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September 29, 2008
AV CLUB/ANDYTOWN ON STEELY DAN
I haven't really been too enamored with The AV Club's weekly feature, POPLESS, in which a music reviewer goes through his record collection. This is mainly because music reviewers write with either objective reserve or aching nostalgia and end up trying to categorize the uncategorizable (pop music) according to a subjective standard that gets passed off as taste. With some exceptions, the list is a mix of esoteric selections and the Chuck Klosterman-inspired new phase of rock criticism, which is to suggest that someone or something you think is terrible (Billy Joel, Heavy Metal) has unseen merits that only a clever rock critic can expound.
That said, I was moved and excited by Noel Murray's latest entry on Steely Dan. I tend to agree that the Dan is something you reject and later appreciate, and I've come full circle on accept Becker and Fagan as among my five favorite groups of all time. Last year, they played a terribly crappy Music fest in Memphis and still managed to rock the place out. They had a great touring band and seemed to be enjoying themselves. Becker looks like a computer programmer and Fagan looks like a hep-cat heroin dealer from the early fifties, but these are two brilliant, ironic creative forces. Like most, I found their last two albums merely okay, but their work that culminated in (the underrated) GAUCHO makes up one of the best runs you'll ever listen to - if you give them a chance and don't write them off as the kind of music you'd hear on a cruise ship.
You probably have your reasons for hating them ("because they're awful," you'll say); or you'll characterize them only for their more overplayed radio hits like "Reelin in the Years," "Dirty Work" or "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," which you don't like for whatever reason. All three work as breezy pop songs, but all are also about rejection, uncertainty, moral ambiguity, and settling in to the crap that surrounds you with reluctant grace.
"Rikki" is probably their most derided song. It often gets confused with a truly terrible song about a phone number, that "867-5309" jingle that shows up on every "Superhits of the 80s" album commercial that scrolls your screen at 1 AM. But while that slumber-party staple is about a guy who wants to call a girl, "Rikki" is not. Maybe it is about a girl, but it appears to be about a career move, about the only good thing that has ever happened to Rikki. The number may not even be a phone number. Becker and Fagan are smart enough to know the many ambiguities that unravel from the word "number" (and "call"), and that the stipulative definition might throw people off, making a song about desperation and desire also curiously acceptable as a dance number.
"Rikki dont lose that number
You dont wanna call nobody else
Send it off in a letter to yourself
Rikki dont lose that number
Its the only one you own
You might use it if you feel better
When you get home"
Listen to the song again. Listen to the intensity that surrounds the line "Its the only one you own;" the Dan don't write love songs. Find one. Rikki is a loser who has the chance to be happy when he gets "home," but he may blow it; it may turn into the kind of unremitting pain and loss that he's been used to his whole life.
This song and many other great ones come off PRETZEL LOGIC, arguably their best album. I prefer KATY LIED, which closes with the transcendent "Throw Back The Little Ones" - a coda in that song has become my academic motto:
"Hot Licks and Rhetoric Don't Count Much For Nothing. Be Glad If You Can Use What You Can Borrow."
Over the last year, I've completed the relatively easy accomplishment of collecting every pre-1982 album that Steely Dan produced. I don't do it out of some commitment to irony. I do it because they have the most unique sound I've ever heard.
Send it off in a letter to yourself.
| By Andytown | 10:18 PM
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