Steely Dan’s Magisterial Sleaze

You either swoon to the jaunty guitar lick that rips Steely Dan’s “Reelin’ in the Years,” or you hold your ears. Same with that eerie figure at the top of “FM,” or the sly, cribbed piano vamp to “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.” Steely Dan tracks can seem not just overproduced but overplayed, overpraised, and catnip for the wrong kind of music nerd. Long before you dig into a five-decade career with countless buried pearls, the band inspires way too many harangues about everything rock supposedly squelched (instrumental pretension, phony intellectuals, and control-freak arrangers). Jazzers profess love for Dan tracks even if they hate rock; rock partisans get swept up in Dan fever even if they hate jazz. Steely Dan records didn’t just thread stylistic needles, they turned style into a sardonic target… continued on Radio Silence