The music of Steely Dan is now very much un-disappeared, with the help of the aforementioned litany of memes, the archival resource that is Spotify, and a now-immortal (and ubiquitous) clip from The Sopranos featuring James Gandolfini belting out one of their early hits. “And so far as you’re using your brain, which as a critic, you really should be, music doesn’t suddenly disappear.” “There are cycles with things that are completely organic, that’s built into being alive,” he continues. … And there’s also indie rock, not quite the same thing, which people are also now finding tedious.” Your generation’s immediate elders are always putting it in your face. “There’s a knee-jerk, reactive way that cultural fashion evolves in its time,” says Robert Christgau, the “dean of American rock critics” and an avowed fan of the Dan. When it comes to the counterculture of the past few decades, Steely Dan’s music has been anything but part of that firmament. And in addition to the generational shift, there’s an aesthetic one: Pop music, broadly defined, gains its cultural currency through an antagonistic relationship to the status quo.
In that light, it’s easier to see Steely Dan’s music as its savvier observers always have: not a smooth-jazz accoutrement to the spoils of boomer aristocracy, but an über-sardonic critique of it. Their taste, then, is freed up to roam toward what they might have once overlooked as outré. Millennials are, of course, growing into their own soft middle age, where one’s identity is less defined by the cultural postures of youth than the big choices one might have made (or not made) while striking them.
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As they head into middle age, a lot of kids start to forgive their parents … so, as the prejudices of their youth crumble a bit, they’re free to be more objective about what they hear-or, they might even have a subliminal, sentimental attachment to sounds they heard in the womb, in the kitchen, in the back seat of their dad’s car-or something like that.”įagen’s insight is spot on, true to both his body of lyrical work and the sharp cultural criticism he’s written for outlets like Slate and Harper’s Bazaar. Of course they hate it (though, in truth the stuff we wrote used tropes more common to the popular music of their grandpops). “Kids and teens resent the domination of the parents-they begin as hostages to their dad’s taste in music. “Developmental psychology might figure in,” Fagen wrote to me after our conversation.
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Of all this, what about them led millennials to pluck the band from the genre’s back pages, placing them on the shelf of honor next to legacy acts like Fleetwood Mac or Bruce Springsteen who have renewed their cred in a similar fashion?Īttempting to explain why certain music goes in and out of vogue might be, to reference the quote apocryphally attributed to the comedian Martin Mull, like “dancing about architecture.” But in taking a stab at it, it’s only fair to offer the first opportunity to the architect of the music in question: Donald Fagen, Steely Dan’s lead vocalist, co-songwriter, and bandleader, whom I spoke with earlier this summer by phone.
The list goes on.Įven in their time, Steely Dan were one of rock’s most idiosyncratic outfits-they covered Duke Ellington, peppered their records with references to obscure spiritualist sci-fi authors, and foreswore the big-time arena rock touring circuit at their (and its) peak.
David Crosby, a fellow Boomer icon who’s become a Twitter favorite in his own right, earned blog press with a new Dan-inspired (and cowritten) tune. John Mulaney and Nick Kroll wrote a bit based on Steely Dan for their hit Broadway show Oh, Hello. Steely Dan, the jazz-rock combo whose musical and lyrical checkpoints include those most boomer-ish of pursuits such as cool jazz, hot guitar licks, tiki drinks, and expensive cocaine, have become an object of millennial obsession, spawning viral tweets, mash-ups, and even a custom run of streetwear emblazoned with their album art. But there are notable exceptions, and perhaps the most notable comes from the medium through which the boomers shaped America’s cultural identity for decades: classic rock. To look at American society over the past decade-from its memes, to its cultural criticism, to even its electoral politics-one might surmise the nation is consumed by a bitter and Manichean generational struggle, where no quarter is given and none taken over the power baby boomers wield as they cling to institutional power.
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