Yacht rock. That’s perfect!
scabpicker, you and I normally do okay. Obviously, anyone can like and dislike whatever they like. As someone I have enjoyed discussing music with on the SDMB, I have to say it really feels like you haven’t given them a shot.
Laggard - Yacht Rock is a Thing. It is used to describe bad easy pop, like England Dan and John Ford Coley or Michael McDonald Doobie Brothers. Steely Dan is so, so much better than that.
I agree with the OP, but I’d restate it as follows. If you dislike certain works without understanding their underlying greatness, then you are wrong.
For example: opera. I dislike opera. I don’t understand opera. I trust I am wrong. I suspect I would dislike opera even if I understood it. In that case though, my opinion would not be wrong.
What does Adele have to do with jazz?
Steely Dan were one of the most inventive rock acts of the time, and now of all time. Not known as smooth to people who heard them then, but to those who heard them on homogenized classic hits radio (sound right?) loking backwards through the punk/metal lens. They liked being slick, but that’s kind of a surface condition, that they earned the right to with lots of melodies. (Bernard Purdie said they were the only geniuses he ever worked with)
Adele does not fill that slot at all. She’s pop for teenage girls and “grannnies,” at least I hear. There’s no parallels I can see.
Steely Dan are not Jazz either. They just know a lot about it and use it. Is Stevie Wonder jazz-pop (1971-75 Stevie)?
I think you got caught up in the genrefication and hating that came after the 70s, where music became a signifier of introjected fantasies rather than what it was. (How many genres of metal are there? There’s a new one created every time someone’s makeup smears. That’s decadence and lameness.) Just my HO.
I have given them many shots over my lifetime. In addition to their being a constant of album rock radio, I had a friend who was convinced that I should like them. Much like the 70’s jazz fusion he liked so much, I’m still of mixed feelings on them. I’ve heard a lot of it, and generally have a good perspective of what I like about them and don’t like about them.
One of the things that I don’t like about SD is that they’re generally so mild that they could be played on grocery store muzak. To a person who thinks all things mild enough to be played there are interchangeable, I can see where they would think Adele would fit into that category.
On preview: sorry drad dog, I know what I speak of. Most grannies don’t have a problem with listening to SD on muzak. As far as the tempo and tone of the music, they’re not too different from the rest of it. I like Stevie Wonder too, but neither are the hard edge of rock music. Both made generally successful radio-friendly pop. I’m not going to get into whether they were actually playing jazz or just using jazz. That’s lunacy.
Everything above sounds like you are preoccupied with genre to the point where the actual songs wouldn’t matter anyway.
But Jazz is improvisational music and none of these mentioned artists are that. Slickness does not equal jazz, or at least good jazz. It is a mark of bad jazz actually.
When SD was out in the 70s a beer commercial would have Al Hirt playing. It was actually shocking to hear rock in a commercial context. At some point in the late 70s/early 80s George Thorogood, and the Del Fuegos became appropriate for ads. Now Led Zepp and Iggy Pop, and The who are in car ads. So how meaningful could it be to finger an artist for being on ads or muzak.
Why would it matter what songs are chosen for Muzak 30 years after the fact? The beatles, the beach boys, etc with more added all the time are. Think David Bowie isn’t on muzak? Don’t you like anything your grannie liked?
My point is that these artists are only radio friendly pop to someone who can’t hear the difference, because the whole history must be jammed together into a genre. So basically SD equals Captain and Tennille. That’s ahistorical and a failure of imagination too, especially when hard rock itself has been subdivided into 30 or more different genres. It must get confusing out there building those walls.
I never heard of it, but I googled it and it sounds good. Which one do you mean, 1998 or 2015?
They were mellow rock at best when they were contemporary. They were muzak shortly after the band broke up and they went in to the bin of easily licensed mellow rock suitable for muzak in the 80’s, not thirty years after the fact.
As to being preoccupied with genre, I think you’re projecting. It doesn’t matter to me where someone lumps them, but they’re often rightfully lumped in with the rest of 70’s mellow rock. That you can’t fathom that people would group them there, or would be indignant about it really kind of boggles my mind. Even if you could argue that they didn’t belong there, it’d just move them to another smaller division of mellow rock, apparently occupied completely by Steely Dan.
Steely Dan commentary is always fascinating. People who like them, like them extravagantly. People who don’t like them can’t find anything about them that’s good.
Me, I put the Dan up maybe second overall to the Beatles. Geniuses at words and music and the feelings they evoke. Both are of course rock, and yet are so not purist at being rock, like say the Stones, that people who insist upon rock purism can dismiss them. (Yes, as many people now do the Beatles here on the Dope.)
Adele. Does she sing anything but dirges? Good voice, but her songs aren’t terribly interesting. There is no universe in which she and the Dan are in the same category other than “stuff I don’t like”.
Like either one or neither, I don’t care. Comparing them? Not even wrong.
As I said before, it’s not that I don’t like them, I just know what I do and don’t like about them. Hell, I can play a good bit of Elliott Randall’s solo from “Reeling in the Years”.
I wouldn’t compare Adele’s and Steely Dan’s musical complexity or range, but they’re both mid-tempo to slow tempo rock, suitable for airplay. For folks who aren’t into that at all, they would be interchangeable.
If that was “mellow rock”, then most of their peers were even mellower and had been all the way up til then too, with obvious harder rock exceptions, some of which are more (and/or less) memorable than others. And the music was so much better then too. Ever wonder why?
Could SD possibly be less interesting to hear than any “Melodic Black Metal” "or “Goth Folk Metal”, or “Pirate Metal” (Yes it exists) band? Hard rock these days is basically Spinal Tap without humor. The Dan were funny as shit, and twisted too.
Christ you sound like a radio programming consultant.
Yeah, I must confess to not being a Steely Dan fan. Great musicians, but they just don’t hit me emotionally. Except maybe for “Peg.” I’m not going to try to justify it or explain it–there’s no need to. Their music just doesn’t move me.
My favourite film of all time - Mike Leigh’s “Nuts in May” - NOOOOBODY likes, and I could give a flying turtle’s you-know-what about it.
Seen it maybe 30(?) times, know every line, meanwhile folks (with the odd freak exception) are scratching their heads, bugging me about what’s this insipid travelogue of a nutty couple all about?
I’ll stand it by it, though, like a sentry standing guard at Castle Anthrax, just like I’d also stand by the equally (wildly?) unpopular “Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia”, ranking 2nd.
No, I don’t wonder why the music was better then. It wasn’t, so I don’t. Perspectives like that are so simplistic that they aren’t worth considering. I was alive then, and recognized it for the mellow rock that it was. Even then, there were more raucous offerings from country music.
Insults don’t really make your argument any more convincing.
Of course you’re wrong. My evidence is that I love opera, and I’m right about everything.
Would you say bands/artists like Bread, Dan Hill, Seals and Crofts, Robert John, Carpenters, America, Eric Carmen and Little River Band fit a much closer definition to 70’s soft rock than SD would? I could name more, but that’s a road I don’t plan going down any further.
Sure, SD didn’t have a hard guitar sound, but to dismiss them as soft rock I think misses the mark - there was way too much irony and acerbic wit in the lyrics, as well as rockin, upbeat numbers like “Reelin in the Years”, “Bodhisattva”, “King of the World”, some kick-ass passages in “Aja”'s title track, and you won’t find a more twisted, in-your-face guitar solo than the one in “Peg”.
Also way too many jazz underpinnings in a lot of their work to lump them under soft rock, which is anathema to ANY complexity in musical arrangements.
Yes, and I am sorry that I made you mentally wade through that.
Well, RITY has already been mentioned. The other two are pretty mellow, even if they do pick up the beat a little bit. They’re not even rocking on the level of a Beatles rocker, and this is several years after that band broke up. Even then, the Beatles barely rocked any harder than their predecessors. By 1974, the Rolling Stones and the Who are somewhere near the middle of the road in rock 'n roll, and even SD’s heaviest songs all seem a bit lighter than their median output by then.
“Peg”. Ohh, that song has a special place somewhere in my body. I’ve tortured my wife for years by singing the lyrics when it gets caught in my head (even today, as a matter of fact). But the second half of the guitar solo, and a nifty fretless bass part doesn’t hide the fact that the rest of that song is an audio leisure suit.
Ehh, I’m not too sure about that. My father listened to a lot of pretty complex jazz that would get piped out over the EZ-100 style stations. It’s not necessarily conducive to making a mellow rock hit, but it wouldn’t preclude one, either.
The Phantom Tollbooth.
The Goodies.
Test Cricket.
That’s a start.
Sure, my examples weren’t “Symptom of the Universe”, but neither would I consider them soft rockers, along with the majority of SD’s tunes - they’re just lacking that key saccharine veneer to qualify them for this much-vaunted soft rock grail.
Good on the EZ-100 style stations whenever they venture a little out of the box, then - something soft rock is less likely to accommodate.
Hoping you don’t sing just the “cuz when you smile for the camera” but also Mike McDonlald’s dulcet vocal stylings during the chorus.
great - earwig thread submission in 3…2…1…
Seem like the Steely Dan discussion should have its own thread, if there haven’t already been many here. I feel no need to say “man, the music was better then!” or anything like that. But I don’t find them “easy listening” at all - I love the layers I hear, the arch lyrics that have some edge to them.
YMMV, of course 