours in my teens I spent listening to that song over and over. And making other people listen to it. I didn't even have anybody in my life that I could have been obsessed with like that and still I identified with it.
83 - Is a really great description of the way they sound. But as others have remarked, not quite how they worked.
Yeah, but I said pretty much that in the sentence you didn't quote, the one that says "... except when it's revealed how many takes there were and how much production went into making it sound like they didn't care."
re: 86
Yes. I realised after that you'd also made the same remark!
Although what's interesting is how much of their stuff was still improvised. The soloists pretty much just went for it, it seems, until Fagen and Becker had a take they liked.
I've never really bought the idea of liking popular music for its lyrics. I'm not saying I can't find enjoyment in a well-turned phrase, but if it's set to music that I think is awful, the issue can't be avoided. Lyrics can certainly enhance the pleasure found in a song--to take the example above, ""The chairman of this boredom is a compliment collector/I'd like to be his funeral director" sounds great when Elvis spits it out. The hard consonants and multiple syllables of "compliment collector" go so well matched against "funeral director", especially he slightly stretches out the end of the last word. It's manic, and nasty, and one doesn't really care if it means anything. Most pop lyrics are more about sounding good and striking an attitude, and that's fine. It's why I've often thought this song had some of the best lyrics ever.
I can enjoy a few of the Steely Dan songs that get some radio play: "Deacon Blues", "Hey Nineteen", ""My Old School", that's about it. The problem with Steely Dan isn't that they sound sleazy, or like the day after. It's that their music is boring. That their lyrical obsession amount to a cliched pose isn't in itself so wrong--most things in pop are cliches--though it is a rather embarassing sort of cliche, like college kids pretending to hardbitten romantic losers instead of over-educated wankers they are. None of that would matter, though, if the music weren't so dull.
Messed-up Neil Young can be fun, though, at least when he's still able to hold it together a little and not noodling too much. Roll another number for the road. It is also the case that the first person I ever knew who expressed a positive opinion about Steely Dan was a really annoying rich hippy kid.
emr -- it's a great song for obsession.
Anyone here a John Cooper Clarke fan? Phenomenal lyrics and good tunes. Almost no one I knows has heard of him.
I'm not saying I can't find enjoyment in a well-turned phrase, but if it's set to music that I think is awful, the issue can't be avoided.
Very much true. If it were entirely about the lyrics, you could skip the medium and read the lyric sheet. But there can be songs that would be boring if they had the same music and boring lyrics, but because they have good lyrics are cool. Like, "Scotland" by King Missile, which I can only find the lyrics of.
Sometimes I think this applies to Gilbert & Sullivan, other times I think maybe they should just skip the music.
>I can enjoy a few of the Steely Dan songs that get some radio play
All the zappa songs that they played on the radio in the late seventies sucked. I don't trust bands that don't have good singles.
>I can enjoy a few of the Steely Dan songs that get some radio play
All the zappa songs that they played on the radio in the late seventies sucked. I don't trust bands that don't have good singles.
Returning to my 55, for a time I mis-heard "Carve a V for vandal" as "Carve a V for venal." And my mishearing is better, so I'm trying to convince myself that's what it says.
43: 39 -- I am always intensely envious when I hear people talking about music this way. At the risk of exposing myself as a dilettante -- music is for me a hedonistic experience (speaking here only of music I enjoy) -- I don't get the spiritual part of it, well with a couple of exceptions like Dylan and R. Hitchcock, but these are situations where I am responding I think to the lyrics, my response to the music is still just frooving.
I'm not sure I'm fully grasping the hedonistic vs. spiritual distinction you're drawing here. I'd be interested in seeing you expand on it. (I find it especially interesting that this comes up in a discussion of Steely Dan, where that distinction would seem to be at its blurriest.) For what it's worth, Steely Dan is one of a small handful of bands/artists about which I would feel moved to write something like 39, perhaps akin to the way you feel about Dylan and R. Hitchcock.
expand on it
(ATM)
Well... When I read 39
[when I read well-written criticism in general]
I have a sense the author is responding with language and mental imagery to music
[to an artistic work in general]
-- where I go to the concert, to the museum, enjoy the feeling of the music or of the pictures but it doesn't go anywhere for me intellectually. Only to written words do I have a response that fits into the language/mental imagery framework I'm characterizing your 39 as. And Dylan and Hitchcock aren't my favorite musicians, they're just the most literary among musicians I like. This is coming out pretty incoherent so I'll lay off now. Maybe I will be able to frame it better later on this evening.
"literary" is a poor choice of adjective in 96. Also insert "among" before "the most".
I said: "Peg" is what passes for a love song in the Steely Dan oeuvre ("I like your pin shot / I keep it with your letter"), a farewell to a love who's gone on to something bigger.
Now that I'm listening to it, however (damn this thread), another interpretation comes to mind: it could be written from a creep/stalker perspective ("I know I love you better," "It's your favorite foreign movie"). The first is optimistic, the latter pessimistic. Take your pick.
Kid Charlemagne isn't about cocaine, surely. It's about Owsley in his years on the run -- "WHile the music played, you worked by candle light/those san francisco nights/you were the best in town/ that's when you turned the world around." and even the alchemy reference: "if by chance you crossed the diamond with the pearl/you turned it on the world. and "All those dayglo freaks who used to paint their face: they've joined the human race/ life can be very strange"
Dunno if alameida's still reading, but on the subject of what to cook for Anthony: I know what he doesn't like.
99 - Yeah, I screwed up my drug references, but it was only "very loosely inspired" by Owsley according to this online chat. And I never knew before today that there was a real guy behind the song anyway.
For cocaine, the one reference off the top of my head would be in "Hey Nineteen" ("The Cuervo Gold / The fine Colombian / Make tonight a wonderful thing"), but I'm drawing a blank as to what whole song would be about it. Maybe "Charlie Freak" but that reads more like a heroin addiction than just coke to me.
For cocaine, the one reference off the top of my head would be in "Hey Nineteen" ("The Cuervo Gold / The fine Colombian / Make tonight a wonderful thing")
I always assumed that "the fine Columbian" was pot. It just seems more like an expression one would use about marijuana, and goes with the mellow vibe a lot better.
for cocaine? Glamour profession