YMMV / Steely Dan

• Awesome Music:
  • Their album Aja is considered the zenith of their career by some. Other contenders for that title include Pretzel Logic and Katy Lied.
  • Despite its troubled production, Gaucho contains some of the band's best music, such as "Hey Nineteen", "Time Out Of Mind" and the title track.
  • "Do It Again" gives an absolutely iconic guitar solo, while the rest of the song being pretty catchy by itself.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • Their Cover Version of Duke Ellington's "East St. Louis Toodle-oo", both in terms of its parent album (1974's Pretzel Logic) and the Dan's career as a whole.
  • "Dirty Work" is a very Beatlesque pop tune amid the jazz-rock songs on Can't Buy A Thrill, and is even among the few Steely Dan songs not sung by Fagen (David Palmer sings it. In live shows they have their backing singers do the vocal).
• Broken Base:
  • "Dirty Work". Is it a refereshingly sentimental ballad from a band who's musical output is mostly cynical and sardonic or is it a boring, meandering, and repetitive song?
  • David Palmer's vocals during the early days and first album are divisive amongst fans. Does he serve as a brilliant contrast to Fagen's rough and sarcastic delivery or is he a completely out of place blue-eyed soul singer who doesn't fit at all with the band?
• Consolation Award: Their album Two Against Nature winning big^note It won four awards: Album of the Year, Best Pop Vocal Album, Best Engineered Album – Non-Classical, and Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals (for the single "Cousin Dupree"). at the 2001 Grammy Awards is generally considered to be this. It winning Album of the Year has become one of the more infamous Award Snubs in Grammy history since it beat out Radiohead's Kid A and Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP, two albums that are now considered to be among the greatest of all time, while Two Against Nature has faded into obscurity. For their part, Becker and Fagen consider Two Against Nature to be among their weaker albums and have said that Eminem deserved the award more than they did.
• Critical Dissonance: The Royal Scam is especially loved by fans, but its often rated by professional music critics as among their lesser albums.
• Epic Riff:
  • "Reelin' In The Years" and "Hey Nineteen" have especially memorable guitar solos.
  • A non-guitar example (played on flapamba) appears in "Rikki Don't Lose That Number". The opening riff is lifted directly from the Horace Silver Quintet's "Song for My Father." Well, they are a jazz fusion duo, after all...
  • "Black Friday" is also a good example, with the riff being played by a combination of two electric pianos and a guitar.
  • "Don't Take Me Alive" is, atypically for the band, led by a heavy guitar riff played by Larry Carlton. Whilst their guitarists would usually only get the chance to shine on solos, this song is led by one. It is one of the band's most popular songs amongst fans for this reason.
  • "Aja" has several, most notably the two-chord riff that begins the instrumental break.
• Genius Bonus: There's at least one website dedicated to explaining some of the obscure references in their songs. In fact, some of the band's references may be so oblique or obscure that they could be mistaken as a Lyrical Shoehorn. An example is the chorus for "Deacon Blues" — the lyrics are very dark and melancholy, until it gets to:
  They call Alabama the Crimson Tide
  Call me Deacon Blues!^note To some, that just seems like a Lyrical Shoehorn, but the part of the chorus just beforehand is "they got a name for the winners in the world/I want a name when I lose". The University of Alabama is chosen as an example of a "winner" and were well known as a dominant force in college football under legendary coach Bear Bryant. The "Deacon Blues" part? It refers to the Wake Forest Demon Deacons, a college football team that were particularly lousy during the seventies.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Not many due to their largely cynical worldview, but this little gem from "Deacon Blues" counts:
    This is the night of the expanding man
    I take one last drag as I approach the stand
    I cried when I wrote this song
    Sue me if I play too long
    This brother is free
    I'll be what I want to be.
  • The message of "Any Major Dude Will Tell You" is that troubles are all temporary, even though they have to be endured.
    Any major dude with half a heart surely will tell you, my friend
    Any minor world that breaks apart falls together again
    When the demon is at your door
    In the morning it won't be there no more
    Any major dude will tell you.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Donald Fagen's solo track from 2006, "Security Joan", is about someone falling in love with a airport security officer while being searched at a checkpoint. Fast-forward to 2012, when Fagen gets stopped at the US-Canada border because of an FBI file related to the drug bust at Bard.
  • In the Malcolm in the Middle episode "Garage Sale", Hal used to go by the name "Kid Charlemagne" for an old pirate talk-radio broadcast. This won't be the last time Bryan Cranston would get references with Steely Dan, as his Breaking Bad character Walter White shares interest with his family about the band and the 2022 film Jerry And Marge Go Large has Bill suggesting the couple they should get Steely Dan for the music festival.
• I Am Not Shazam: No, there is no guy in the band named Steely Dan.
• Misattributed Song:
  • No, they did not do "Still The One". That was Orleans.
  • The Hall of Fame writings from their website include a fictional letter in which a woman pleads for their induction so that she can meet them, and find out which one is her father. Her belief is based on a dream in which she is sitting in their lap, while they sing "Tequila Sunrise".
  • Also mocked by the guys in this chat:
    Which song is the quintessential Steely Dan song?
    "Ride Captain Ride"^note Actually by Blues Image or "Year of The Cat"^note  Al Stewart
• Nightmare Fuel: "Do It Again." From the eerie chords and organ riffs — to the lyrics about murder, ruin, and even divine judgment.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • It's the only Steely Dan song he played on, but Jay Graydon's guitar solo for "Peg" is one of the top moments in their catalog.
  • Two songs later on Aja, Michael McDonald sings the bridge of "I Got the News" and nearly steals the entire song for himself.
  • Similarly, Elliott Randall's guitar solo on "Reelin' In The Years", although he did later do sessions on other Steely Dan albums.
• Refrain from Assuming: The song is called "Peg", not "Your Favorite Foreign Movie".
• Sampled Up:
  • The "you know they don't give a fuck about anybody else" line from "Show Biz Kids" is used as the refrain for "The Man Don't Give A Fuck", a 1996 single by Welsh psychedelic band Super Furry Animals. This sample is repeated fifty times in the five minute song.
  • The opening riff from "Black Cow" is sampled for "Deja Vu (Uptown Baby)" by Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz. Fagen himself jokingly referenced it in the Classic Albums episode that covered the making of Aja.
  • "Peg"'s keyboard riff and a part of the lyrics is sampled in De La Soul's "Eye Know".
  • The song "Champion" by Kanye West extensively samples "Kid Charlemagne". Interesting, they initially denied his request to use the sample, but after he wrote them an emotional letter explaining how important the song was to him, they obliged.
• Tear Jerker: A number of songs, including, but not limited to:
  • The chorus of "Turn That Heartbeat Over Again" concerns a character named Michael who has just died, his friend frantically expressing regret over helping cause his demise and wishing he would revive.
  • "Charlie Freak" is about a homeless heroin addict and his last moments alive.
  • "Doctor Wu" is a rather mournful song that actually has a Hope Spot, but ends with the titular doctor falling to similar problems the narrator had.
  • "Any World That I'm Welcome To", a Growing Up Sucks song akin to "Goodbye Stranger" by Supertramp, with the added fun of the past not being remarked upon fondly either.
  • "Third Word Man" counts as well; focusing on a paranoiac former soldier going insane.
• Values Dissonance: "The Fez." It's about a guy who won't have sex with a woman without wearing a condom (see Get Thee to a Nunnery), and it's making fun of him. Today, wearing a condom is pretty much standard operating procedure (at least until you've been with your partner for a good long while), but back in 1976 (when the song came out), the thought process was that pregnancy was avoidable with all the marvelous contraceptives on the market (the pill, the diaphragm, and the IUD being the most notable), and virtually all STDs were either curable or could not be prevented with condoms anyway, so insisting on a condom was seen as a sign of an overly-cautious, distinctly un-hip man who didn't trust his partner(s). Yeah, HIV/AIDS undid that attitude in a hurry... One could also take the song a bit more amusingly literally and see it depicting a certain roleplay or fetish necessary for the first-person voice to get off (wearing the literal hat as some version of a "holy man" seducing an acolyte or something?). This actually seems more in the character of Steely Dan subject matter — actually, both interpretations are probably intended.
• Vindicated by History: Gaucho was considered a weak album in comparison to Aja at the time, but a lot of younger fans who've gotten into the band like it more because of its consistently laidback sound and hilarious lyrics. In fact a sizeable amount of people like it the most of all Steely Dan albums.

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