Steely Dan's Two Against Nature

Steely Dan has always been a shifty customer in the eyes of the Indie Cred Bureau and its predecessors. From their beginnings as prematurely middle-aged jazz lovers trying to sell songs to Jay and the Americans in the crumbling years of the Brill Building, to their suspicious ability to write hit songs (even if their first hit's opening lines rhymed "gunnin'" with "done in"), all the way to their reunion seemingly timed to nudge forward their induction into the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker have always had the huckster's instinct of how to put one over on a crowd - even, or especially, if that crowd was never particularly sure what it was getting. And it's that perversity, that pride in simultaneously fulfilling and subverting commercial imperatives, that's perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Steely Dan, their sheer unwillingness to play by the rules of hip and their often undisguised glee when, even if years or decades later, the trend-besotted hipoisie is forced to acknowledge that, yeah, Steely Dan had been there before. Still, when I read a couple of years ago that Becker and Fagen were actually recording an album together to be released under the Steely Dan name, my usual cynicism regarding such reunions was on red alert - or at least some shade of orange. In part this was because what I'd heard of their off-and-on work during the eighties and nineties - one track or so from each of their solo albums on which the other had collaborated, a live track featuring Michael McDonald bleating away on some old soul classic - hadn't terribly impressed me as very essential. In fact I didn't pick up Two Against Nature until I saw a used copy cheap. I figured that Becker and Fagen's notorious studio perfectionism would make a positively icky mix given current studio technology, and the album would be a better composed and more wittily written collection of sterile poop. I was worried that either they'd try to pretend that two decades hadn't passed since the last Steely Dan album, or (worse) that they'd throw breakbeats and samples all over the record in a musical equivalent of a fifty-year-old man trying to pick up a teenager by referring to, oh, Run-DMC or somebody. (Yeah, I know.) In fact, although lacking the beats and samples, the CD kind of is that last thing, and quite knowingly so. See, Steely Dan knows they're utterly irrelevant to the current musical landscape, and as a couple of folks who I suspect have unpublished short stories stashed away in a drawer somewhere, they took that situation and made characters out of it, characters who inhabit these songs. And the songs themselves are perfectly pitched to convey those desperate characters, characters who are lost somewhere between clueless and cynical when contemplating their own irrelevance to the situation. In other words, they've gone and made a virtue out of their music's very outdatedness, made it signify, and thereby, with a bravura application of postmodern virtual quotation marks, given us a reason to pay attention. "Janie Runaway" presents nearly exactly the teen pickup scenario above, with its narrator's perfectly inept (and probably incomprehensible to Janie) references to "You be the showgirl and I'll be Sinatra." And "Cousin Dupree" presents a sad sack looking for some "down-home family romance" by hitting on his cousin. Its final verse needs to be quoted in full: I said babe with my boyish charm and good looks How can you stand it for one more day She said maybe it's the skeevy look in your eyes Or that your mind has turned to applesauce The dreary architecture of your soul I said - but what is it exactly turns you off? And lest one think we're only laughing at these guys, there's "What a Shame About Me," whose narrator has the grace to know he's a loser, and who actually turns down his ex-flame's casual offer. The musical settings are adept, with the Dan's faux-jazz creating an aura of forced pseudo-sophistication, the putting-on of airs, like a CD you play only when you have a date over. And yet the music is also interesting in its own right, such as the oddly harmonized descending sequence that spells out the chorus of "Gaslighting Abbie," or the title track's slinky and tricky triple meter, or the way the chorus of "Janie Runaway" teases as if it's schoolyard taunt, which makes the song both creepier and funnier. I mean, it's good to be able to relate to those younger than you - but only in such a manner that doesn't attract the interest of the vice squad. A musician of my acquaintance once pointed out that one thing he really admired about the Beatles was their ability to, in 1966, write a song like "She's Leaving Home." In the midst of an intensely youth-oriented culture, bearing a host of clichés about older generations, that song dared to sympathize with its protagonist's parents, even as it clearly knew how little those parents understood their daughter - whose own naivete is also painfully apparent. In a culture where calling a musician "fat and old" is about the worst insult you can hurl, it's still fairly rare to see musicians in their thirties, forties, and fifties addressing the fact of their own lives. Except, of course, that there's a whole nostalgic boomer-based market not only for aged, vintage tracks but also for the middle-aged leftovers from that era, most of whom have, unlike cheese, only grown blander with age. And if I'm not fooling myself, I'll recognize that Two Against Nature won a Grammy, forchrissakes, nearly a badge of admission to AARP meetings all by itself, and that the last guy I met who was raving about the album was a walking stereotype: sadly single in his late forties, fat and balding, with a graying ponytail ratifying his sad sense that "rebellion" of such a surface cosmetic was worth pursuing anymore. But it's always a bad idea to judge a record by its fans, or blame it for them. As usual, Steely Dan has both deified and defied marketing judgment, since fans like the guy above quite often don't see the way the knife twists in those lyrics, the way their own bland tastes are constantly satirized by Steely Dan (see the band's hilarious website at www.steelydan.com - and notice the running gag at the expense of the Eagles). So people like me, born long enough ago to remember when the only CD was Michael Jackson's Thriller but who still pays attention to new music, get to feel all superior to the rest of the band's audience, much in the way the cognoscenti in the band's heyday could lord it over the top-forty audience buying "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" - "Heh-heh - I'll betcha Junior's mom doesn't know the band's named after a dildo!" - and chuckle over the arcane lyrics and references to dead jazzers' chord sequences. And if that's not a guilty pleasure, I don't know what is.