Homage to Steely Dan

 I'm not yet retired, and so can't yet attribute my inclination to avoid, for a time at least, the great events of our time to a sense of ennui.  Nonetheless I am so inclined, and so will indulge in another homage, this time to the work of Steely Dan.

I know of no work of Steely Dan I haven't liked.  The duo of Don Fagen and Walter Becker, backed over the years by a legion of highly competent studio musicians, have been consistently good, and have managed to work at a high level despite what I think are the inherent limitations of popular music.  Those limitations derive from the need that popular music be, well, popular.  The songs must sell, and sell well.  That may require pandering to the less artistic among the buying public, and the buying public in our Glorious Union doesn't have a high reputation.  H.L. Mencken reportedly said "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."

Be that as it may, the music of Steely Dan has been consistently sophisticated, and has made use of styles and themes prevalent not just in rock music but in jazz, blues and Latin music while managing to sell very well.  Many of the band's songs are classics.

I've always thought of Fagen and Becker as having more in common with the Beat Generation than with those who came of music-buying age in the 1970s.  There is, of course, the fact that the name "Steely Dan" was taken from William S. Burroughs' novel The Naked Lunch, where it appeared as the name of a very special dildo.  Burroughs was one of the great figures of the Beat Generation.  Also, they strike me as having in common with the Beats an aptitude for poetry and a disdain for conventions, with none of the histrionic showiness seen in subsequent efforts of rebellious youth. 

But in addition to that, there seems to be nothing at all of the hippie in the band's music.  There's nothing psychedelic there; there's nothing about peace and love.  Peace and love are more subjects of mockery or disillusionment than anything else.  I think of Third World Man or Don't Take Me Alive when it comes to peace, and songs like Everyone's Gone to the Movies, Babylon Sisters and Janie Runaway when it comes to love.

The various conceits of the Me Generation are certainly present, however.  But again when they're made the subject matter they're treated ironically.  The album Gaucho is full of this sort of thing, particularly the song Glamour Profession.

It's unsurprising that the lyrics of many Steely Dan songs are seemingly unclear, and have been subject to interpretation.  But what is surprising about this is that the lack of clarity is the result of clever artifice and metaphor.  Through the use of artifice significant issues may be addressed in a manner which isn't self-important or banal, as are most efforts along those lines in popular music.  The meaning of the lyrics of The Royal Scam (the song, not the album), for example, is far from clear on their face, but some thought and attention to them suggests that immigrants and the American Dream are their focus.

Ultimately I think one's preference for artists of the written word, or the written word when put to music, is based mostly on the extent to which one associates with the author, composer and musician.  That is to say, the fan in that case sees the fan in the artist, has something in common with the artist, or think they do though they may flatter themselves.  The fan may even dream they are the artist, or at least wish they could be like them.

Steely Dan's songs often are seemingly delivered by or made from the perspective of jaded, cynical, sophisticated observers of life.  They're gentleman losers, disconnected and shrewd ("The Gentleman Loser" is the name of a bar in one of William Gibson's cyberpunk novels, if I recall correctly).  They're aware of the faults of people and in society, aware of our many weaknesses and vices, and may even share in them but do so with a kind of blithe, knowing detachment.  

Which may say something about this particular fan, in the end, and not all of it to his credit.

Regarding Senescence

Both Cicero and Seneca, and no doubt other wise and good people, wrote of old age.  They did so to extol it; to tell those of us who are not as wise as they were that our disaffection with it is unwise and unneeded.  As I race (or so it seems) into my twilight years (well, late afternoon years, perhaps) I'm inclined to wonder just how much of such reflection is wisdom and how much of it is wishful thinking.

I don't doubt their sincerity.  Perhaps I do doubt Seneca's sincerity, though, at least a bit.  Regardless, I ask myself if they were trying to persuade themselves if not others that the evidence of aging--which can't be spoken or written away and which is disturbing sometimes, at least--is also evidence of something else, something less apparently bad and even good.  This is not necessarily an easy task. 

It's not necessarily a Stoic task either.  Pierre Hadot and others have claimed that the ancients engaged in spiritual exercises and have made that case convincingly.  Marcus Aurelius' notes to himself are such; Epictetus' recommendations, called "negative visualization" in this latest resurgence of Stoicism, are others.  Imagine the worst and what is the case or will be the case may be tolerated with equanimity (the anxious have always been Stoics, perhaps--something of a surprise).  But extolling age, if that is a practice, is of a different kind.  Were these two sages engaged in "positive thinking"?

The fact is that aging is a kind of progressive failure of the body and its little helper, or guiding spirit, or prisoner depending on your point of view, the mind.  There isn't much in that to celebrate when you think of it, unless you have a soul inclined to clap its wings and sing and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress as I think Yeats' poem says.  That singing presumes a life after death which somehow turns out to be much better than the one that ends in death, and many think that improbable.  I'm not certain what I think, and not for the first time.

As I contemplate with a sense of resignation if not delight the degradation of what physical and mental powers I possess, I think of Warren Zevon's song invitingly titled My Shit's Fucked Up.  The singer goes to a doctor as he's feeling kind of rough and is told that his shit's fucked up.  He tells the doctor he doesn't see how, and the doctor replies that the shit that used to work won't work now.  It's a kind of anthem of the aging sung in a mournful tune that is unmistakably Zevonesque. 

And as I noted, this is certainly true.  Wherefore then is old age the crown of life as Cicero called it?  An increasingly heavy crown, it seems.

Continuing with the popular music theme, which has somehow replaced that which was evoked by the mention of Cicero and Seneca, another view of old age or at least older age is given by Steely Dan in the song Janey Runaway.  In that song an older, well-heeled man, tells of the new lease on life he experiences taking up with a young woman who ran away from home.  It's a kind of anthem to lechery, the fantasy of an older man.  But alas, although the libido doesn't seem to decrease for us aging males the opportunities to indulge it sadly do, at least if one is not rich and living Gramercy Park.

Fantasies and mourning aside, how does a Stoic pass this time as time so indifferently passes him by?  By realistically acknowledging it and accepting it, I think, neither bemoaning it nor extolling it.  It's one of the many things beyond our control (for now, at least; perhaps soon we'll find a way to control it).  As such, it shouldn't disturb us or worry us.  It's simply life and we do the best we can with what we have and take the rest as it happens.