I Stopped Hating Steely Dan | Hacker News Reader

I Stopped Hating Steely Dan

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20 pointspaulpauper16 comments

Steely Dan is one of my all time favorite bands. I have all of their studio albums and I listen to them often (I also have several of Donald Fagen's solo albums too).

It's pretty incredible to think that this band spent over a year in the recording studio to put together an album with just 7 songs on it and using something like a total of 100 different session musicians. This album is Aja. I find it difficult to assign meaningful genre to their music. Plex categorizes it as "Pop/Rock". This shallow label seems to go well with the dismissive attitude that the article's writer held for so many years. Inaccurate at best.

If you're not familiar with 'The Dan', give your ears a treat by sampling their work across a number of their albums. Don't limit yourself to just the most popular songs like "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" or "Peg". Use headphones or a great stereo system and turn the volume up enough so that you can really enjoy the incredible sounds.

I can't do much better than this.

I enjoyed the band a lot as a young adult, stopped listening for a few years, and they have come back hard to my playlist for the last 15 to 20 years. Just a lot of depth to their music, words, and cultural approach.

Besides Aja, I'd recommend Katy Lied, Gaucho, and Everything Must Go; and Fagen's solo Nightfly as starting points. For songs, "Kid Charlemagne" is partly a nice Bay Area piece, and "Any Major Dude" is necessary consolation when everything is falling apart.

>Use headphones or a great stereo system and turn the volume up enough so that you can really enjoy the incredible sounds.

I'm already well-versed in the Steely Dan catalog, but I got a good reminder of this approach to music listening recently. My car is where I most often listen to music—the factory system is quite good, if certainly not great. I was listening to the latest album by a different artist, an album that overall hadn't yet done much for me. I listened wearing AirPods Pro, and the in-ear experience made for a much different experience. It was a clear indication that I should increase how often I do some higher-quality listening because on a day-to-day basis I'm getting diminished involvement which, over time, is dulling my expectations and the catharsis I discover with music.

I'm just not a fan of his vocals, but I really enjoy "Rose Darling", which has Michael McDonald on backup. Their sound is very clean.

For so many years I wrote them off as yacht rock or just being really good at setting a dirty 70’s feel I didn’t like. I kept trying to like them, and after the 3rd listening to “Can’t buy a Thrill” it clicked. That’s a perfect album.

Has anybody noticed a subtle shift and broadening of Hacker News’ remit since the Reddit protests

See the last line of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

That said, I agree this post is mostly off-topic. I've found uBlock origin really useful for filtering off-topic stuff on HN; please feel free to import/adapt my custom rules from here: https://pifke.org/hn.txt. (The domain for this story was just added.)

Thank you for the list. I left Reddit for a reason and have no desire to recreate it elsewhere, Lemmy forays aside. I appreciate that you were willing to share this with the rest of us.

I understand why that is there and am even a little embarrassed (I've always rolled my eyes when people make accusations about astroturfing, and I've definitely looked at that page before but the last line escaped my notice.)

However, the last month has been exceptional with respect to what is going on at Reddit and that context should be considered. I think it elevates it above a generic "wow is HN reddit now" gripe. This wasn't the first thread that made me think this, it was the thread about the "Russian coup" a few days ago.

I seem to be having issues with the script now:

https://i.imgur.com/4nH4yYp.png

It's removing the headlines but keeping the rest so I suspect it's not working as intended.

I grew up like most on my parent's music which I still love. I added jazz, which my parents never listened to all.

One of the last conversations I had with my father was about Willie Nelson. He loved him, and I thought he was terrible. We both had fun making fun of the other over this. I got several Willie Nelson CDs as attempts to culture me.

The grateful dead is another band I detested.

But 1 month ago a buddy was playing a dead song I never knew and it hit right. Then I found other songs I also like. I now sheepishly admit maybe I was too sure of my facts. Age is a factor.

I still don't like Willie. I'm reminded of the big lebowski line when the dude complains he doesn't wanna listen to the eagles because his day already sucked enough. The eagles and Willie are like that: barely tolerable on good days.

But on the dead ... I'm coming around

If you get confused

listen to the music play

Did somebody get a garage, a VW project car, and a garage boombox? Does this garage also contain posters that are delightfully tacky, yet unrefined?

tends to happen as you start reelin’ in the years

Hilarious, but also true, of me too.

I don't wanna do your dirty work.

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