You remember when the kids were into Steely Dan? I swear I'm not making this up. I remember reading multiple articles about it. I don't really have the heart to dig into archived late-'10s internet "virality" articles right now, so I'm just gonna have to trust my own memory on this one. There was an upswing in the popularity of this band among the yutes. The reading on the phenomenon, if I interpreted it correctly at the time, was that the enjoyment of Steely Dan, a very adult-sounding band, was able to bridge the gap between irony and sincerity. It went quickly from "wouldn't it be funny to get really into Steely Dan" to "holy shit, I love Steely Dan."
Again, it's all hearsay from me, but I distinctly remember this thing happening to Steely Dan, and I remember enjoying the idea of it. I thought about it a lot this week. My own very brief history with this band is that Aja was probably one of the first albums I ever specifically downloaded with the sole motivation being "I should listen to this classic album to see if it lives up to the hype." If the A Year of Blind Spots blog series had started five years earlier, it would've started with a Steely Dan album.
I became cognizant of Steely Dan as a band worthy of attention around the time that it was decided (for whatever the reason, you know how these things go) that Aja was the critical consensus of their discography. True, it is a pretty incredible album. It's always interesting to start there, and to then attempt to travel in either direction, and figure out for yourself the reasons why that particular album was the consensus pick. (Were the kids thinking about any of this when they bought their Steely Dan tees and vinyl? I don't know.)
So here I am, many years later, walking backward and trying out their first album, Can't Buy a Thrill. I immediately know why this is not the critical consensus—it appears that it might be the commercial consensus. There are three songs on here that I might typically hear on classic rock radio, which is a high number for this column without me knowing about it beforehand. "Do It Again," "Dirty Work," and "Reelin' in the Years." One I hate, one I think is pretty good, and one is, through its own persistence, growing on me. All three, plus the rest of the songs I'm listening to for the first time, have a sort of mellow, adult contemporary sound to them. If this was the sole body of work, I don't think the kids would find room for ironic/sincere appreciation.
It's just interesting how basic it sounds, since later albums would dip into "quirky," or, like, the jazz-adjacent equivalency to prog or something. I don't know. Actually, how do people usually describe Steely Dan's work? RYM has jazz-rock for all their albums, yacht rock for some of them, and funk rock for albums after this one. I guess that's what's missing here? The white boy funk? I was going to say that Can't Buy a Thrill sounds more like soft rock than any Steely Dan album I've heard before, but maybe that's saying the same thing, especially if you consider "soft rock" and "funk rock" to be polar opposites, which... I kind of do?
Pam did the thing where she's like "is this Steely Dan album the album of the week?" and because she's out of the blogging loop I have to reexplain A Year of Blind Spots, which is pretty embarrassing for me, all in all. But I told her about how I dislike "Do It Again" and like (against my better judgment perhaps) "Reelin' in the Years" and am improving on "Dirty Work" but possibly only because it was in One Battle After Another a couple times. And then we were starting Season 2 of Euphoria and there was "Dirty Work" again in the very first episode. Maybe Steely Dan season is still upon us, or maybe it just makes sense that Steely Dan would be the ironic pick in art for the yutes.
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