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

moronic - some, imagine that in pop/rock music
untrained - yeah, but so??
reactionaries - highly debatable
not musicians - subjective overstatement at best, virtuosity not necessary to create music, see several thousand years of folk music.

Moronic: Have you seen the Sex Pistols when they were on BBC for the first time? If that isn't mornic than I don't know what is. Rock and Pop maybe be bastions of moronicism in general, but Steely as well as many Motown artists are not.

How is reactionary debatable?! When you react against something - ie. 70's rock complexities and indulgences by taking something and mocking it or attacking it, then you have a reactionary. Creating something new for the sake of innovation and love is very different.

And I didn't say they weren't musicians, I said they were celebrity-driven first, musicians second. If you can argue that Malcolm Mclaren didn't create the Sex Pistols as a fashion statement designed to attract media attention - then I don't know what 70's you grew up in.

O RLY? THEN WHAT?

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In almost all cultures, music is sacred. It is a great responsibility to play it and communicate the ideas and feelings from a deep inner source that cannot be translated in any other way.

Think of it like this, many christians around the world were horrified when Bush said he walked around the White House lawn and thought about whether he should invade Iraq. He said that his answer came when God told him this was the right thing to do. Okay, not even the pope claims to speak for God. He is merely an emissary who has the final say on interpreting scripture. The outrage that musicians feel when music is paraded as "art" by fools in make-up who rehash the rehashed and who are merely marketing tools of "The Man", is similar (in a less serious sense of course - people don't die from music) to the way a christian would take Bush's blasphemous and delusional comments. One of the main foundations of over three-thousand years of Jadeo-Christian culture is the Ten Commandments. #1 was - Thou Shalt Not Kill. Okay, so taking Bush's comments into context you can come to one of three conclusions if we are to believe that the Commandments have any integrity.

1. God told Moses "Thou Shalt Not Kill". 3600 years later he has changed is mind.

2. Moses was deluded, Bush is actually the greatest prophet of all time.

3. Bush is a deluded moron who is utterly faithless and ignorant.

Now because of this ignorance, 10's of thousands of civilians get their houses blown up and their children killed by rockets. It's an extreme example, I know, but as mentioned above, if we all treated music as sacred, then a few people might actually begin to treat human life as sacred...

I thought this thread was full of Jeff Beck fans! Ooops. Stumbled into the Punk Rock firing lines again!

I am sorry if I offended anyone. I thought that what punk rock stood for was dialogue. Freedome of speech. If the thread has to be closed because I crossed the line, then I think that that's censorship. The guy from Bad Religion was willing to keep it open, and I don't think that there is a better speokesman for punk rock than him.

More like, a couple chapters in the Bible later.

It sounds like you need a hug and a drum circle.

I think they (Steely Dan) are another victim of classic rock radio's tendency to over-play certain songs.

This is exactly it for me, at least with the radio station I listened to growing up. They played the same "hits" over and over and over again and I just learned to cringe every time I heard them, no matter how cool I thought it was that they were named after a sex toy. Although: I did love "Hey Nineteen" when it came out, but I'm still not sure if that was the song itself or my adolescent whatnot reacting to the fabulousness of the Solid Gold dancers uh "interpreting" it every week while it was still on the charts.

Maybe I'll come around to the band some day, but it's going to take a lot of time and possibly some therapy.

-- Sean Carruthers (oneiro...) (webmail), February 13th, 2004 5:08 PM. (SeanC) (link)

Anyhow, OTM

Fagen: But isn't it true that the Leone films, with their elevation of mythic structures, their comic book visual style and extreme irony, are now perceived as signaling an aesthetic transmutation by a generation of artists and filmmakers? And isn't it also true that your music for those films reflected and abetted Leone's vision by drawing on the same eerie catalog of genres - Hollywood western, Japanese samurai, American pop, and Italian Opera? That your scores functioned both "inside" the film as a narrative voice and "outside" the film as the commentary of a winking jester? Put it all together and doesn't it spell "postmodern", in the sense that there has been a grotesque encroachment of the devices of art and, in fact, an establishment of a new narrative plane founded on the devices themselves? Isn't that what's attracting lower Manhattan?

Morricone: [ shrugs ]

Probably it's that he used the same musicians as SD. And I think it's possible to hear Simon's first album as a folkier blueprint for what SD would do (studio obsessive, New York-centric snarky lyricism).

i'm getting worried about how i feel about them, actually.

I've got every Dan album besides Two Against Nature and Alive In America. My local store never seems to have those.

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