Everybody but the millions of fans who attend Rod's shows thinks he was never again as good as solo on Mercury and clowning around with the Faces pre-1975, and I agree. True, I'd say something similar of every other artist named up top while granting that, Mitchell excepted, the drop-off was somewhat more drastic with Rod. Whether the same applies to Steely Dan, however, is a trickier question. Steely Dan were and remain perfectionists, chord-obsessed jazz nuts who in 1974 made what seemed a rational economic decision--they quit the road to turn out better and better records, because records were where the money was (and also because they're neater). Commercially, their coup was 1977's Aja, which apotheosized the sonically opulent AOR aesthetic at a level of difficulty glossy rivals like Supertramp and Journey couldn't approach--and which won them a jazz-lite following that makes their original fans very nervous, because we're not suburban cornballs and want everyone to know it.
Everybody but the millions of fans who attend Rod's shows thinks he was never again as good as solo on Mercury and...
DALE
Everything this faggot has ever written boils down to "Am I cool for thinking this?"
What up with this goody niggas glasses LMAO
He was rocking the nu male look 30 years before the term was invented.
>I hate art music and rock and roll should be of the people/the common man
>yeah us sophisticates who listen to Steely Dan not that cornball pleb stuff like Supertramp and Journey
He's just as much admitted his real love is jazz and he thinks rock is an inferior art form.
Cuckgau is the ultimate cuck.
It consistently floors me how he gives groups like SD a pass for things he'd find absolutely intolerable if a group like Yes did them.
Probably because Steely Dan are relatively unreconstituted.
Meaning...what?
Well I'm listening to TRS now. It's not bad although I wish I knew what they were singing about.
The Fez is about some garment he likes to wear during sex for kink purposes and nobody's going to make him stop no matter how weird it seems.
Yeah SD are aight.
Album?
Vespertine
wat
Oh, fuck off, cuckgau, Steely Dan are in my top-3 of all fucking time, but your description of them is one of the worst I've ever fucking read. Go eat some silicate.
>some garment
Nigger, it's literally a condom, what the fuck. You know, a tiny little fez for your dick.
Also why is he even mentioning them in the same sentence as J*rney?
Because I guess Steely Dan are classified as AOR by him, which is about as apt a description as calling them Yacht Rock. So, he compares them to other AOR bands. I don't know. It's Christgau, the retardation is to be expected.
Aja [ABC, 1977]
Carola suggests that by now they realize they'll never get out of El Lay, so they've elected to sing in their chains like the sea. After all, to a certain kind of reclusive aesthete, well-crafted West Coast studio jazz is as beautiful as anything else, right? Only I'm no recluse. I hated this record for quite a while before I realized that, unlike The Royal Scam, it was stretching me some; I still find the solo licks of Larry Carlton, Victor Feldman, et al. too fucking tasty, but at least in this context they mean something. I'm also grateful to find Fagen and Becker's collegiate cynicism in decline; not only is "Deacon Blues" one of their strongest songs ever, it's also one of their warmest. Now if only they'd rhymed "I cried when I wrote this song" with "Sue me if I play it wrong," instead of "Sue me if I play too long." Prefering long to wrong could turn into their fatal flaw. B+
>glad to see their collegiate cynicism in decline
Man, what the shit, Aja is cynical as fuck.
They had a friendly rivalry going with the Eagles.
>Prefering long to wrong could turn into their fatal flaw.
Just look at St. Anger for proof of this.
Journey were awful, cheesy suburban white teen sex music. Steely Dan targeted jaded college hipsters. The two bands didn't even have any overlap in fanbase or have much else in common stylistically or otherwise.
tl;dr fuck this guy
They're not bad but I've never related to that whole lounge lizard aesthetic.