Mr. William Gibson on Mr. Steely Dan

" Artistic collaboration is a profoundly strange business. Do it right up to the hilt, as it were, and you and your partner will generate a third party, some thoroughly Other, and often one capable of things neither you nor the very reasonable gentleman seated opposite would even begin to consider. 'Who,' asks one of those disembodied voices in Mr. Burroughs' multi-level scrapbooks, 'is the Third who walks beside us?' My theory, such as it is, about Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, is that their Third, their Other, Mistah Steely Dan hisself, proved so problematic an entity for the both of them, so seductive and determined a swirl of extoplasm, that they opted to stay the hell away from him for twenty years.

He continues on, of course, in the atemporal reaches of electronic popular culture, and I have often raised an eyebrow at hearing him sing, as I push a cart down some Safeway aisle, of the spiritual complexities induced by the admixture of Cuervo Gold, cocaine, and nineteen-year-old girls (in the hands of a man of shall we say a certain age). At which point I look around Frozen Foods and wonder: 'Is anyone else hearing this?' Do the people who program these supermarket background tapes have any idea what this song is actually about? On this basis alone I have always maintained that Steely Dan's music was, has been and remains among the most genuinely subversive ouevres in late 20th-century pop."

[For "Safeway," read Corporate Thrift Store, on whose in-house sound system, today, in three different locations, I heard (in order) What A Shame About Me, Babylon Sisters, and, finally, IGY]

- posted by cjb @ 11:05 PM