What Lies Beyond Perfection? Listen To Steely Dan And You’ll Know

Your correspondent is familiar with today’s popular music, more familiar than he wishes to be, because they play it at his gym and yoga studio.

And your correspondent believes with absolute conviction that nothing today compares with the music of his youth from the 1960s and the 1970s.

Especially…Steely Dan.

Steely Dan was one of the great ’70s groups, performing a quirky, unique, rock-jazz fusion with lyrics that didn’t always make sense and yet with incomparable, nonpareil musicianship.

My friendly algorithm at YouTube somehow knew that Aja was one of my favorite albums back when I was a college boy, and suggested that I watch an hour-long documentary on the making of that album.

I did, I was dazzled, and I wanted to recommend it to you.

The link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sdMV9TzMkc

The complexity of the writing on Aja is phenomenal.

It’s like Stockhausen or John Cage, but you can dance to it.

I played the album almost nightly in my dorm room as I was winding down after a tough day of, well, being a mid-’70s college student.

Every note is still alive and resonating in my brain, 45 years on.

I urge you to watch this video, even if you’ve never heard of Steely Dan.

It’s only secondarily about music.

It’s primarily about having high standards, living up to them, and holding others accountable to those high standards as well.

At one point, one of the studio musicians who performed on Aja talks about the group’s approach to making music.

He says that perfection is only the starting point, that there is an expectation that the music will be played perfectly.

Only when it’s perfect, he says, are they able to shape it into something they want — specifically, songs that people will play over and over.

That’s what Aja was for me, and that’s what it still is.

Steely Dan fans will tell you about the impenetrability of the lyrics, and it’s Walter Becker and Donald Fagen who help demystify the words, to a certain extent.

There’s also a funny moment when they react to the bass and guitar lines of one of the songs being sampled for a rap song.

As somebody who fools around with music, I found it riveting to see these world class studio musicians along with Becker and Fagen explaining and showing exactly what they set out to do in each of the songs.

If Aja is an old friend, revisit it with this video.

And if you’ve never heard of it, or Steely Dan, give yourself a treat.