Steely Dan

Music history too often relegates Steely Dan to the level of bloodless soft rockers like The Doobie Brothers and Toto: technically perfect but emotionally dead music made to play on high-end stereo systems while the cocaine and ludes were being passed around. But although Donald Fagen and Walter Becker did eventually get so wrapped up in studio perfectionism that their music suffered (1980's Gaucho is nearly unlistenable in its glossiness), much more interesting things lurked just under the pristine surfaces. Notorious misanthropes--during their stint in '60s AM-radio hitmakers Jay and the Americans, Jay supposedly once compared them onstage to serial killers Charles Starkweather and Charles Manson -- Becker and Fagen had a distaste not only for love songs, but for pop songwriting tropes in general, so their lyrics tended toward knotty skeins of in-jokes and impenetrable metaphors hinting at a dark, cynical view of humanity. Combine this with music that owes as much to Stan Kenton and Duke Ellington's big bands or late '50s Miles Davis as it does to rock and roll and it's clear why the punks wanted nothing to do with them, but Steely Dan were a clear albeit often unspoken influence on post-punk sophisticates like Prefab Sprout and The High Llamas. Unfortunately, with the exception of Fagen's near-perfect solo debut The Nightfly, an affectionate piece of Cold War nostalgia, little of the duo's work after 1977's career high point Aja is worth investigating.