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Marc Oxborrow's avatar

Enjoyed your discussion with Mr. Hyden! Looking forward to the documentary.

Minor editorial note: "cede," not "seed."

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Bo Adan's avatar

Ugh! I am—and not as a knee-jerk response, nor because Donald Fagen needs the likes of no-one-from-nowhere me (he doesn’t!) to champion him—easily in the camp alongside Mr. Fagen's “Go fuck yourself” to the filmmaker who, among others, places Steely Dan in the warm-fuzzy of anodyne sub-genre “Yacht”-rock, … and notwithstanding the filmmaker’s self-congratulatory (and self-aggrandizing?) posture that Fagen is somehow being ironic and not sincerely telling him to fuck-the-fuck-off.

[Aside: Even if Fagen is being ALSO humorous-ironic-sarcastic, his epithet is at least—as tropes such as Cliché and Passive-Aggressive also INCLUDE—a substantive truth: i.e., DON’T call “Yacht”-rock what Walter and I had been doing for a half-century now, namely investing in genuinely STILL nonpareil creative songwriting (that is, within music/lyrics; other genres/artists—e.g., novelists such as James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, et al.—certainly can lay claim as avatars if not progenitors of the Becker-Fagen encyclopedic wit).]

I appreciate that YOU meanwhile call to attention the distinction between the sound- and sound-adjacency of indeed progenitors Becker/Fagen, then copied or mimicked or whatever by other bands … and Yes, too, by other musicians in the Dan pantheon. But none of that justifies Hyden’s presumption. I mean, just a for a quick-and-easy example: I love the Grateful Dead AND Joni Mitchell; and lo-and-behold, Garcia, et al., backed Joni here and there and on the “Court and Spark” album. But that does NOT mean that Joni’s music/lyrics have anything to do with Grateful Dead music/lyrics. Yeeesh!

Perhaps I’m in some minority or minor-plurality here, curmudgeonly or otherwise, and I don’t need to invoke some sort of argumentum ad populum, but as we don’t know each other, I will confess that fellow “deep” Steely Dan fans (some east coast; some west coast—all professionals/academics/touring-musicians, et al.—I’m an ol’ west-coast English Lit. guy and writer/poet/editor) indeed feel likewise: that Steely Dan’s music and especially lyrics are still ahead of their time, and in any case not relegated to one or another easy classification, and in EVERY case, certainly not in the same solar system … or galaxy … or universe as, say, the Yacht Rock of “Reminiscing” (Little River Band)—though, as Seinfeld would say, “…not that there’s anything wrong with [Yacht Rock]. :-)

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