Steely Damn!

Aaron Wells

Assistant A&E and copy editor

Sagebrush 2-27-2001

Last Wednesday Eminem won three awards at the Grammys. He lost out, though, in "Album of the Year" to the obscure 70s jazz-pop band, Steely Dan, who took a total of four Grammys.

A 70s jazz-pop band named steely Dan, whose albums' songs sound like easy listening but have lyrics about incest? Who the hell listens to these people?

Well... I do.

As a long-time Steely Dan fan, this Grammy award was at first a vindication of sorts. For years, whenever my friends have overheard me listening to Steely Dan, I've had to respond to countless queries of "Who the hell is this?", "What kind of shit-music is this?", "How the fuck do you listen to this shit?" and "Fucking change this shit already!" As you can see, the music of Steely Dan arouses passion even in first time listeners. However, the recurring insinuation amongst my peer group was that no one has ever heard of Steely Dan and, therefore, they are worthless. This Grammy award seemed t say the reverse. Steely Dan may be obscure, but they are far from worthless. Like they book "Naked Lunch," from which they take their name (in a reference to a giant rubber dildo named Steely Dan), Steely Dan is part of the obscure underpinnings of our culture. They're a piece of the library of the intelligentsia who form the top-tier of our post-modern trickle-down culture. At least I know that Spike Lee and William Gibson dig them.

But now, a week later, the press seems to be backing up what my friends were saying before. MTV.com's headline, for instance: "Grammy's dominated by Dre, Eminem and, uh, Steely Dan".

I suppose this just means that MTV is not the intelligentsia.

It's pretty clear that what turns off the younger listeners is simply Steely Dan's sound. Only a handful of Steely Dan songs sound obviously angry or dark, and lead singer Donald Fagen's voice is admittedly very strange. Combine that with a sound that is based largely around jazz, which is these days equated with Kenny G, and one can understand why 20-somethings don't often listen to Steely Dan.

But Steely Dan is not Kenny G. They are remarkable as the band whose music always sounds cheerful but whose lyrics are often the most disturbing on the airwaves. Since they sound like easy-listening, I constantly hear Steely Dan songs in grocery stores and hospitals whose lyrics are about adultery, incest, murder, political rebellion, prostitution, heroin, cocaine, LSD, pedophilia, and, well, sometimes about hover-cars.

Take the album they won their award for, "Two Against Nature". One of its singles was "Cousin Dupree," about an unemployed slacker who, while leeching at his aunt's house, tries to seduce his cousin Jeanine. The chorus goes "Well we used to play when we were three/ How about a kiss for your cousin Dupree?"

I still remember seeing them perform on the Today Show last year to promote their album. They performed "Jack of Speed" and "Kid Charlemagne" in front of a crowd of soccer moms. The first song is about a speed addict, the second is about an LSD chemist ("On the hill the stuff was laced with kerosene/ But yours was kitchen clean").

Steely Dan is admirable to me for being the most ironic band I have ever heard. These men live irony. This is not Weird Al Yankovic's "look at me I'm doing a song about food" irony. This is not Barenaked Ladies' "I'm Canadian and can't get laid" irony. Every Steely Dan song drips with the irony that comes from being cool enough to live like a rock star, but smart enough to still make fun of it. This is irony that's so straight-faced it makes the normals feel superior.

Hm... perhaps I've said too much. Just keep listening to Eminem.