The band Steely Dan thought left everybody “in the dust” in the 1980s
Whether they said it themselves remains a mystery, but plenty of others have said it for them; when Steely Dan emerged in the 1970s, they effortlessly began pedalling a brand of ‘smart rock’. The band hybridised jazz and added a wealth of literary depth to catchy lyricism. While they weren’t the first songwriters to get bookish, they did seem to pioneer the notion that academia was a new groovy pinnacle. They were music’s premier postliberalists.
They didn’t even like rock music, with Donald Fagen comically referring to it as “inherently fascist”. This made Talking Heads, the band who called themselves brokers of “Thinking Man’s Dance Music”, natural contemporaries of the Dan when they burst onto the scene like oddballs. Thankfully, the CBGB punk band arrived at a period when Walter Becker didn’t like much else. “I’ve had a tough time with the radio lately,” he said in 1981. “It’s pathetic.”
However, at that stage, Talking Heads had four masterful albums under their belt. Their latest record, Remain in Light, had also brought an Afrobeat incursion into their singular mix of dance, punk and pop. This was an innovation that made them stand out to the boys in Steely Dan, with Donald Fagen commenting, “The Talking Heads are very interesting. They’re a top band.”
The duo were frequently shy of praise from their peers, but the art school edge of the ‘Psycho Killer’ group endeared them. Furthermore, they also recognisably function as a ‘band’, a set collective who all brought their own influence to the mix; this is something that Fagen and Becker always looked to hone with their own sound, mimicking the delicate mix of their jazz and soul heroes, and the legion of session musicians that they fired, ironically, proves it—they weren’t happy unless a perfect blend was achieved.
This sense of sweating over the details appealed to Fagen. He figured that Talking Heads had the same attitude and commented that he liked the band’s album covers. “And the guy’s eyes are great,” he wryly told Musician Magazine. “There’s at least an intelligence behind them, which is more than you can say for most groups.” In some ways, that disdain held a grain of salt; as the 1980s progressed, ‘smart rock’ was traded for ‘hair rock’ and showing off like a flash watch became the latest musical pinnacle.
“Further and further as time goes by,” Becker noted of Talking Heads’ development, “they’re leaving [the scene] in the dust.” In some ways, that’s because, like the Dan in the early 1970s, David Byrne and the gang never saw themselves as part of a ‘scene’. Sure, they admired their fellow groups who had cut their teeth in the famed CBGB club, but that didn’t mean that they had to be like them.
So, they didn’t mask their School of Design background and remained happily artful and avant-garde, writing in a manner not too dissimilar to Fagen and Becker about Bolshevists predicting the future and schizophrenic murderers to their own Flippy Floppy beat. Allong the way, like the Dan before them, they happily reflected back the true ways of society in a way that Mötley Crüe couldn’t even begin to comprehend.
As Byrne put it himself, “Forces that you might think are utterly unrelated to creativity can have a big impact. Technology, obviously, but environment, too. Even financial structures can affect the actual content of a song. The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.”
