Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen on why rap wasn’t an original sound
After releasing their consummate and highly accessible debut album, Can’t Buy A Thrill, in 1972, Steely Dan garnered a solid global following. After a decade of rock ‘n’ roll domination in the ’60s, band leaders Walter Becker and Donald Fagen sought to revitalise popular music with an injection of breezy jazz and folk instrumentation. As the band prevailed throughout the 1970s, they began to polarise some music lovers, especially the punks.
Steely Dan polarised audiences primarily due to their forthright musical opinions. Their music blended genres in meticulously crafted albums of high production value. Audiophiles will find it difficult to fault Fagen and Becker’s 1977 jazz fusion masterpiece Aja, but such music stood in stark contrast to the ideals of heavier rock genres of the time, namely punk and metal.
For most punk musicians, live performance was the central focus of being in a band. Simple, affecting progressions and punchy, provocative lyrics could whip bored youths into frenetic storms of sociopolitical contempt and imbue a fraternal sense of belonging. On the contrary, Steely Dan avoided live performances and toured very often. The pair were much happier with the perfection permitted by the studio setting and the complexities afforded by record production.
In short, those who liked Steely Dan were often upset they couldn’t see their favourite band perform live, and those who didn’t like them criticised their pretensions and lack of emotional immediacy that other musical styles can bring. Fagen and Becker were fully aware of these criticisms but never seemed particularly bothered. They seemed to enjoy cult fandom and the chance to counter criticism with humorous jibes.
When Steely Dan broke up in 1981, Becker moved to Maui, where he kicked the drugs and became an “avocado rancher and self-styled critic of the contemporary scene.” Though Fagen maintained a sporadic solo career throughout the 1980s and ’90s, he, too, was a critic of the contemporary scene, much to the contemporary scene’s irritation.
Speaking to Chris Rolls in 2006, Fagen revealed that he still listened to “the same 40 jazz records I had in high school pretty much” and felt nothing original had been done in music over the past 30 years. Rolls brought rap music to Fagen’s attention as an innovation of the ’80s and ’90s. “It’s more of a theatrical forum really… or poetry with music type of thing, which certainly isn’t new,” Fagen opined in response. “And the beats are basically funk, or something else, only played by machines, it’s really not… it doesn’t sound new to me. I mean, what’s new about it?”
Indeed, rap music is inherently derivative, given that it makes use of samples. The crucial nuance is the style of lyrical delivery. Fagen felt that the fast-paced delivery of poetry was nothing new. Though rap, as popularised by Black Americans, is part of a different generation and cultural movement, many musicologists trace the style back to Bob Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’.
Continuing, Fagen suggested that, in a sense, sampling an orchestral piece for just a small section, which is then looped and stylised in a way that an orchestra wouldn’t be able to reproduce it, could perhaps be regarded as original. “They use sampling technology to put out a blip of sound, but it’s really like an orchestral hit will be sampled,” he mused. “If they appear very rapidly, that’s something maybe an orchestra couldn’t do because it happens faster than an orchestra could play it, but… it’s not what I would call a really significant change or anything.”
