It’s now the summer of 2022, and the generations roll onward. The Millennials are slowly beginning to middle-age, and Gen Z is beginning to drink legally. And their successors – Generation Alpha – are out of the cradle and off to pre-school.
And the story of rock’s millennial years – 18 of them, total, which is how these things tend to be measured – is told. It opened oddly and ironically, with an out-of-the-blue Grammy win by Steely Dan – Boomer gods still fiercely embraced by the children of the Seventies. And it closes just as oddly and ironically, as the Dan finds itself now likewise embraced by the millennials themselves.
At face value, this is astonishing; why would the millennial generation, whose rock preferences were grounded in the aftermath of punk and grunge and alternative, embrace the ancient music of a jazz rock duo on the far side of classic rock? Wasn’t this the ultimate Dad Music? “Reelin’ in the Years”, “Black Friday”, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number”, “Deacon Blues”, “FM”, “Josie” - Boomer anthems, every one, now consigned to satellite Oldies radio in yacht rock-radiant Audis.
But journalist Derek Robertson found, via careful analysis of Twitter Likes and retweets, that against all expectations, the generational rift between the disillusioned Millennials and their institutionally fossilized predecessors had indeed been bridged by the smart, soothing vibes of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker.
In an essay on The Ringer, Robertson quotes a 30-something Brooklyn kid named Alex who runs “Good Steely Dan Takes”, a Twitter account with 25,000 followers who’s been interviewed by Rolling Stone:
“When I started the account, I had absolutely no idea how far it would go,” he said. “The Fagen and Becker worldview, there’s a sort of this ironic stance that permeates their music, that for certain circles of Twitter is kind of like a prerequisite.”
And from Francois, 24, a clothing designer on the West Coast, “I started collecting vinyl in college, like most people, and a friend’s mom gave me Aja, like, ‘This is something you need in your collection.’ I started looking at the lyrics and the meaning behind then, and I was like, there’s such a polished sound, and they’re talking about just absolute losers, you know? That, to me, was conceptually really interesting; I was like, this is crazy, these guys are geniuses.”
“They were an unidealistic band at the end of a very idealistic period,” wrote critic Carola Dibbell. “That unidealistic quality probably appeals to their young fans today.”
Robertson characterizes the Dan’s music in terms that seem to make the connection instantly clear: he calls it “wry and detached,” which pretty much sums up Millennials themselves. From Can’t Buy a Thrill on, the Dan were outsiders looking in and perfectly okay with that – again, like the new generation now embracing them.
Fagen himself, interviewed by Robertson, credits this newfound popularity to the fact that Steely Dan wasn’t really of its era: while most young people in any generation are “hostages to their dad’s taste in music... the stuff we wrote used tropes more common to the popular music of their grandpops.” Duke Ellington, and so on.
Robertson went on to draw out the distinction: “It’s easier to see Steely Dan’s music as its savvier observers always have: not a smooth-jazz accoutrement to the spoils of Boomer aristocracy, but an über-sardonic critique of it. And in addition to the generational shift, there’s an aesthetic one: Pop music, broadly defined, gains its cultural currency through an antagonistic relationship to the status quo. When it comes to the counterculture of the past few decades, Steely Dan’s music has been anything but part of that firmament.
“Millennials are, of course, growing into their own soft middle age,” he continued, “where one’s identity is less defined by the cultural postures of youth than the big choices one might have made (or not made) while striking them. Their taste, then, is freed up to roam toward what they might have once overlooked as outré.”
“A cleaner, smoother aesthetic has seeped into a lot of elements of indie rock and pop; it’s more OK for things to be clean,” said Winston Cook-Wilson of the Dan-influenced band Office Culture. “And then there’s their history with rap, and Kanye sampling them, which preceded all of this - listening to Steely Dan in some sense aesthetically is like listening to DJ Quik [records] from 1997… people caught onto the contrast between their whole vibe and the music itself.
“Like, 2016 or ’17, that’s when I started to see this creep into the discourse,” said Cook-Wilson, “Steely Dan sections at record stores - I buy a lot of records - you’d start to see those empty out… it was like in the early 2010s, with a record like [Fleetwood Mac’s] Tusk, these records that Mom and Dad had in their collection you suddenly start to pay attention to.”
“So, again: the generational issue,” continued Robertson. “To understand why the music of Steely Dan, a band so representative of their own generation, resonates so strongly with the descendants with whom they’re supposedly at war, one might start by acknowledging that such frameworks are rarely as simple as they might seem. So when we spoke, I posed the question to Fagen: Is there a line going backward through time that transcends such a simplistic narrative, connecting today’s Dan-obsessed youth, their contemporaneous fans, and even pre-rock hipsters like Jean Shepherd, the radio host and writer beloved by Fagen in his childhood?”
“There’s a general sense of humor that comes with a realization that what you were taught in school about American history was wrong,” Fagen replied. “There was a language we heard in the media, and in articles in the ’60s, with the space race, and all that kind of stuff, there was a lot of deceit, and I think a lot of the humor was defensive toward what we realized was going on.”
“You hear that with the Beats, Ferlinghetti, and Ginsberg, and what started out as marginal humor, like Jean Shepherd and other people,” he continued. “Now, why has this suddenly become an interest of younger generations? I’m not sure, except that certainly all of that’s just gotten worse.”
So the adoption of Steely Dan by the children of the Boomers begins to not only make sense, but resonate: as the Millennials ease into middle age, and Generation Z brings its own preferences out their pockets and into the mainstream, it becomes more clear that the injustices and unfairness that stick in the craw of each generation are truly shared, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, by their derised predecessors.
Yes, you have nuts like Lauren Boebert trying to pass the Ten Commandments in Congress, but we had Jerry Falwell; you had to live through 9/11, we got duck-and-cover. We weren’t any wilder about our parents’ legacy than you are about yours.
And it will be the same with Gen Z. If there really is a Santy Claus, some of them will likewise discover Steely Dan – and figure out that all of this music, for the past 75 years, has been about the same thing.
“In other words,” Robertson summarized, “as long as false optimism, self-delusion, conformism, superficiality, and all of their cousins hold sway in society, there will be Steely Dan People. That is to say, forever.”
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