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

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

[selkiesiren.livejournal.com]

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