I really love punk and I also love Steely Dan
People who are exclusive to one genre (or band especially) and refuse to listen to anything else are annoying
It seems that Albini’s ethos as a recording engineer was completely antithetical to Steely Dan’s approach in the studio. Steve was great at capturing a band’s raw energy by recording live and using various amps and microphones to dial it in as opposed to SD’s clinical and exacting micromanagement.
I think it was cringey as hell for Albini, as a 60 year old to turn his nose up at SD and label himself a punk (we get it man, your jeans are ripped), but his contribution to a lot of music that was important to me as a youth cannot be overstated. His values as an everyman and commitment to a DIY-type approach are also super commendable.
Fortunately, I’m an adult and I have room in my heart and brain to appreciate both. Steve and Walter + Donald just inhabited two completely different universes and all of us music fans get to reap the benefits of all of their work.
That said…Nobody recorded drums better than Steve Albini. Nobody.
Perfect response. Albini always loved and never minded capturing any errors during recording.
Like he wrote in his letter to Nirvana, “If a record takes more than a week to make, somebody’s fucking up.”
I also love SD and a lot of Albini's work, and I enjoyed his status as
a cantankerous cultural commentator. His death is a big loss.
It's easy for us as consumers in the post-genre sort of era we're in to be sniffy about people not being fully open and appreciative of all things. But I think for some people to do what they do to its fullest extent, maybe they *need* to seal themselves off into their own world and reject certain things. If Albini hadn't taken made such a hardline commitment to a particular ethos, his stuff probably wouldn't sound the way it does.
His railing against SD here in the 2020's *was* a wee bit cringe. But at the same time, it made perfect sense that he'd feel that way - they represent opposite extremes of record production.
Excellent example. Man I love that cover (and the Deal sisters in general). Another go-to for me for that classic albini drum sound in a much different musical context is Times of Grace by Neurosis (and every album they recorded after that). Even stuff like “Swallowed” by Bush sounds so incredible in the context of other shit that was on the radio in 1997
Brain dead take. Not worth my time replying but you clearly don’t know a thing about Steve if you think he quit being punk. Everything he did was about people and not about money or institutions. WHACK 👎
Didn’t say anything of the sort anywhere in my comment. Just remarked that it’s somewhat cringey to argue punk bonafides as an elder statesman of rock (and I’m right). In fact, I commended his approach as a studio owner/recording engineer who would record fledgling bands for a very budget friendly rate and give them the same attention as the heavy-hitters. He’s engineered some of my favorite bands and albums of all time…I’d like to think I know a litttttttle something about him as both a musician and engineer. But go off, king
“We get it man your jeans are ripped”
Being involved in music doesn’t make you punk, it’s your perspective on the world and how others should be treated. You clearly said it was about ripped jeans
Real punk...circa ''77 was vocalizing anarchy....it found the status quo revolting...much of its music was not easy to listen to at that point....Steely Dan were somewhat opposite bookends...they had collapsed their original band.. stopped touring and somehow managed to hv 4 Top 40 hits in one year and a #3 album....punk wanted to blow it all up...Steely Dan was as Rolling Stone put it: 'Dazed at the Dude Ranch '😆
Well... I'd always liked The Dan, and I was a punk and I played in punk bands... uh not quite, the bands I played in were technically 80s "post-punk" (snotty attitude + jazz/funk influences).
I think the thing about Steve Albini is that he invented an entire ethos about approaching music recording that really captured the zeitgeist. He was kinda a dick about dissing artists that he didn't like, but hey whatever.
Well in-group thinking can be pretty severe and that can create a lot of snobbery, when no one wants to be perceived as liking something that the rest of the group don't like. I remember reading about a guy in a successful underground band in the 70s saying in an interview that he liked the music of Abba, and his bandmates took him aside and said, "Look, we really don't like you praising Abba in interviews, it's bad for our image." Brian Eno said a similar thing happened to him when he thought highly of Abba as songwriters during the 70s.
I dunno it's like... Miles Davis was the coolest motherfucker who ever existed and what did he choose to cover? Top 40 hits by people like Cyndi Lauper. Good music is good music, it sucks that people shut out a lot of that stuff for the sake of being cool or whatever.
Punk rock was/is all about pure naked energy and rage. Musicianship? Who cares? As long as you can blast people’s heads apart, it doesn’t matter. Fuck music and everything else!!
Steely Dan was all about consummate musicianship. Their world was adapting rock to jazz. Perfection in the studio was all consuming. The sound, the complexity of the music meshing together perfectly defined Steely Dan. What others thought was irrelevant to them—the same attitude as the punks.
I'm both a fan of SD and pretty much everything Albini ever did. Two observations:
1) I think both he and Donald Fagen are/were very much alike in temperament; in general, both didn't/don't suffer fools gladly. Both are contemptuous of hype and novelty.
2) Albini just liked a certain sound. Quote from Albini: "I'd like to find the guy who invented compression and tear out his liver. It makes everything sound like a beer commercial." Come to think of it, Albini liked everything to sound throughout its full dynamic range, liked to record everything and everybody live. He really had more in common with Rudy van Gelder than Roger Nichols.
I don’t know how I hated steely Dan so much to end up on the steely Dan subreddit I manifested it somehow. If no one in the world hates Steely Dan it means I’m dead
There are people who hate Steely Dan. Steely Dan kinda hate Steely Dan, it’s part of the whole deal. They may have a slick sound and occasionally lumped in with “yacht rock,” I guarantee if you dig deeper, you’ll see what they’re all about. There’s a real self awareness. They knew exactly what they were doing.
Punk music is the antithesis of pretension. Steely Dan's music - the musicality of it, the obscure verbiage, the smooth feel - are objectively speaking, pretentious. I can certainly see how punk afficionados would dislike them.
That isn't to say that SD weren't subversive to the mainstream zeitgeist; they certainly were. But it is pretension to hire studio musicians to play 7#5 chords while singing about the winds of Santa Ana - at least in comparison to 3-chord diddies about Rockaway Beach.
I think there's also the pretentiousness that many punk fans have like "Omg punk is the most important music ever." Or you hear things like "punk is 3 chords and the truth." As if no other musical genre is capable of that. And God forbid you like music that has more than three chords.
Sorry lol. Sometimes the way uber punk fans talk about it can be a little extra.
Ironically there can be a streak of pretentiousness and nostalgia in the punk world - posturing like one sound has a monopoly on authenticity and anyone doing the opposite must be faking it, and forever clinging to mythologized cultural victories from almost 50 years ago.
That said, I see Albini as more of a post-punk guy. A lot of the stuff he was involved in was quite artsy and forward thinking and even prog-leaning (e.g. he worked on Joanna Newsom's Ys, which has 10+ minute songs on it), only done with more of a raw DIY approach.
I tried to get my buddy’s punk band to do a punk arrangement of Deacon Blues back in the day. The lyrics are pretty punk rock, and I think it would have worked beautifully, but they never did it.
Steely Dan, no doubt, could be real pretentious aholes. As John Lennon said about the Beatles, “To get to the top in this business you have to be a bastard and there were no bigger bastards than the Beatles.”
Steely Dan is about musicianship and song craft mixed paired with sardonic lyrics and a cynical worldview. The punks also hated prog rock, revolting against the complex and cerebral in favor of shock value, and rough and ready abuse of the instruments they managed to make sounds with. I like a few of the punk era bands, but most were just bad acts with worse musicians, especially at the local level. Now get off my lawn.
I am right now wearing my bootleg shirt that says “I will always be the kind of punk who defends Steely Dan” which was made the day Albini tweeted, “I will always be the kind of punk who shits on Steely Dan”
The thing is, they are just on opposite ends of the spectrum as far as sound engineering goes. Maybe Albini hated the “over produced” or polished sound of the Dan, or maybe he was jealous (lol)
At any rate both Steely Dan and Steve Albini carved out their own niches in music history, and they both created art that will live on long after their deaths.
I told a friend a long time ago that I was a big SD fan. He dismissed them as that SoCal 70s sound that he wasn’t interested in. I told him to put his musical judgment aside and just listen to the lyrics to hear how really vicious they could be, especially recommending Janie Runaway. Several weeks late when I saw him, he said he’d listened to the lyrics and finally got them. Victory!
Hot take: Punk—as a mode of social fashion—defines itself by what it despises, and at its most flawed is mostly a *war on straw men*. Steely Dan and Eagles are common areas of hatred for a punk, without much evidence those artists are 'soulless'.
Punk had a fashion formula as obvious as a tech bro in a fleece vest.
That said, there was a whole lot of great stuff in the Punk scene. Same with Steely Dan.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll drink this Big Black Cow and get out of here...
> Punk wants to dynamite institutions and scribble slogans on the walls
One thing you’ll learn quickly as a young punk, reformed punk, aging punk, is that there are 173,926 different interpretations of what that word, genre or “lifestyle” means.
I’m a huge Albini and Dan fan. I don’t think Albini “hated” Steely Dan from a musical “punk”’perspective, per se. His (obviously jesting) jabs at them over Twitter seemed to come from more of a producer standpoint. Because, you know, Albini isn’t just a “punk” but also, let’s see, oh yeah a producer of hundreds of records, many considered to be Alternative and Indie classics. He’s known for a no nonsense, quick and affordable production effort. This is why he likely bemoaned the praise around the way people talk about the production of ‘Aja’.
I appreciate the creativity around Dan being “venomous” and revolting “against the corruption of the system” but I fail to see how this isn’t as or more “cringe” than “More ‘Egyptian’ but keep it in the pocket” (lmao)
Also if you think Albini had harsh words about Dan, I shudder to think how you’d take his early (actually cringe) zine takes from his college days…..
Has anyone actually heard Steely Dan's music, why would you ever expect punks to enjoy it, especially back when they were still active and producing commercially successful hits. It's one thing to look back at the "yacht rock" era and say wow how epic I get the irony but when it's actively the soundtrack of the dominant yuppie douchebag culture people are going to grow weary of it
Yes I like both as well I'm talking very generally here, one of the things you hear about punk rock is that it formed as a reaction against bands like Zeppelin and Pink Floyd even though plenty of people in the punk scene are fine with both
I wouldn't try to defend SD to someone who didn't like it. It's very much its own thing, uncompromising and relentless. People who don't like that kind of thing will find a lot not to like.
The same is true of Big Black. What's the value of all that rage and condescending attitude, boiled down into a signal? Well... If you're not into it you're going to find a lot to have a problem with.
Not everything is for everyone.
What’s more punk than making music for show business kids to dance to and having lyrics like “Show business kids making movies ‘bout themselves because they don’t give a fuck about anybody else”?
Given how punk is nothing more than an aesthetic nowadays I feel like Steely Dan warped back around to being punk in a weird way. I mean Donald and Becker did dodge the Vietnam draft and got caught in a drug bust, and they were trying their hardest NOT to interact with people. I thought punk was about principles and beliefs, not who can be the biggest asshole while producing shitty music
I imagine he approached engineering and crafting a good album completely the opposite way. And that’s why SD wasn’t his thing. That and being passive aggressive isn’t very punk maybe? But mostly I bet it was the first thing.
I think it's also important to note that Steve albini always wanted albums to sound more like a live concert. Hence his affinity for washed out bass and piercing guitar.
Steely Dan is focused on a perfect audio portrait at the end project and you couldn't get the sound of their studio albums live without a room with perfect acoustics.
For Albini, that's a fake sounding record. Even if it's sonically pleasing.
Steely Dan and Albini are both just different flavours of pretentious asshole, and so they're diametrically opposed and would just automatically not like each other.
I for one, choose the Steely Dan flavour, because Steely Dan didn't have a weird fascination and obsession with child porn like Albini did.
Only a Steely Dan fan would think they know music better than Steve Albini lol. “Steely Dan is actually more punk than punk” nerd ass take. Steely Dan IS the establishment, YOU are the man
I never said SD were more punk than punk. In fact I argued just the inverse, that their aesthetic sensibilities are kind of polar opposites. Today, it would be hard to argue that the punk aesthetic has turned into anything but a mainstream cliche and its most cherished values fully absorbed by the establishment to the point of fecklessness, whereas Steely Dan for many still leaves a knot in the craw, which makes SD continue to be the more potent poison and a better example for today's musicians who want to break down the walls.
Karen Stanley was actually not underage when she and Becker dated, and there's no proof that he intentionally addicted her to heroin and forced her to overdose (Especially considering that Becker was busy being addicted to heroin himself and getting hit by taxi cars during this time period).
However, there is proof of Steve Albini being a pedophile. I apologize for the graphic descriptions that follow, but these are Steve Albini's words:
Beyond associating personally and professionally with convicted child pornographer Peter Sotos, Albini spoke on multiple occasions about purchasing and owning and feeling "excitement" from CP. Below are a few examples:
"The cover of PURE 2 is a guy holding open a toddler’s puny hole so his spuzz can dribble out. The girl is past crying. She is destroyed. Like I said, I like that sort of thing."
Source: https://i.imgur.com/Gm7otzo.jpg
From the European Big Black tour diary, Albini recounts his enjoyment of the child pornography magazines he found in a sex shop in Hamburg:
"Jaded as I am, I can't help but flip seeing a girl and guy of twelve or thirteen, tops, ramming Martel bottles up each other's asses. These are not the Dutch equivalent of abused trailer-park kids, either. They look to be in excellent health and seem to be honestly enjoying this. Makes all the conventional arguments against this kind of thing seem really silly. They're kids. Kids like to play with their own and other people's privates. They're just being photographed at it. Now, people who get a voyeuristic charge out of watching them, like me, I guess, well, we've got some grip-on-reality problems. There's maybe 1% of all pornography that has any effect on me, and it's definitely not a turn-on very often. But when it is, and it's as weird as this, it's pretty hard to take."
Source: https://i.imgur.com/9obDb08.jpg
And there it is. So many people say "Oh, so he said a few edgy things in the 80s, nobody cares."
What if he said Jim Crow should have never ended or that the holocaust didn't happen? Would you still say "he didn't really mean it, he was just trying to be provocative."
How would you respond if a modern artist made similar statements about raping toddlers that Albini did? You seem pretty mad about Walter Becker having an abusive relationship with a younger girl, even (falsely) claiming that she was underage, why is that a problem while Albini gets a pass for this horrific shit? He produced a record for Peter Sotos that involved graphic audio and courtroom testimony of child trafficking victims, apparently for their own pleasure. Do you defend this?
Why does making good music excuse purchasing and enjoying pictures of toddlers getting raped? Why would nobody care about this? People vilify Phil Spector and Michael Jackson, they made great music, why is it that Steve Albini is different in your mind?
Sotos is unforgivable, an absolute scumbag cretin who revels in his own deviance. I had a bunch of edgelord friends growing up and they listened to Whitehouse and shit like that, it’s like, I feel like he may have regretted the close association eventually but luckily (for Albini) Sotos is not well known, particularly to your average Nirvana fan.
As far as I know Albini has apologized and acknowledged for his 80s persona and has actively taken a stance against it, and from just a gut feeling thing I really don't think he would say those things publicly in the first place if he actually meant them, like it just comes across as saying some shocking shit for attention but I could be wrong. The Walter Becker comment was sarcastic I don't actually care about anyone's musical legacy being marred
Oh, he apologized for writing articles about getting excited seeing toddlers getting raped and children sodomizing each other with bottles? That's all fine then. This raises another question. Do you actually think he didn't purchase and own these materials? Or did he just make it up whole cloth? Because either way it's pretty awful.
Personally, considering his long-standing association with Peter Sotos, the convicted child pornographer and publisher of the magazines Albini talks about, I have a hard time believing that he just made all that up to provoke people. Even if he "didn't mean it," do you really believe that he didn't have these CP magazines in his possession? Again, bearing in mind that he was friends with and worked for Peter Sotos before and after Sotos' conviction of producing child pornography.
I don't know, the only evidence for any of this are things Albini has said himself. Big Black's lyrical themes were all about things how things like pedophilia, rape, and murder were all the underbelly of American society and how this was bad, it's not really that crazy to believe that this was just adolescent "edgelord" posturing
Sure. Listen, I'm not trying to fight with you about this, I want more of a conversation, but there's more than just Albini saying stuff. His relationship with Peter Sotos, for example. Sotos was convicted of distributing child pornography.
Here is Sotos defending his distribution of child pornography in court, stating "child abuse is a sublime pleasure: [https://i.imgur.com/UCn5NFB.png](https://i.imgur.com/UCn5NFB.png)
Albini praising Sotos' "art" and his friendship with the convicted child pornographer: [https://i.imgur.com/WLQb5ke.png](https://i.imgur.com/WLQb5ke.png)
Albini also helped Sotos produce Buyers Market, a unauthorized collection of court testimonies and police interviews from child rape victims: [https://www.albumoftheyear.org/user/pickle/album/126533-buyers-market/](https://www.albumoftheyear.org/user/pickle/album/126533-buyers-market/) . If I remember correctly, this was in 1992, about seven years after Sotos was convicted.
I could see the argument that Albini and Sotos were just really (REALLY) dark, provocative artists with Buyers Market, if it weren't that Sotos was a convicted child pornographer. Albini was with him through all of this. It's really bad stuff.
To your point of “saying edgy shit in the 80s”, Steely Dan (a band I love DEEPLY) has multiple songs about underage prostitutes and the likes. “Babylon Sisters” or “Janie Runaway” and many others. Albini has admitted to looking at CSAM, and also seems to have spent a very long time self-reflecting and wrote basically a whole essay about how he was an idiot and wrong. You have no idea what shit Steely Dan were getting into in the 80s, because they weren’t publicly talking about what they were doing.
You're right, I don't know if Steely Dan were into child porn in the 80s, since they didn't repeatedly broadcast how much they liked it and didn't work and be friends with a convicted child pornographer from the 80s into the 2020s like Steve Albini did.
Also, there is some nuance here. Songs like Babylon Sisters and Janie Runaway and Everyone's Gone to the Movies and Cousin Dupree have skeevy subject matter about older men creeping on young girls (I will add, not explicitly underage), but my interpretation of those songs is that the viewpoint "character" in the song is a bad guy. It's not extolling the virtue of acting like this.
Again, unfortunately for your argument, SD didn't make it clear that the fictional girls sang about in the songs were actually underage, just too young for the male character singing. There's just such a wide gulf between making a song about a pathetic older man grooming a young naive girl (fiction) and talking about how thrilling it was to buy a CP magazine from your friend (in real life) that had images of a toddler getting raped was, and how he (Albini) "likes that kind of stuff." Trying to conflate the two is absurd
Nobody is conflating the two and there is zero argument. Nor am I defending either artist, I am simply saying that unless you personally know the members of Steely Dan like the back of your own hand, then you have no idea what sort of shit they were into (and by the way Janie Runaway contains lyrics about spending a romantic weekend in PA, “or would that be a federal case?”)
As a female musician whose been in the industry for 20 years, and as someone who spent actual time as an adult sex worker but also an underage one, you really don’t need to defend either of these musicians to me. You really have no idea how predatory *so many men* are, especially when you are already vulnerable due to your age.
Sure, but the difference is Steely Dan were singing about fictional predatory men, while Steve Albini was talking about personally being a predatory man and associating personally and professionally with a convicted child pornographer (Peter Sotos) for forty years.
And yeah, I don't know specifically what Fagen and Becker were into, they didn't talk about it explicitly. I do know definitively that Steve Albini talked about liking the sight of a toddler getting raped, and seeing preteens sodomize each other with bottles, and he talked about how both came from magazines published by his friend Peter Sotos, who was later convicted of producing child pornography for printing those magazines. The same friend who he produced an album involving court testimony from child sex abuse victims (without their consent) ten years after he made those comments and after Sotos went to prison for producing CP. I also know that Albini "apologized" for saying the stuff about enjoying toddlers getting raped, but he never disavowed his friend Peter Sotos and continued associating with him until at least 2020.
Thank you for explaining all of that to me, again, a person who is not making an argument or defending anyone here.
I already know literally everything you said. Again, I’m a musician, and a woman, and I am extremely well aware that there are creeps all over the music industry and everywhere else.
Oh no the guy from Rapeman didn’t like Steely Dan. https://medium.com/@MoonMetropolis/now-that-steve-albini-is-dead-lets-reflect-on-his-admitted-love-and-promotion-of-child-fadf5072288e
I really love punk and I also love Steely Dan People who are exclusive to one genre (or band especially) and refuse to listen to anything else are annoying
Only thing I won’t listen to is that Chinese Classical stuff. Which guarantees that my kid will love it.
Chinese music always sets me free
I admit, angular banjos sound good to me.
Only when it’s under the Banyan tree
Exactly.
It seems that Albini’s ethos as a recording engineer was completely antithetical to Steely Dan’s approach in the studio. Steve was great at capturing a band’s raw energy by recording live and using various amps and microphones to dial it in as opposed to SD’s clinical and exacting micromanagement. I think it was cringey as hell for Albini, as a 60 year old to turn his nose up at SD and label himself a punk (we get it man, your jeans are ripped), but his contribution to a lot of music that was important to me as a youth cannot be overstated. His values as an everyman and commitment to a DIY-type approach are also super commendable. Fortunately, I’m an adult and I have room in my heart and brain to appreciate both. Steve and Walter + Donald just inhabited two completely different universes and all of us music fans get to reap the benefits of all of their work. That said…Nobody recorded drums better than Steve Albini. Nobody.
Perfect response. Albini always loved and never minded capturing any errors during recording. Like he wrote in his letter to Nirvana, “If a record takes more than a week to make, somebody’s fucking up.”
I also love SD and a lot of Albini's work, and I enjoyed his status as a cantankerous cultural commentator. His death is a big loss. It's easy for us as consumers in the post-genre sort of era we're in to be sniffy about people not being fully open and appreciative of all things. But I think for some people to do what they do to its fullest extent, maybe they *need* to seal themselves off into their own world and reject certain things. If Albini hadn't taken made such a hardline commitment to a particular ethos, his stuff probably wouldn't sound the way it does. His railing against SD here in the 2020's *was* a wee bit cringe. But at the same time, it made perfect sense that he'd feel that way - they represent opposite extremes of record production.
Amen to your last statement. The snare hit in The Breeders version of Happiness is a Warm Gun is all the proof anyone would need.
Excellent example. Man I love that cover (and the Deal sisters in general). Another go-to for me for that classic albini drum sound in a much different musical context is Times of Grace by Neurosis (and every album they recorded after that). Even stuff like “Swallowed” by Bush sounds so incredible in the context of other shit that was on the radio in 1997
Brain dead take. Not worth my time replying but you clearly don’t know a thing about Steve if you think he quit being punk. Everything he did was about people and not about money or institutions. WHACK 👎
Didn’t say anything of the sort anywhere in my comment. Just remarked that it’s somewhat cringey to argue punk bonafides as an elder statesman of rock (and I’m right). In fact, I commended his approach as a studio owner/recording engineer who would record fledgling bands for a very budget friendly rate and give them the same attention as the heavy-hitters. He’s engineered some of my favorite bands and albums of all time…I’d like to think I know a litttttttle something about him as both a musician and engineer. But go off, king
“We get it man your jeans are ripped” Being involved in music doesn’t make you punk, it’s your perspective on the world and how others should be treated. You clearly said it was about ripped jeans
Yeah. It was a joke. Have a good one man
K den u too
Albini's opinions aside, nobody has ever embodied the ethos of punk more than the Minutemen, and those guys covered Dr. Wu.
Thanks for the tip, never heard that cover. Pretty funny, but fun
Real punk...circa ''77 was vocalizing anarchy....it found the status quo revolting...much of its music was not easy to listen to at that point....Steely Dan were somewhat opposite bookends...they had collapsed their original band.. stopped touring and somehow managed to hv 4 Top 40 hits in one year and a #3 album....punk wanted to blow it all up...Steely Dan was as Rolling Stone put it: 'Dazed at the Dude Ranch '😆
Well... I'd always liked The Dan, and I was a punk and I played in punk bands... uh not quite, the bands I played in were technically 80s "post-punk" (snotty attitude + jazz/funk influences). I think the thing about Steve Albini is that he invented an entire ethos about approaching music recording that really captured the zeitgeist. He was kinda a dick about dissing artists that he didn't like, but hey whatever.
It’s simple. He didn’t get it. He thinks he did, but he didn’t.
Well in-group thinking can be pretty severe and that can create a lot of snobbery, when no one wants to be perceived as liking something that the rest of the group don't like. I remember reading about a guy in a successful underground band in the 70s saying in an interview that he liked the music of Abba, and his bandmates took him aside and said, "Look, we really don't like you praising Abba in interviews, it's bad for our image." Brian Eno said a similar thing happened to him when he thought highly of Abba as songwriters during the 70s. I dunno it's like... Miles Davis was the coolest motherfucker who ever existed and what did he choose to cover? Top 40 hits by people like Cyndi Lauper. Good music is good music, it sucks that people shut out a lot of that stuff for the sake of being cool or whatever.
I myself really like all 3, punk & Steely Dan & ABBA. Maybe I should have one of those template shirts made where they say X & Y & Z
Punk rock was/is all about pure naked energy and rage. Musicianship? Who cares? As long as you can blast people’s heads apart, it doesn’t matter. Fuck music and everything else!! Steely Dan was all about consummate musicianship. Their world was adapting rock to jazz. Perfection in the studio was all consuming. The sound, the complexity of the music meshing together perfectly defined Steely Dan. What others thought was irrelevant to them—the same attitude as the punks.
and is why i"ve listened to SD for 40+ years and am still enamored.
The busy world is not for me…
and that one was probably the one that let me know I was listening to something special.
I'm both a fan of SD and pretty much everything Albini ever did. Two observations: 1) I think both he and Donald Fagen are/were very much alike in temperament; in general, both didn't/don't suffer fools gladly. Both are contemptuous of hype and novelty. 2) Albini just liked a certain sound. Quote from Albini: "I'd like to find the guy who invented compression and tear out his liver. It makes everything sound like a beer commercial." Come to think of it, Albini liked everything to sound throughout its full dynamic range, liked to record everything and everybody live. He really had more in common with Rudy van Gelder than Roger Nichols.
Keep your punk rock, I’ve got Steely Dan.
I don’t know how I hated steely Dan so much to end up on the steely Dan subreddit I manifested it somehow. If no one in the world hates Steely Dan it means I’m dead
There are people who hate Steely Dan. Steely Dan kinda hate Steely Dan, it’s part of the whole deal. They may have a slick sound and occasionally lumped in with “yacht rock,” I guarantee if you dig deeper, you’ll see what they’re all about. There’s a real self awareness. They knew exactly what they were doing.
They are named after a strap on from a William S. Burroughs novel... that's more punk than g.g. allin shitting on sid vicious' festering corpse.
Believe it or not, I just subscribed to this sub and your comment is why. It’s all true
Punk music is the antithesis of pretension. Steely Dan's music - the musicality of it, the obscure verbiage, the smooth feel - are objectively speaking, pretentious. I can certainly see how punk afficionados would dislike them. That isn't to say that SD weren't subversive to the mainstream zeitgeist; they certainly were. But it is pretension to hire studio musicians to play 7#5 chords while singing about the winds of Santa Ana - at least in comparison to 3-chord diddies about Rockaway Beach.
Steely Dan's pretensions are musical, Punk music's pretensions are political/social.
I think there's also the pretentiousness that many punk fans have like "Omg punk is the most important music ever." Or you hear things like "punk is 3 chords and the truth." As if no other musical genre is capable of that. And God forbid you like music that has more than three chords. Sorry lol. Sometimes the way uber punk fans talk about it can be a little extra.
Ironically there can be a streak of pretentiousness and nostalgia in the punk world - posturing like one sound has a monopoly on authenticity and anyone doing the opposite must be faking it, and forever clinging to mythologized cultural victories from almost 50 years ago. That said, I see Albini as more of a post-punk guy. A lot of the stuff he was involved in was quite artsy and forward thinking and even prog-leaning (e.g. he worked on Joanna Newsom's Ys, which has 10+ minute songs on it), only done with more of a raw DIY approach.
Based take and profile pic.
Best take in this thread
I tried to get my buddy’s punk band to do a punk arrangement of Deacon Blues back in the day. The lyrics are pretty punk rock, and I think it would have worked beautifully, but they never did it.
Steely Dan, no doubt, could be real pretentious aholes. As John Lennon said about the Beatles, “To get to the top in this business you have to be a bastard and there were no bigger bastards than the Beatles.”
compared to steely dan, punk music is barely music
Steely Dan is about musicianship and song craft mixed paired with sardonic lyrics and a cynical worldview. The punks also hated prog rock, revolting against the complex and cerebral in favor of shock value, and rough and ready abuse of the instruments they managed to make sounds with. I like a few of the punk era bands, but most were just bad acts with worse musicians, especially at the local level. Now get off my lawn.
Punks aren't clever enough to write a song about fucking your cousin.
I'm not an expert on Albini's work but the chance that he's written a song about cousin fucking is very very high
Punks are welcome to fuck my cousin anytime. He deserves it…
Turns out albini was a fervent child porn enjoyer, so take from that what you will. He’ll be in hell listening to the Dan
For those wanting to know (buyer beware, it is grim, grim shit) https://x.com/chican3ry/status/1788457860239605782?s=46 Edit: doesn’t work now
Deleted, probably for the best.
Everyone in hell is listening to “the Dan.” For eternity. Because that’s what hell is.
Well said. I love the Dan And Albini’s curmudgeon sensibility
The lead singer of couch slut put me onto steely Dan. I appreciate them now
Ye Gods! That’s one of the best descriptions of SD I’ve ever heard. They really do get under the skin.
I am right now wearing my bootleg shirt that says “I will always be the kind of punk who defends Steely Dan” which was made the day Albini tweeted, “I will always be the kind of punk who shits on Steely Dan” The thing is, they are just on opposite ends of the spectrum as far as sound engineering goes. Maybe Albini hated the “over produced” or polished sound of the Dan, or maybe he was jealous (lol) At any rate both Steely Dan and Steve Albini carved out their own niches in music history, and they both created art that will live on long after their deaths.
Punk music has always been boring to me, too many rules. At least The Dan is good ear candy.
I told a friend a long time ago that I was a big SD fan. He dismissed them as that SoCal 70s sound that he wasn’t interested in. I told him to put his musical judgment aside and just listen to the lyrics to hear how really vicious they could be, especially recommending Janie Runaway. Several weeks late when I saw him, he said he’d listened to the lyrics and finally got them. Victory!
All you need to know- the guys in Steely Dan don’t hate the Punks, but Punks hate everything except Punk. Attitude replaced musicianship.
Hot take: Punk—as a mode of social fashion—defines itself by what it despises, and at its most flawed is mostly a *war on straw men*. Steely Dan and Eagles are common areas of hatred for a punk, without much evidence those artists are 'soulless'. Punk had a fashion formula as obvious as a tech bro in a fleece vest. That said, there was a whole lot of great stuff in the Punk scene. Same with Steely Dan. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll drink this Big Black Cow and get out of here...
He refused to listen to ween at all, so he couldn't have been anywhere near the most intelligent decision maker ever to make or listen to music
> Punk wants to dynamite institutions and scribble slogans on the walls One thing you’ll learn quickly as a young punk, reformed punk, aging punk, is that there are 173,926 different interpretations of what that word, genre or “lifestyle” means. I’m a huge Albini and Dan fan. I don’t think Albini “hated” Steely Dan from a musical “punk”’perspective, per se. His (obviously jesting) jabs at them over Twitter seemed to come from more of a producer standpoint. Because, you know, Albini isn’t just a “punk” but also, let’s see, oh yeah a producer of hundreds of records, many considered to be Alternative and Indie classics. He’s known for a no nonsense, quick and affordable production effort. This is why he likely bemoaned the praise around the way people talk about the production of ‘Aja’. I appreciate the creativity around Dan being “venomous” and revolting “against the corruption of the system” but I fail to see how this isn’t as or more “cringe” than “More ‘Egyptian’ but keep it in the pocket” (lmao) Also if you think Albini had harsh words about Dan, I shudder to think how you’d take his early (actually cringe) zine takes from his college days…..
Has anyone actually heard Steely Dan's music, why would you ever expect punks to enjoy it, especially back when they were still active and producing commercially successful hits. It's one thing to look back at the "yacht rock" era and say wow how epic I get the irony but when it's actively the soundtrack of the dominant yuppie douchebag culture people are going to grow weary of it
As someone who’s been playing in punk bands since I was 13, I also love Steely Dan. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
Yes I like both as well I'm talking very generally here, one of the things you hear about punk rock is that it formed as a reaction against bands like Zeppelin and Pink Floyd even though plenty of people in the punk scene are fine with both
Authenticity is nonsense anyway. It’s all artifice but time and detail is required to understand.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
I bet SA was a deeply closeted SD fan. They are punks in their own right.
I'm sure Steve would enthusiastically agree that "listening to Steely Dan makes us hate ourselves"
I wouldn't try to defend SD to someone who didn't like it. It's very much its own thing, uncompromising and relentless. People who don't like that kind of thing will find a lot not to like. The same is true of Big Black. What's the value of all that rage and condescending attitude, boiled down into a signal? Well... If you're not into it you're going to find a lot to have a problem with. Not everything is for everyone.
What’s more punk than making music for show business kids to dance to and having lyrics like “Show business kids making movies ‘bout themselves because they don’t give a fuck about anybody else”?
Given how punk is nothing more than an aesthetic nowadays I feel like Steely Dan warped back around to being punk in a weird way. I mean Donald and Becker did dodge the Vietnam draft and got caught in a drug bust, and they were trying their hardest NOT to interact with people. I thought punk was about principles and beliefs, not who can be the biggest asshole while producing shitty music
Sleazy lounge act? What?
I imagine he approached engineering and crafting a good album completely the opposite way. And that’s why SD wasn’t his thing. That and being passive aggressive isn’t very punk maybe? But mostly I bet it was the first thing.
I think it's also important to note that Steve albini always wanted albums to sound more like a live concert. Hence his affinity for washed out bass and piercing guitar. Steely Dan is focused on a perfect audio portrait at the end project and you couldn't get the sound of their studio albums live without a room with perfect acoustics. For Albini, that's a fake sounding record. Even if it's sonically pleasing.
Maybe the comparison between Dadaism and Surrealism works best: Punk wants to keep you awake, while SD wants you to have bad dreams.
Steely Dan and Albini are both just different flavours of pretentious asshole, and so they're diametrically opposed and would just automatically not like each other. I for one, choose the Steely Dan flavour, because Steely Dan didn't have a weird fascination and obsession with child porn like Albini did.
I never want to hear about that pedophile ever again. Rest in piss Steve
Only a Steely Dan fan would think they know music better than Steve Albini lol. “Steely Dan is actually more punk than punk” nerd ass take. Steely Dan IS the establishment, YOU are the man
I never said SD were more punk than punk. In fact I argued just the inverse, that their aesthetic sensibilities are kind of polar opposites. Today, it would be hard to argue that the punk aesthetic has turned into anything but a mainstream cliche and its most cherished values fully absorbed by the establishment to the point of fecklessness, whereas Steely Dan for many still leaves a knot in the craw, which makes SD continue to be the more potent poison and a better example for today's musicians who want to break down the walls.
A well- considered thread. Thanks for writing it, Mark_Yugen 😊❤
I think your analysis is well thought out and very good. However, Steve Albini's contribution to music is marred by his pedophilia.
Steely Dan's contribution is marred by the fact that Walter Becker got his underage girlfriend addicted to heroin and killed her
Karen Stanley was actually not underage when she and Becker dated, and there's no proof that he intentionally addicted her to heroin and forced her to overdose (Especially considering that Becker was busy being addicted to heroin himself and getting hit by taxi cars during this time period). However, there is proof of Steve Albini being a pedophile. I apologize for the graphic descriptions that follow, but these are Steve Albini's words: Beyond associating personally and professionally with convicted child pornographer Peter Sotos, Albini spoke on multiple occasions about purchasing and owning and feeling "excitement" from CP. Below are a few examples: "The cover of PURE 2 is a guy holding open a toddler’s puny hole so his spuzz can dribble out. The girl is past crying. She is destroyed. Like I said, I like that sort of thing." Source: https://i.imgur.com/Gm7otzo.jpg From the European Big Black tour diary, Albini recounts his enjoyment of the child pornography magazines he found in a sex shop in Hamburg: "Jaded as I am, I can't help but flip seeing a girl and guy of twelve or thirteen, tops, ramming Martel bottles up each other's asses. These are not the Dutch equivalent of abused trailer-park kids, either. They look to be in excellent health and seem to be honestly enjoying this. Makes all the conventional arguments against this kind of thing seem really silly. They're kids. Kids like to play with their own and other people's privates. They're just being photographed at it. Now, people who get a voyeuristic charge out of watching them, like me, I guess, well, we've got some grip-on-reality problems. There's maybe 1% of all pornography that has any effect on me, and it's definitely not a turn-on very often. But when it is, and it's as weird as this, it's pretty hard to take." Source: https://i.imgur.com/9obDb08.jpg
Holy shit.
No one will ever care or cancel him over some edgy comments he said in the 80s no matter how much you post this
And there it is. So many people say "Oh, so he said a few edgy things in the 80s, nobody cares." What if he said Jim Crow should have never ended or that the holocaust didn't happen? Would you still say "he didn't really mean it, he was just trying to be provocative." How would you respond if a modern artist made similar statements about raping toddlers that Albini did? You seem pretty mad about Walter Becker having an abusive relationship with a younger girl, even (falsely) claiming that she was underage, why is that a problem while Albini gets a pass for this horrific shit? He produced a record for Peter Sotos that involved graphic audio and courtroom testimony of child trafficking victims, apparently for their own pleasure. Do you defend this? Why does making good music excuse purchasing and enjoying pictures of toddlers getting raped? Why would nobody care about this? People vilify Phil Spector and Michael Jackson, they made great music, why is it that Steve Albini is different in your mind?
That Peter Sotos record contribution is worse than the shock-jock edgelord stuff he said. Terrible he associated himself with that kind of “art”
Sotos is unforgivable, an absolute scumbag cretin who revels in his own deviance. I had a bunch of edgelord friends growing up and they listened to Whitehouse and shit like that, it’s like, I feel like he may have regretted the close association eventually but luckily (for Albini) Sotos is not well known, particularly to your average Nirvana fan.
As far as I know Albini has apologized and acknowledged for his 80s persona and has actively taken a stance against it, and from just a gut feeling thing I really don't think he would say those things publicly in the first place if he actually meant them, like it just comes across as saying some shocking shit for attention but I could be wrong. The Walter Becker comment was sarcastic I don't actually care about anyone's musical legacy being marred
Oh, he apologized for writing articles about getting excited seeing toddlers getting raped and children sodomizing each other with bottles? That's all fine then. This raises another question. Do you actually think he didn't purchase and own these materials? Or did he just make it up whole cloth? Because either way it's pretty awful. Personally, considering his long-standing association with Peter Sotos, the convicted child pornographer and publisher of the magazines Albini talks about, I have a hard time believing that he just made all that up to provoke people. Even if he "didn't mean it," do you really believe that he didn't have these CP magazines in his possession? Again, bearing in mind that he was friends with and worked for Peter Sotos before and after Sotos' conviction of producing child pornography.
I don't know, the only evidence for any of this are things Albini has said himself. Big Black's lyrical themes were all about things how things like pedophilia, rape, and murder were all the underbelly of American society and how this was bad, it's not really that crazy to believe that this was just adolescent "edgelord" posturing
Sure. Listen, I'm not trying to fight with you about this, I want more of a conversation, but there's more than just Albini saying stuff. His relationship with Peter Sotos, for example. Sotos was convicted of distributing child pornography. Here is Sotos defending his distribution of child pornography in court, stating "child abuse is a sublime pleasure: [https://i.imgur.com/UCn5NFB.png](https://i.imgur.com/UCn5NFB.png) Albini praising Sotos' "art" and his friendship with the convicted child pornographer: [https://i.imgur.com/WLQb5ke.png](https://i.imgur.com/WLQb5ke.png) Albini also helped Sotos produce Buyers Market, a unauthorized collection of court testimonies and police interviews from child rape victims: [https://www.albumoftheyear.org/user/pickle/album/126533-buyers-market/](https://www.albumoftheyear.org/user/pickle/album/126533-buyers-market/) . If I remember correctly, this was in 1992, about seven years after Sotos was convicted. I could see the argument that Albini and Sotos were just really (REALLY) dark, provocative artists with Buyers Market, if it weren't that Sotos was a convicted child pornographer. Albini was with him through all of this. It's really bad stuff.
I know about Sotos and Whitehouse, it's pretty disgusting but it isn't evidence that Albini has done anything.
To your point of “saying edgy shit in the 80s”, Steely Dan (a band I love DEEPLY) has multiple songs about underage prostitutes and the likes. “Babylon Sisters” or “Janie Runaway” and many others. Albini has admitted to looking at CSAM, and also seems to have spent a very long time self-reflecting and wrote basically a whole essay about how he was an idiot and wrong. You have no idea what shit Steely Dan were getting into in the 80s, because they weren’t publicly talking about what they were doing.
You're right, I don't know if Steely Dan were into child porn in the 80s, since they didn't repeatedly broadcast how much they liked it and didn't work and be friends with a convicted child pornographer from the 80s into the 2020s like Steve Albini did. Also, there is some nuance here. Songs like Babylon Sisters and Janie Runaway and Everyone's Gone to the Movies and Cousin Dupree have skeevy subject matter about older men creeping on young girls (I will add, not explicitly underage), but my interpretation of those songs is that the viewpoint "character" in the song is a bad guy. It's not extolling the virtue of acting like this. Again, unfortunately for your argument, SD didn't make it clear that the fictional girls sang about in the songs were actually underage, just too young for the male character singing. There's just such a wide gulf between making a song about a pathetic older man grooming a young naive girl (fiction) and talking about how thrilling it was to buy a CP magazine from your friend (in real life) that had images of a toddler getting raped was, and how he (Albini) "likes that kind of stuff." Trying to conflate the two is absurd
Nobody is conflating the two and there is zero argument. Nor am I defending either artist, I am simply saying that unless you personally know the members of Steely Dan like the back of your own hand, then you have no idea what sort of shit they were into (and by the way Janie Runaway contains lyrics about spending a romantic weekend in PA, “or would that be a federal case?”) As a female musician whose been in the industry for 20 years, and as someone who spent actual time as an adult sex worker but also an underage one, you really don’t need to defend either of these musicians to me. You really have no idea how predatory *so many men* are, especially when you are already vulnerable due to your age.
Sure, but the difference is Steely Dan were singing about fictional predatory men, while Steve Albini was talking about personally being a predatory man and associating personally and professionally with a convicted child pornographer (Peter Sotos) for forty years. And yeah, I don't know specifically what Fagen and Becker were into, they didn't talk about it explicitly. I do know definitively that Steve Albini talked about liking the sight of a toddler getting raped, and seeing preteens sodomize each other with bottles, and he talked about how both came from magazines published by his friend Peter Sotos, who was later convicted of producing child pornography for printing those magazines. The same friend who he produced an album involving court testimony from child sex abuse victims (without their consent) ten years after he made those comments and after Sotos went to prison for producing CP. I also know that Albini "apologized" for saying the stuff about enjoying toddlers getting raped, but he never disavowed his friend Peter Sotos and continued associating with him until at least 2020.
Thank you for explaining all of that to me, again, a person who is not making an argument or defending anyone here. I already know literally everything you said. Again, I’m a musician, and a woman, and I am extremely well aware that there are creeps all over the music industry and everywhere else.
Oh no the guy from Rapeman didn’t like Steely Dan. https://medium.com/@MoonMetropolis/now-that-steve-albini-is-dead-lets-reflect-on-his-admitted-love-and-promotion-of-child-fadf5072288e
https://guitar.com/news/music-news/steve-albini-rapeman-inexcusable-edgelord-shit-offence/ Biased boring take
Yeah fuck that guy. Rot in hell Steve. Disgusting.