No. It’s not. I’m out before the end of the first bar.
Not here to poop on the band. Thought I’d give ‘em a shot again and see if my opinion has changed from my last listen.
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Steely Dan..
- Thread starter bubinga5
- Start date
No. It’s not. I’m out before the end of the first bar.
Not here to poop on the band. Thought I’d give ‘em a shot again and see if my opinion has changed from my last listen.
There are a lot of people who don't like them. There are plenty of people who don't like jazz, but also plenty of people who don't like metal, country, or really you could just pick any music and it will have it's fans and it's detractors.
I don't listen to metal; I know there are all sorts of subgenres that fans can recognize, but to me it all sounds similar because I haven't listened to enough of it to understand the difference. I won't tell you that the differences aren't there, though.
That someone lumps in Steely Dan and Air Supply together speaks to the same lack of understanding, but at least I know what it is I'm lacking and I don't try to tell other people that all metal sounds the same when, clearly, they know metal better than I do.
Totally happy to respect differences in taste. Not as happy to be told via implication that I don't hear well or understand what I've been listening to for years.
Well, hey, thanks for taking the time to wade through the pages of a thread devoted to praise for a band so that you could let us all know that you don't care for them, but you're definitely not here to say anything negative about them.
First, thanks for pulling back to something less personal. Also, that's a good argument!
So, guy in an Internet video says, "based on criteria X, Y, Z, I'm coining a label for a category of music that includes A, B, C, D, etc." Steely Dan is explicitly named in that list. Label sticks, becomes part of common usage, now used by every major service that categorizes music. If you polled a whole bunch of people who said they knew the term "yacht rock" and asked them if that category includes Steely Dan, I'm positive that the overwhelming majority would say that it does.
So, the counter argument basically goes "I'm a fan of B and I don't like the label, so I disagree with the X, Y, Z criteria that defined the category in the first place." There's definitely merit to this—I certainly agree with y'all that Steely Dan is an outlier in the category on certain things. However those aren't the things that originally defined the category, and more importantly, aren't how people generally understand the category. To wit, I think the only people who think Steely Dan isn't yacht rock is a small collection of devoted SD fans who just don't like the label yacht rock. Y'all can object all you want (and LBS’s objection is a good one), but you won't change how basically everyone else in the world understands the term. But I think it’s a strong enough argument that I see why I won't be able to change your minds, either, so I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.
Of course, this whole discussion is orthogonal to my original point anyway. Being yacht rock is NOT why I don't like Steely Dan. (But I explained this badly, so that’s on me.) As noted, the label didn't come about until 2005, and so I have 20ish years of not liking them before I ever even heard the label. What I don't like about Steely Dan just happens to apply to other yacht rock (which is why I brought it up). It’s not just yacht rock, though—in general, I don't enjoy most soft rock, yacht or otherwise. Again, not because of the label, but because what I don't like happens to be true for most things that have that label.
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Well, this is the thing. Someone's always got to p*** on someone's parade. Someone in this thread has to announce that he respects me less because I have a considered and thoughtful opinion about why this band isn't like any other band, tells me that I'm "less than" for it, and can't leave people alone to enjoy what they like.
With all due respect, that's not what this thread is about. Coming here to dump on the enjoyment of others is not a class move.
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That’s a gross mischaracterization of what happened here.
The reason I’ve always respected you is because you do consistently express considered and thoughtful opinions, but this time you just said “so says a guy who doesn’t like them,” and ignored the rest of my post, which is NOT considered or thoughtful, and so your post struck me as out of character for you.
Your next post was your usual considered and thoughtful, to be sure.
I never dumped on anyone’s enjoyment. I never said Steely Dan were bad, or that people shouldn’t enjoy them, or there’s anything wrong with people enjoying them. Please don’t put words in my mouth.
Someone literally said “nobody doesn’t like Steely Dan” and I said that wasn’t true because I don’t. So I guess we’ve reached the point where simply not liking something someone else likes is now dumping on it? Give me a break.
But even still, you’re absolutely right, I’ve diverted things from the spirit of the thread (though that wasn’t my intention) so I’ll leave.
Yeah, that was me making a play on words mimicking an old Sara Lee ad campaign.
Kind of weird that it escalated to this... But hey, TalkBass I guess.
The internet. It's the internet. People can't just let other people have their happiness!
I tend towards the old line about 'there's only two kinds of music: good and bad'. I tend to shy away from labels for music, as the contrarian in me somehow dimly views doing that as the work of Music Industry Professionals or Radio Consultants, life forms I view dimly.
This does make me think of a situation I ran into in the 80's when I was working MI retail. Had a kid that was just GONE on this new Van Halen stuff. Wrecked a nice G+L guitar, and chiseled in a pair of X2N pickups and a very early version Floyd, just hacked it up to get what he wanted like Ed did his axes (although I did get a laugh when he'd floor it and his Marshall half-stack and make PA announcements talking through those very warm pickups!).
Of course, he thought Country Music was just junk. I tried to reason with this 20-something that in the best of any good music there were things that were universal, that you could take something from. Wasn't hearing me at all.
At the same time VH was hitting, so was Ricky Skaggs. So, he came in one day, I said 'come here, you need to hear this', and put on Skaggs' version of 'Country Boy' with all those leads flying by at 90mph, all flatpicked, no pedals, no Marshalls, no hammer-ons, no pull-offs, no tricks. He was utterly dumbstruck by how these bluegrass-influenced players could just fly like that unplugged. I never heard any static again about country music, he was enough musician to 'get it'.
I understand it's easy to call this or that 'yacht rock', but until you get it under your hands and can play 'Aja', "Bhoddisatva', 'Glamour Profession', and so many others from the SD catalog, with all respect, it's talking out of your hat. In all commercially viable music, the range is from dreck to divine, no matter who the artist is. And this is today music from a different, older generation, hopelessly old and out of touch in many ways in the current music market, and that it still has a place tells me a lot.
This does make me think of a situation I ran into in the 80's when I was working MI retail. Had a kid that was just GONE on this new Van Halen stuff. Wrecked a nice G+L guitar, and chiseled in a pair of X2N pickups and a very early version Floyd, just hacked it up to get what he wanted like Ed did his axes (although I did get a laugh when he'd floor it and his Marshall half-stack and make PA announcements talking through those very warm pickups!).
Of course, he thought Country Music was just junk. I tried to reason with this 20-something that in the best of any good music there were things that were universal, that you could take something from. Wasn't hearing me at all.
At the same time VH was hitting, so was Ricky Skaggs. So, he came in one day, I said 'come here, you need to hear this', and put on Skaggs' version of 'Country Boy' with all those leads flying by at 90mph, all flatpicked, no pedals, no Marshalls, no hammer-ons, no pull-offs, no tricks. He was utterly dumbstruck by how these bluegrass-influenced players could just fly like that unplugged. I never heard any static again about country music, he was enough musician to 'get it'.
I understand it's easy to call this or that 'yacht rock', but until you get it under your hands and can play 'Aja', "Bhoddisatva', 'Glamour Profession', and so many others from the SD catalog, with all respect, it's talking out of your hat. In all commercially viable music, the range is from dreck to divine, no matter who the artist is. And this is today music from a different, older generation, hopelessly old and out of touch in many ways in the current music market, and that it still has a place tells me a lot.
Amen. I've been in bands with people who can play, and have played, all of that. And I know many people who won't play it because they really don't want to put in the time. Or can't be bothered.
The guitarist I played with all throughout the 80's used to play Bodhisattva with me in the last band we were in together. He played all the harmonizing guitar parts himself, simultaneously. Nobody I've played with since can play that. One band I'm in now stopped doing it when one of our guitarists left, and the guitarist who remains is one of the best I've played with here in this town, but he can't play that.
People either appreciate the talent and ability involved, or they don't. The roster of players SD brought in is off the hook. That's not to take away from some of the other great studio bands that (rightfully) do wear the "yacht rock" label, like Toto. No coincidence that their drummer also played on a lot of the SD stuff, I guess. But the composition rises to a different level, even if the players are astounding on either end.
I doubt I'll ever encounter another guitarist who could do what my friend John could do.
The intro really sounds a lot like Zappa, or Zappa sounds a lot like this intro. Nice blast from the past!
Katy Lied was the first to feature Michael McDonald on background vocals. He made such an impact he had a pic on the back cover. There was some sort of technical issue with the mix and the band was not happy with the result. I could never figure out what it was because the LP sounded fine to me. The musicianship was stellar as usual. This came out just before the disco craze started to take over.
Steely Dan's lack of high decibel aggression is probably the least important characteristic of their sound, but also probably the easiest characteristic for non-musical people to hear. So, they get lumped into an airplay category with Air Supply. The same thing happened to Steps Ahead, who were sometimes stuck in the smooth jazz radio format based on very superficial aspects of their music. I'm sure that Donald Fagen, (and Randy Brecker) are not too concerned.
Cool, some bozo on the internet christen's steely Dan yacht rock almost 30 years after their main sequence of albums is is done. Must be true!
I lived with a bunch of dudes who were major Steely Dan fans, they had all of the old albums and played them with great regularity. The Dan were never my favorite band, but I respected the thought and talent that went into making the music they made. I found them a bit slick for my taste.
I ended up moving away, and missing these dear friends, so to help keep them in my heart I bought the Citizen Steely Dan box set, and it lived in my truck for years. Now I count myself as a huge fan, and have learned a bunch of their songs on keyboard.
It all comes down to a matter of preference and taste, as far as I can tell. Similarly, these same friends and I used to argue about which was the better funk band; Parliament/Funkadelic or Tower of Power? A fruitless conversation, but when you have plenty of spare time and lots of weed, these are the discussions that happen sometimes...
I ended up moving away, and missing these dear friends, so to help keep them in my heart I bought the Citizen Steely Dan box set, and it lived in my truck for years. Now I count myself as a huge fan, and have learned a bunch of their songs on keyboard.
It all comes down to a matter of preference and taste, as far as I can tell. Similarly, these same friends and I used to argue about which was the better funk band; Parliament/Funkadelic or Tower of Power? A fruitless conversation, but when you have plenty of spare time and lots of weed, these are the discussions that happen sometimes...
