Explain me the praise!

It should be noted, if it wasn't implied strongly enough, that I do really like SOTT overall. I just don't get why it's held in such vastly higher esteem than, say, Parade.

Can I echo that?

But as for Steely Dan, there's more to be said for smooth jazz than you seem to let on.

Matt Carlson, I have no idea what you're referring to when you talk of influences. What superior artists do you think Steely Dan is being influenced by?

Is it so very strange that ILM contains clusters of enthusiasm about some stuff that you find uninteresting, even if there's a lot of overlap with your own taste in other areas?

a new Christian Gang Of Four/Strokes/Killers disco punk boy band upstart called The Praise

BRING IT THE FUCK ON

EMTP?

The man has a point.

(xpost god no!)

Horny old men love trashy miss big nose!

I hope this was a joke. My comment was just a rip on "House of Jealous Lovers" if it were done by an xtian band. It was a response to donut's comment.

The "ad nauseam" indicates my disgust for the fact that the fucking song is just one big repitition of something I find boring. Sort of the same as "etc" but with bile.

The subtext in my comment is that I wish someone would explain me the praise for the Rapture.

And re: Steely Dan influences, I'm speaking generically of jazz, pop, blues, soul as genres. Give me the real damn thing and not some watered down noodling without an ounce of energy.
-- Matt Carlson (mattsoncarlhe...), November 10th, 2005. (mattsoncarlhew)

D-

One ha ha, one not so ha ha.

So Mrs. Genius McGuruchakra, if that is your real name, I would respond by writing:

ilm in being not of much use to explain why Steely Dan is good NONSHOCKAH

doesn't seem like it's ilm as much as this matt dude.

well i'd wager that "Deacon Blue" would sound pretty ridiculous to anyone who doesn't already like Steely Dan. The lyrics are really corny, and there is a college football reference in there, and the narrator asks you to call him a dumb name in response to the football team reference and its an unconscious gag reflex thing, its just... ick... certainly not a good song for Steely Dan neophytes.

but if you can listen to "Peg" or "Green Earrings" really LOUD and not feel all cool and bouncy and groovy than you just don't like rock and roll.

The way that everything is so SMOOTH, and yep it is smooth but smooth in a very unique and cool way....but then there are these little moments, little suprises that leap out...one such for me is on "Rikki Don't Lose that Number", the chorus....(keep in mind I know shit about music theory so I don't know what trick he does exactly with the chord change)...but in the chorus, every thing is flowing so NATURALLY, you can almost anticipate the melody (even the first time you heard it it seems like everything is so RIGHT, yr in the hands of a pro)...so anyway, they're going "Rikki don't lose that number, you don't have to call nobody else"....but then he does some little wierd twist with the chord changes into some territory that sounds sort of major and minor at the same time, very melancholy, and says "Send it off in a letter to your self" and you get that nice little wry guitar line going back into the main chorus part...it's such a lyrical non-sequiter, but it seems so tender and sad in the context...

same thing in Dr. Wu...where he sounds sort of sarcastic "All night long, we would sing that stupid song" almost snide, but then the chord progression does that same sorta thing he does in Rikki...tumbling down, with "And ev-ry word we sang...I knew....was true", and it just hits me so hard...

Such a great, precise lyricist and such beautiful melodies...I think his lyrical darkness makes the moments of love and sadness so much more powerful....plus deacon blues:

"They gotta name for the winners in the world, but I want a name when I lose" feels like everything punk was ever trying to say, feeling like you could be someone even if you weren't that talented (learn to "work" the saxophone, kind of a Mike Watt/D.Boon/Fogerty type populist musician-as-laborer metaphor) or cool or whatever, all wrapped up.....

Anyway, I'm not a rock critic or a good enough writer to do Steely Dan justice, but those are a couple of little moments that mean a lot to me....they mean a whole lot to me.

Well, yes, but...I have, you see. Threads on the aforementioned subjects (w/r/t Steely Dan in particular) are usually little more than lovefests for the loving lovers who love those things. Which is all very lovely but does little to convince the unconvinced.

Is it so very strange that ILM contains clusters of enthusiasm about some stuff that you find uninteresting, even if there's a lot of overlap with your own taste in other areas?

Not so very strange. I'm just trying to understand where others are coming from. I'm guessing that a lot of Steely Dan fans have a fair to middlin' grounding in music and that their appreciation is based on technical merits. Whereas I'm coming from somewhere a little more visceral, I think.

ilm in perpetuating the rhetoric that "smooth" ANYTHING is bad and not aesthetically valid nonshockah

Mmmmm...kinda. If it's smooth, it's overly-polished. And polish ain't my bag, daddio. But that's just me perpetuating the rhetoric, not ILM.

this is awesome

naw, trust me, someone like you comes around here to SHAKE THINGS UP once a week.

Never was much a fan of "Reelin In The Years". Sounds too much like generic classic rock.

Yup, that's what I'm here for: A-SHAKIN' THINGS UP. You got me pegged. Hoo boy. Astute. That's you.

For me, it's exactly the opposite...I've always played in rock bands - indie/punk/post-punk/whatever type stuff....I know zero music theory so actually Steely Dan I react to almost totally emotionally, the ways that "real" musicians, theory dudes make songs is so foreign to me, so unreachable that I can't even begin to comprehend, so I just listen to the melodies and the lyrics, just how the song hits me....stuff that would seem more "visceral" like, say I dunno, Shellac or Bad Brains or something, I'm much more prone to react to technically, like "Oh man, that's a cool little bass riff there", or "that's a cool drum beat" because I've written stuff in the same vein, and can sort of understand it....

Well, I was suggesting that for people who don't like Steely Dan because of the perceived smoothness - for people like yourself, who do like the smoother side, you are free to take that with a grain of salt.

Also: this was originally indended to be a general Explain me the praise! thread and not necessarily so focused on the Dan. Anyone else need some 'splainin'?

As for SOTT, it doesn't need to be boiled down to a single LP, because it was already boiled down from three different LP projects. And I agree with what Robert Christgau said about it: "No formal breakthrough... Merely the most gifted pop musician of his generation proving what a motherfucker he is for two discs start to finish."

genuis.

OK, I'll stand myself up in the shooting gallery: Black Sabbath. Ever since I first heard them in Jr. High (this was 1970) I thought they sucked. Now they're heroes. I mean, Ozzy is cool and all, but WTF? I'm serious. Am I really missing something here?

The Invisible Knife

that was really good. you should write more stuff about how steely dan is awesome. for real. i wish i could.

Well, okay. I don't know what to say about music that you can appreciate on an intellectual level but that makes you kind of queasy to listen to. Metal Machine Music is like that for me, but it's a good kind of queasy. "I.G.Y." makes me feel like I'm being exsanguinated, slowly.

It reminds me of the hairdos on Knots Landing. In a gross way. Which is, I guess, kind of what you already said. Except for the "gross" part.

I can easily understand that. What's "good" about it is that it was a radical chord structure compared to pretty much all other jazz tunes -- it wasn't blues, it wasn't AABA with conventional resolutions, it was weird sets of thirds. Basically it's weird and hard to improvise on and it became a "test tune" for musicians, like Cherokee had been before.

http://assoc.wanadoo.fr/pecb/gospel%202.jpg

I doubt it's possible to listen to anything neutrally, our brains are wired to make these associations constantly. I've found in the past that when I've gone from disliking a band to liking them (or at least understanding or tolerating them) it's because I've found a new way to hear them. I have to recontextualise the music for myself, find values in it that I can share.

I don't know if I'm being very clear here. Jaymc makes the same point in his "I.G.Y." article - he contextualises the song in a way that's necessarily different from the general historical view of Easy Listening. Maybe not a hugely different way, as it happens, but a way that explains why he gets pleasure from the music.

I've come to the conclusion that there's no genre that isn't enjoyable in this way - by finding your proper perspective to it. There's no reason why anybody should have to work at enjoying anything they instinctively dislike, but I think that finding new ways of listening creates fascinating possibilities for digging up unknown pleasures.

M@tt--awesome defense of the band. I still don't like what I've heard, but I may give it another go. At least their early stuff. Someone played me one of their comeback albums about 4 years ago, and I couldn't stand it.

OTM, I've really been trying to approach stuff that WAY turns me off instinctively from a new perspective, ie trying to get what it is people are getting out of it....like for example, Ween for some reason has always really really turned me off, huge aversion to "joke rock", but the singer in my band made me a double CD mix of them, and there's actually some really great songs and interesting things going on, even if there is a side to them (esp. that country PIss up a Rope song) that I fucking hate...

same with the Grateful Dead, I've been downloading old live shows from that archive.org site, and trying to suss them out, obv. always had sort of a b.s. "punk" idea that they were the enemy....it's interesting to try, at least....

Not to disagree with Christgau, but personally I find myself skipping past the jammy songs quite often these days. Though many of the other songs are still some of Prince's best, IMO.

As for Black Sabbath, give War Pigs another spin.

As a fan, Giant Steps is the John Coltrane album that you have to have, but probably never listen to more than twice.

I don't personally like Steely Dan, but I know enough people whose music tastes I do respect that seem to authentically love them. Because of that, I find it hard to write them off completely.

Don't let my girlfriend hear this, but I'm still trying to figure out Joni Mitchell's Blue. I get a migraine if I have to listen to the whole thing.

My relationship to them is weird though, because they're my mom's favorite band, so I had to hear Pretzel Logic and Katy Lied a lot growing up, but then I probably didn't listen very closely and just thought it sounded like annoying smooth jazz funk like most people who don't like them think. Only recently have I been willing to give them a closer listen, and I still don't connect that strongly with most of what I hear, but I appreciate it more.

Sabbath: try Sabotage, which is their last great Ozzy-era record and has a surprisingly good garage-rockish-yet-way-mid-'70s pop stab "Am I Going Insane," as well as great meathead-rock anthems "Hole in the Sky" and "Symptom of the Universe" (the latter of which is essentially one of several blueprints for early-mid '80s metal, along with, fuck it, Sweet's "Set Me Free").

Steely Dan I find it harder to explain, except that their deceptive smoothness goes well with their sardonic semi-fatalism (like "King of the World," which I'm pretty sure is about life after a nuclear apocalypse); they're a buncha Burroughs fans ferchrissakes.

(Also, I still stand by Purple Rain and Dirty Mind being better than Sign o' the Times.)

As a fan, Giant Steps is the John Coltrane album that you have to have, but probably never listen to more than twice.

That's just wrong. Sell your copy - you don't deserve to own it.

Also, Coltrane's Sound makes a great counterpart to it and is almost as good.