Steely Dan: "Steely Dan's name has been popping up as a hip musical crush. Remember, this glossy bop-pop was the indifferent aristocracy to punk rock's stone-throwing in the late 70's. People fought

Pitchfork's 1970s album list included no Steely Dan. They found room for only one Roxy Music album. They picked the wrong Randy Newman, left out the Roches and Pere Ubu and Michael Hurley, and picked only one record with George Clinton on it.

Um....where was I....oh yeah....No Steely Dan! Mother fucker.

Look, there is something about the Pitchfork aesthetic that is so yick. They are so anti-Jann Wenner that they become some kind of creepy hipster yawn weiners. Let's check out their number one albums of the decades: 70s: Low. 80s: Daydream Nation. 90s and 00s: Radiohead & Radiohead, OK and Kid A.

Any patterns emerging here? All of their decade winner choices bespeak a certain kind of extended adolescence, a fetishization of alienation as some kind of major artistic statement. Steely Dan in particular, as well as the other bands named above (two Radiohead albums, holy crybaby), were adult in a way (compromised by life!) that is probably still beyond the Pitchfork crew, or at least their official version of themselves.

i know this thread's TITLE comes from pitchfork being smh and awful re: steely dan but at this late date i don't know if we even need to dwell on it.

no Steely Dan in the Pitchfork 70's list?? that's incredible.

a tangent, but daydream nation does this weird thing where it seems to fetishize adolescent alienation not from within, but from sort of fond, aesthetically motivated remove. underneath the artfully scruffy disaffection, it seems to be reaching towards the comfortable adult acceptance that characterizes sonic youth this side of Y2K. like the key line is not "out here in this whirlpool world, dreaming of a pitchfork kiss" but "your sister is a beauty when she's naked, like my kid."

but yeah...

OK contenderizer, I'll give it a bit more chance. I don't have anything against Sonic Youth but the surface structure bores me the way that....oh I guess the way that the surface structure of Steely Dan bores others!

hey a a s (sd) I think somebody ought to dwell on the Pitchfork album lists, given the alleged influence of that site. Anyway, not here is fair. I'm surprised there weren't Pitchfork album list threads formed long ago.

o god, believe me, there's no shortage of pitchfork list discussion on ILX (starting to feel like someone's pulling my leg here).

i can see why DN might seem boring. it's more uniform gray, less texturally varied than either sister or goo. suppose that helped it seem like a statement album at the time, but at this remove, i like the songs better than the whole.

can't get too worked up over pitchfork's failure to recognize steely dan. lot of great music in the 70's, and though i do like them, i'm not the world's biggest steely dan fan.

Ok pulled leg, pardon my newness to the site. I did find a discussion of that particular list - about fifty threads in - once I just searched for "Pitchfork". I see why there would be a move to NOT talk about Pitchfork given the kind of search results I came across.

I see why there would be a move to NOT talk about Pitchfork given the kind of search results I came across.

advice i should probably take to heart

plus welcome to ILX, challops to your right, clusterfucks to your left, mind the bobbins as you board

Sonic Youth and Steely Dan are prob my 2 favorite bands of all time so any attempt to put one down to benefit the other just makes my head hurt, it's possible to love both

I had a huge SY phase followed by a Dan phase a few years later and still love both groups. I guess the midway point between the two would be the Minutemen (or maybe Joni Mitchell?).

there was an issue of sonic death, the old sonic youth fanzine, that had a quote from a Walter Becker interview where he said something like "I always check out the latest Sonic Youth alb", def don't see the two in conflict either

woah that's awesome

al do you like the new thurston band song? i really like it. started a thread but nobody cared:

body/head -vs- chelsea light moving

maybe i like it cuz it sounds like the old days. i dunno. but i'll take it. i love the guitar solo at the end.

oh but anyway i would totally go see these 3 dudes if i didn't have to go to a casino or something. saratoga would be a great spot. i saw steely dan there when they first went out again on tour.

Sonic Youth and Steely Dan are prob my 2 favorite bands of all time so any attempt to put one down to benefit the other just makes my head hurt, it's possible to love both

They're both top 5 for me.

ha i just remembered this post

jaymc wrote this on thread Chicago: Please don't park your Lamborghini on the highway on board I Love Everything on Sep 4, 2007

Al Shipley = Alex in Baltimore.

Maybe we should start a band together! He loves Steely Dan and Sonic Youth. Although he likes hip-hop way more than I do.

lol

i'm getting a practice space, lemme know when you can come by and jam

The tweetrage is already happening:

Anthony Bourdain
@Bourdain

It's wrong that dark, literate lyrics like Steely Dan's were set to dentist office music...Imagine Steely Dan catalogue performed by Mark Lanegan.

Bourdain in point-missing non-shockah

hmm no thank you!

tbh i WOULD be up for a lanegan album of dan covers but yeah shut up guy

big month for my @steelydanlyrics twitter account!

http://oi45.tinypic.com/xfcob9.jpg

http://oi48.tinypic.com/2mm6ds5.jpg

nice

klosterman totes thinks your the van halen of twitter accounts

(or whatever)

damnnnn. i hate to say it m@tt but your life might be all downhill from here.

i fear so

also, there was part of me that was a bit disappointed i never got a cease & desist from steely dan's lawyers....man i would have framed that

i'd frame this

http://www.highfidelity.net/catalog/images/ABC758.jpg

I think Bourdain and Marc Maron talked shit about the Dan on WTF. i almost had to stop listening to that podcast

i can't stand Steely Dan. They are terrible.

Remember, this glossy bop-pop was the indifferent aristocracy to punk rock's stone-throwing in the late 70's.

Only a fool would say that. xp

People fought.........................................

...and died so our generation could listen to something better. Okay, so they died of overdoses and car crashes. They still had soul. Keep up the good fight. Put down this sports-utility vehicle of a record. As with the urban yuppie driver, the four-wheel drive is never activated.

Rashida Jones stars in the new film Celeste and Jesse Forever. She's also the daughter of superstar music producer Quincy Jones and actress Peggy Lipton. Jones says her father is a "record collection all unto himself," but she had something else in mind when NPR's Audie Cornish asked her about the song she most remembers from when she was growing up.

"My mom, I remember as a kid, came home with Steely Dan, and "Hey Nineteen" was her favorite song," Jones says. "We had a lot of jazz growing up, and soul, R&B, classical ... ['Hey Nineteen'] was the first time I had heard something that was like this '70s bluesy rock, that was really lyrical.

"It kind of opened me up to being a music nerd," Jones says. "Those guys are music nerds, and that's what's so great about them. They like complex rhythms, and they're interested in the mathematics of music."

<3

New Donald Fagen solo album due in October!!!

Donald Fagen's fourth solo album for Reprise Records, Sunken Condos, will be released on Tuesday, October 16 2012. His first three solo albums, The Nightfly, Kamakiriad and Morph the Cat comprised the project known as the Nightfly Trilogy. Sunken Condos begins a new chapter in the creative evolution of this innovative artist, whose career is still going strong after forty years.

The nine tracks on Sunken Condos were co-produced by Michael Leonhart and Donald. All but one track, an Ashkenazi recasting of Isaac Hayes' Out of the Ghetto, are new Fagen originals. Some familiar names from the Steely Dan family of players are on hand (Jon Herington, the Steely Dan horns, Freddie Washington) plus some new faces. The word is that, from now on, everything Donald does has got to be funky.

hmmm - tbh Morph was such a bore that i'll approach this very tentatively

i was just listening to Kamakiriad the other day, good album

Morph may have had the best bass of any album I've ever heard.

hmmm - tbh Morph was such a bore that i'll approach this very tentatively

― licorice oratorio (baaderonixx), Friday, August 24, 2012

I agree but I'm still curious.

yeah i love to hear what these crusty old geniuses can do in their later years. Becker's last album was great imo.

Yeah I love that Becker album. "Darkling Down"!

Fagen describes on his website as "an Ashkenazi recasting of Isaac Hayes' Out Of The Ghetto".

klezmer?