“Rock music is inherently fascist”: Are Steely Dan really a jazz band?
Steely Dan have always been a fairly divisive group within the music world, loved by an incredibly dedicated group of fans and largely ignored by virtually everybody else. For the most part, though, Steely Dan are viewed within the context of the rock scene of the 1970s and the small subgenre of jazz-rock fusion, much to the disappointment of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. Fagen, in particular, regularly expressed his hatred of rock music, but were Steely Dan really a jazz group in the eyes of the masses?
Luckily for Fagen and Becker, the boundaries of jazz as a musical genre are famously broad. Everything from the big band era of Benny Goodman to the spaced-out spiritual jazz of Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew is captured under the vast umbrella term of jazz. After all, the style is largely based on free improvisation, inventiveness and spirit. On the face of it, therefore, the improvisation which characterised a lot of The Dan’s work certainly seems to adhere to the methods of jazz.
On the other hand, the music of Steely Dan would certainly appear as an outlier if placed in the jazz section of any respectable record store. Despite their clear appreciation and dedication to the genre, The Dan’s records share very little in common with the mainstream jazz scene of the 1970s. The way the band and fans have gotten around this fact is by referring to Steely Dan as ‘jazz fusion’ or ‘rock-jazz’, which does seem to complicate matters.
It is important to note, at this point, that jazz music and rock music are largely cut from the same cloth. Particularly during the early days of the rock ‘n’ roll revolution, musicians drew from the improvisational and rebellious qualities of jazz. Of course, as rock developed, it became more closely associated with blues than jazz, and eventually, it largely moved away from both styles. By the time Steely Dan hit the scene, mainstream rock had very little in common with jazz, which might go some way to explaining their confusing jazz fusion label.
Jazz fusion is a difficult brew, as it seems to upset both camps of fans, featuring a distinct lack of what makes either jazz or rock enjoyable. Fusion might as well be its own defined genre in itself and, if it was, Steely Dan would certainly be the pinnacle of that scene. Indeed, fans of the group are more likely to view them as a jazz or jazz fusion band rather than an out-and-out rock band and it is easy to see why.
The construction of Steely Dan’s records borrow much more from jazz than rock, storied by improvisational techniques, a revolving cast of session musicians and a distinctly organic nature. These things were certainly not standard within the rock scene, but the product of these recording sessions shared little in common with the likes of John Coltrane, Miles Davis or Thelonious Monk.
For their part, The Dan seemed pretty unhappy with being labelled as rock, with Fagen once saying, “I don’t like rock music, to be frank. I know David Byrne, and I once heard Nirvana, I think. But anthemic rock music is inherently fascist — anything intended to move huge masses of people is politically offensive to me”.
