‘The Mop Song 2000’: The strangest song Donald Fagen ever wrote
Jazz has always been a genre that favours the strange and outlandish. In every style and subgenre that falls under the jazz umbrella, the artists who dare to put themselves out there as true origins are often those who are most handsomely rewarded. The same is true of the much-maligned style of jazz fusion, where New York outfit Steely Dan has reigned supreme since their inception back in 1971. If you think the work of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker is strange, some of their extracurricular activities are on an entirely different planet.
From the very early days of Steely Dan, Fagen and Becker were looking for ways to blend together styles and sounds that had never previously been attempted. Throwing everything from blues to R&B to Latin jazz and pop into a blender and seeing what spewed out, the group never found the lasting mainstream success of some of their contemporaries. Nevertheless, the undeniable songwriting quality, along with the incredibly dedicated cult following afforded to the pair, have ensured the lasting relevance of Steely Dan.
True artists in every sense of the word, Fagen and Becker were always attempting to diversify their output and get their fingers into a countless array of pies. Even during the 1980s, a period in which Steely Dan were largely on hiatus, the pair remained prolific through multiple forms of music and expression. Nevertheless, this period also led to some of the musicians’ most bizarre work.
Around the end of the decade, National Lampoon satirist and This Is Spinal Tap star Tony Hendra, along with Peter Elbling, began working on the comic book The 90s: A Look Back—A History of the 1990s Before They Happen. A parody of the nostalgia-fueled retrospective publications that tend to come out at the end of every decade, the book gave satirical predictions of things that might occur during the 1990s, featuring contributions from the likes of George Carlin, Bill Murray, Keith Haring, Ann Magnuson, Mike Wallace and Paul Krassner among various others.
Predominantly a comedy book, The 90s: A Look Back also featured various musical contributors, the most notable being Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen. When the book was published in 1989, Steely Dan had not released any material since the beloved album Gaucho nine years prior. Perhaps it was boredom, madness, or maybe Fagen was simply out of practice, but the song he wrote for the parody book is, without a doubt, the strangest he ever landed upon.
Featuring lyrics like “Say Mop-d’dwee-dit, the sky is falling, men of Earth, your time is up, we have come to decorate your world,” the song reads like the paranoid ramblings of a rogue animatronic from Tomorrowland’s ‘Carousel of Progress’. Vaguely, the song offers a degree of pessimism about the sci-fi-esque future potentially awaiting humanity during the 1990s. Mostly, though, it is just weird, nonsensical lyrics about household chores.
Fagen himself has never really revealed his motivations for the song or how he came to write it. Given that the song was published in a book, there aren’t even any available recordings of the Steely Dan musician performing the oddity – although perhaps some home recordings will surface one day, allowing Dan fans to experience the extent of Fagen’s weird and wonderful mind.
So, while Steely Dan might have made a name for themselves crafting subversive jazz-pop fusion, the band’s discography only scratched the surface of the strange and expansive ideas rattling around in the heads of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. ‘The Mop Song 2000’ is bizarre, but it was also a product of its time. Thankfully, when the pair released Two Against Nature in 2000, Fagen’s songwriting skill was in much better shape.
