Music (or, more specifically, one’s taste in music) is a tenuous thing. What is it that makes me love The Future Sound of London but hate Hoobastank? What is it that makes someone else, who is not unlike me in most other respects (same age, same basic social/cultural background, similar upbringing, etc.), love Hoobastank and hate The Future Sound of London? Similarly, how is it that I can love The Future Sound of London but also Jimi Hendrix—two distinct artists with such disparate musical styles that they cannot be reconciled in even the most basic way? I can only assume that most other deeply devoted listeners of Hendrix would be hard pressed to even consider what The Future Sound of London creates to be “music.”
Yesterday I was talking to Steve, the guy whose office is next to mine at work. He’s only been working here for a few months and although we’ve had several conversations since he started, I haven’t really gotten to know more about him until recently. But he and I are similar in a lot of ways, and these similarities include us each having girlfriends significantly younger than ourselves. (Julie’s seven years behind me, whereas Steve’s gal is Julie’s age but Steve himself is in his late 30s—making for a slightly wider gap between them.) So yesterday, in reference to his occasional feelings of pseudo-cradle robbing, Steve quoted the Steely Dan song “Hey Nineteen.”
Being 32 myself, I grew up in the era of Steely Dan, but I know nothing about them. Before today I wouldn’t have been able to name a single Steely Dan song. Nonetheless, I would be able to tell you that Steely Dan’s music “isn’t my thing.” Perhaps because general cultural awareness has allowed my subconscious mind to lump Steely Dan in with R.E.O. Speedwagon, Bob Seger, Blue Oyster Cult, and all those other successful-but-insipid bands from the late '70s/early '80s that I never took an interest in (preferring instead, at the beginning of my musical awakening, to focus on bands such as Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, the Doors, etc., whose creative peaks occurred well before I started listening seriously to music in the mid-80s).
But to Steve’s way of thinking, this gap in my musical proclivities was tantamount to missing a limb or an eye. I quote: “Certainly it helps a lot to have grown up liking a band, so I may not be able to turn you, but I will argue to the end that the Dan is one of the five greatest rock entities.” Furthermore, he stated that he is “a bigger music guy” than 95 percent of the people I’ll meet. Now, this is a significant statement to me because it means he really knows music, is intimately familiar with the history of rock ‘n’ roll, and has an understanding that many casual listeners don’t. People who know music may disagree with one another, even violently at times, about the validity of a certain group or performer, but they’re not going to be hardcore devotees of a band that is liked by someone like my mom.
This is not a put-down of my mom, mind you. What I mean to say is that she doesn’t care a whole lot about music. She spends most of her free time painting with watercolors or reading books or cruising around on a boat in the Florida Keys with my dad. Music is a footnote in her story, and a small one at that. She has an abbreviated collection of LPs that includes records by Air Supply, Barry Manilow, Joan Baez, and ABBA, to name just a few. In other words, my mom likes “nice” music. If it doesn’t belong in the easy listening section of a record store then she probably won’t listen to it.
Which isn’t to say that some of these bands don’t have merit. Thanks to fond memories of my brother and I setting up epic Star Wars action figure battles in our childhood home’s basement while listening to Barry Manilow Live, that album will always be one of my all-time favorite records, and no amount of sneering or laughing will ever change my mind so you might as well forget about it. Similarly, hearing the song “Super Trouper” will fill me with such a feeling of familial love that I can’t possibly dissociate ABBA from what it means to be truly happy. But under no circumstances would I argue that either Barry Manilow or ABBA is “one of the five greatest rock entities.”
Can Steely Dan even be considered rock, or do they belong in the aforementioned easy listening category? After listening twice to the compilation Steve so graciously burned for me, here are my thoughts on Steely Dan:
Most of the songs sound like nothing so much as the themes for a string of early ’80s television shows I never saw, perhaps opposite “Welcome Back Kotter,” “Three’s Company,” or “Bosom Buddies.” The vocalist(s) use a whole lot of falsetto and he/they are frequently supported by a trio of soulful backup singers. There are prominent horns (mostly trumpets and saxophones), jangly guitars, some jazzy piano, and that weird keyboard/electric organ hybrid so popular with so many bands of their era. A handful of the songs devolve into seemingly endless instrumental interludes after the singing is done. Don’t even get me started on “Aja,” an eight-minute song that could’ve wrapped up about five-and-a-half minutes early. Another extended epilogue (at the end of “Black Cow”) strongly evoked the jazzy background music in the PlayStation 2 game Gran Turismo 4, which, upon hearing it for the first time, struck me as being a totally bizarre, unexpected (and slightly hilarious) correlation.
So it goes without saying that my avoidance of Steely Dan up to this point in my life was no accident. But is their music objectively terrible and dated, or is it just not my thing? Is Steve crazy or are his tastes merely different from my own? (I know he includes Led Zeppelin, Frank Zappa, and Elvis Costello in his top 10, so he’s not completely hopeless as far as my own likes and dislikes are concerned.) Is my complete indifference to jazz and fusion my downfall here? Maybe trying to figure it out is a waste of time. As Steve said (and again I quote): “This will be worth your while, if you can get past the fact that it may not be your thing.”
Despite my severe allergic reactions to a lot of music on the radio nowadays, I do believe that something being one's thing and something being worth one's while aren’t always mutually exclusive. It’s best to keep an open mind, as DJ Mark Vidler would be happy to tell you. By way of example I present you with this mashup he created by combining Christina Aguilera’s “What a Girl Wants” and the Velvet Underground’s “Rock and Roll.” The first time I heard it I wanted to cry murder (being a pretty strong VU fan myself), but the more I listened to it the more I found myself enjoying it. Now I consider it to be one of the coolest songs I’ve heard in a long while. So there you go.
Any Steely Dan fans out there?
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