The one genre Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen hates: “Inherently fascist”
Donald Fagen is “just being honest”. He’s always just being honest, in fact, he’s belligerently honest—the Larry David of music, if you will. Much like the egg-headed comic, this blunt honesty comes from a sincerely curmudgeonly place. Like a lot of curmudgeonly folks, Fagen’s also pretty funny too. “My natural motive is irony,” he says—the music of Steely Dan should tell you that. It is an expression of individualism—irreverent, snaky, jazzy and acerbic individualism. And it is most certainly not ‘rock’.
Fagen fucking hates rock, as he proclaims in his tour diary Eminent Hipster: “Rock star, people forget that it wasn’t used widely until — well, I forget when, but there wasn’t this institutionalized careerism in rock that there is now. 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.”
Fagen is not the sort of fellow you’d see cajoled into waving a lighter upon request. He’s a jazz man with a jazz mind. “He’s always been one of my favourites,” he said of Ray Charles. He also loves Erma Franklin, Little Willie John, Marvin Gaye, Frank Sinatra and Shirley Bassey. While the Lovin’ Spoonful might creep into his favourite discs, rock is far from the bread and butter of the group that many would misnomer as a classic rock band.
Nevertheless, that misnomer is rather understandable. The Dan are a radio band, and they rattle off guitar riffs and a slew of other factors familiar with the rock world, so they are, at least, rock-adjacent in sound and constitution. Thus, you might expect Fagen to care about some of his cohorts in that realm (whether he belongs there or not). But he asserts that his assessment of the fascism of moshpits is a sincere one. “It’s just me being honest,” he declared, “And me feeling old, and I have to say, if you want to know the truth, I just don’t care”.
So, it might not be in sound per se where Steely Dan differ from their peers – though all the minor 7ths and bebop inferences in their back catalogue stand against this – but this disposition was certainly the antithesis of commercial rock.
Is rock music fascist?
Well, ask bands like Kino, who used their art to help try and topple the fascist regime of the USSR, and they’ll tell you that Fagen has got it all backwards—that any unification in the form of culture is inherently anti-fascist. But Kino don’t represent every band. While many groups might herald a huge following, if this is done as a mere commercial extension of capitalism, as art for mass public consumption, then he has a point that it is people being fed a palatable extension of the regime in charge who dictate the market forces of popularity in the first place.
We see this to some extent now where tax cuts are given to giant media conglomerates, but independent arts funding is slashed. So, although it is naturally a claim laced with irony and is more than a shade of cynical, from an academic standpoint, there is a smidgeon of fascism about commercial rock at its most lighter-waving conformist.
Donald Fagen’s outsider views
And that age factor is a vital one, too. Rock ‘n’ roll first came from the same jazz Fagen adored, but as Keith Richards once explained, the footloose expression of old has become rather more rigid. “It’s all so natural,” Richards said of roots music, “there’s none of this forced stuff that I was getting tired of in rock music.”
He then goes on to clarify, “Rock ‘n’ roll I never get tired of, but ‘rock’ is a white man’s version, and they turn it into a march, that’s [the modern] version of rock. Excuse me,” he adds humorously, “I prefer the roll.” And Fagen calls ‘here, here’ somewhere from afar, in a very sloth fashion.
All that being said, maybe Fagen’s fascist remark is simply an irony taken a little too far. As he admitted himself: “I have a critical nature, in the sense that when I look at something I often look for the flaws.” In some ways, that is his strength, and it’s always ensured that he remains an outlaw outsider, subverting the principle that “people are usually afraid to say what’s on their mind” and taking ‘er easy for all us sinners.
