ah, memories...

[acroyear]

twas looking up some old usenet posts of mine and found this jewel, my rant on why Steely Dan sucks, Feb 9, 2001.

Steely Dan bores the shit out of me. They are the epitome of blandness.

A major element of good prog is that it defies categorization (aside from "Prog" itself). There are so many elements of blues, jazz, avant guarde, classical, folk, pure-rock (whatever that is) and world music, in rather complex and varying combinations, as to make it interesting and creative and innovative (over the standard "pop" crap we hate so much ;-) ). It never feels like it fits directly into any one of these categories...hence, its impossible to get any airplay out of it...

Steely Dan is the opposite. Instead of defying categorization by being on the edge of so many genres, they defy it by being the blandest example of the center of each of them. They're old enough for the classic-rock stations (and even some "oldies" stations), rock enough for the AOR stations, 70s enough for 70s-only stations, mellow enough for "adult-contemporary" stations, still popular enough for a top-40 station to play them when they feel like playing older music (as they do occasionally), popular enough among college kids to make college radio playlists, and, damnitall, hick-sounding enough to make the occasional country station.

Basically, they were so "playable" that almost every station in the fucking world can play them and not feel like they're breaking their genre.

Don't think i'm kidding. During my university years, there was not one station in the area (Harrisonburg, VA) except for the classical and news-talk ones that wouldn't play at least _1_ Steely Dan song.

That kind of blandness I can do without.

Updated: and even a news-talk station once used a portion of a SD track as a "bumper" between the commercials and getting back to the program.

which genre? cheezy 70s post-patridge-family & pre-disco pop? that's all i hear in them.

I didn't hear any "jazz modalities" in anything of there's...occasionally a jazz-like fill, but nothing in terms of modality-based expressions like, say, Allan Holdsworth achieves. what "jazz" they play is the kind that lounge acts do, and that was a kind of jazz that i think rock could have done without. you know, suppose later-years Frank Sinatra had a rock band...

they had harmonies better done by CSN, country-blues riffs better done by the doobies, generally stuck to only 4 base key signatures (hell, i just listened to all the samples @ cdnow of "Show Biz Kids" and at times would be hard pressed to tell the difference between several of the tracks, even those years apart in the making).

bland, emotionless, fluff...and (side note) it is so fucking easy to get sick to death of the processing they put on the lead singer (again, a sound completely unchanged throughout the bands entire career).

if it was influential to anything, it was influential to other parts of 70s music that rather overtly date themselves to that time...like the background lounge music on The Love Boat. it doesn't project timelessness (like, say, King Crimson). It screams 70s. All the emotionless blandness of the mid-70s comes through crystal clear, that same emotionlessnes that disco later held up as an ideal. i reject that as being anything praiseworthy. all the skill in the world is nothing if there's so little emotion behind what you do that it doesn't come across even to someone who doesn't like the genre or style.

"its gripless. i'm completely ungripped" -- Dave Lister of Red Dwarf.

and

no. emotionless == blandness.

Steely Dan's music has (to me) no emotional content at all. Its just there. it just sits there. doesn't move. doesn't budge. doesn't progress. at the end of a song, i'm no different from what i was at the beginning. and neither is the band. the band that quit in the early 80s was exactly the same band (sound and feel wise) as the band that first released in 1972. Like the Rolling Stones (good band, but today are still no better than they were in 1964...no worse, and that's saying something...but no better), Steely Dan was a band that never grew from where they started.

emotion leads to or comes out of growth. the absense of growth shows the absense of emotion.

And "Two Against Nature" [their reunion album in the late 90s] shows them in even worse shape -- not only not growing at all, but a pure imitation of their 70s days. its just the same damn thing. The album title is totally appropriate. Nature demands that people grow and change. The two of them have done neither.

Comments

XM wouldn't help in this case...

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

Its not that there weren't popular at the time (obviously), nor that they have some popularity now. Its just that because they are so "safe" to play in any genre, the airplay they continue to receive is grossly out of proportion to that popularity.

In this, XM doesn't help: I can name at least 10 stations where they could be played "safely" without pissing anybody (except me) off.

Re: XM wouldn't help in this case...

[selkiesiren.livejournal.com]

I think you pegged it, hon...Yer screwed. :)

Re: XM wouldn't help in this case...

[scaleslea.livejournal.com]

This is part of the reason I bought an iPod, and won't buy XM. I get to hear my music, the way I like it, not what someone else likes.

Doc

Re: XM wouldn't help in this case...

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

XM's not for everybody. I *ususally* am of the "I control my own music" mode, but there are times when I don't want that. Sometimes in the car the decision process to figure out what I want takes up the entire half-hour drive home!

and even the mp3 collection doesn't help as usually i restrict my playlist of the time to a single group and choosing even THAT might take up too much time :)

thing is, most of my collection doesn't really count as "background music". Its damned hard for me to not put in some mental concentration to sing/play/"think"-along with Yes, King Crimson, Steve Hackett, Mike Oldfield, Jethro Tull, Marillion or the likes (the groups which take up the largest amount of disk space on my external hard drive).

So when i'm doing a "not thinking about it, just letting it play" mode, I still want radio in the sense of letting someone else decide the playlist. For that purpose, over-the-air radio sucks (the only station that plays things i might like is the local classic rock station, and i'm so sick to death of their selections i quit *years* ago). but XM suits me just fine. Stuff I like, mixed in with similar (well, aside from Fine Tuning) things that I *might* like.

A conscious effort to make a playlist is always better than pure randomizing, which is the flaw of the iPod/iShuffle approach to life. If I can't make the playlist, I'll listen to DJ's who's judgement I trust. Its been decades since over-the-air radio DJs actually bothered. People listen to regular DJs for their personality, not their musical selections, which is not how it used to be (and increasingly led to the state of affairs, pop-musically, that we're in now).

On the other hand, most of the DJs on XM take care to planning the music first, with only a few trying to be typical pop DJs in personality as well (take the evening 80s on 8 lady for example). They actually care about the music they play, rather than the image they're projecting. The music is the image, as it should be.

But not all of them are that careful. For example, the 80s on 8 station tends to be jarring in its contrasts as a Fresh Prince (the young Will Smith) hip-hop song might be followed up by Boys Don't Cry from the Cure. Its like taking a huge 80s collection and putting it on shuffle, and that simply doesn't work for me. I'd rather someone actually *DJ* the programming to guide the listener into and out of specific genres, as there are plenty of "links" between them to utilize, or at least do the talking as a link to clense the palate.

I know I can do it (I've been complimented on it many times over the years), but its really *work* to do it well.

Re: XM wouldn't help in this case...

[scaleslea.livejournal.com]

On those occaisions when I don't particularly care what comes up next, I have a "Not Recently Played" playlist. It selects all music that I haven't listened to either on the iPod or with iTunes in the last three months and serves it all up randomly. So I never know what's coming up next, but I know that it's going to be something I like.

This works for me. XM works for you.

Doc

Re: XM wouldn't help in this case...

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

On a side note, there was a review of the MyFi (the new ipod-sized personal XM receiver) that I really had a problem with.

The author was using it as a forum for being critical of the channel/music selection and the compression quality by comparing it to his iTunes-loaded iPod, having already decided to accept the iPod lifestyle as his way of getting away from commercial radio. He approached XM the same way you imply you would, given this statement.

It was a really bad apples-to-oranges comparison to make, and as an editor I would have sent the review back for revision.