Donald Fagen is “just being honest”. He’s always just being honest, in fact, he’s belligerently honest. And that honesty comes from a sincerely curmudgeonly place. However, like a lot of curmudgeonly folks, he’s also pretty funny too. “My natural motive is irony,” he says—the music of Steely Dan should tell you. It is an expression of individualism—irreverent, snaky, jazzy and acerbic individualism. And it is most certainly not rock.
Fagen f—king 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. “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 not 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. Thus, you might expect Fagen to care about some of his cohorts in that realm (whether he belongs there or not). But he asserts 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.”
And that age factor is a vital one too. Rock ‘n’ roll first came from jazz, 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 & 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 her easy for all us sinners.
