Steely Dan helped build hiphop. | | | | Steely Dan's Walter Becker performing (back when they did that) on March 27, 1973.
(ABC Photo Archives/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “Steely Dan helped build hiphop.”
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| | rantnrave:// One of the many amazing things about the two major dudes who constituted STEELY DAN is that they sustained a 40-plus year career (with a 20-year break in the middle, for what it's worth) without anyone figuring out what exactly the two of them did. I mean yes, we know WALTER BECKER, who died Sunday at age 67, was a stellar bass and guitar player and DONALD FAGEN is a jazz-piano nerd and unconventional lead singer. But everything else—words, chords, arrangements, attitude, arrogance, audacity—was the product of a two-man hivemind with a lifelong aversion to explaining itself (also, to simple major triads). I suspect a casual WU-TANG CLAN fan has a clearer idea what each of that group's nine members does than the most fanatic Steely Dan does about Becker and Fagen. Becker's death leaves an enormous hole not only in that hivemind but in an entire genre of musically complex, lyrically twisted, opaque yet groove-centric rock, of which Steely Dan are the uncontested kings and artists as disparate as PHISH, DE LA SOUL and KANYE WEST are worshippers. Becker's death doesn't leave us a whole lot closer to understanding how exactly "SHOW BIZ KIDS" or "RIKKI DON'T LOSE THAT NUMBER" or "PEG" or "HEY NINETEEN" got made (OK, we sort of do know how "Peg" got made), but a few hints and clues have emerged from the old interviews and new appreciations that poured in over the weekend. Becker, who endured his share of difficulties both as a kid as an adult, was the dark(er), acerbic one who may well have added the last twist of the knife to any number of lyrics. He was also the more groove-oriented blues and rock fan, who appears to have provided a check on Fagen's more avant-garde musical tendencies. He also may have provided a check on Steely Dan's Steely Dan-ness: "I think there is a level of perfection, polish, sophistication, and abundance of detail and structural stuff that [Fagen] wants to hear in his music that I sort of ran out of patience to do," said the man who skipped town immediately after (if not during) GAUCHO. Fagen, sounding like someone who lost not so much a partner as a piece of his own brain, vows to keep the band going. For even in death, these singular collaborators refuse to stop collaborating. MusicSET: "Remembering Walter Becker: Steely Dan's Mystery Man"... After a season full of acts like NINE INCH NAILS, SHARON VAN ETTEN, EDDIE VEDDER and the CHROMATICS playing in the TWIN PEAKS Roadhouse, DAVID LYNCH booked an old familiar face for Sunday's two-hour season finale... VARIETY asked music insiders to vote on their favorite 20th century label. But who is, or will be, the 21st century's ATLANTIC or BLUE NOTE? TOP DAWG ENTERTAINMENT anyone? COLUMBIA? SPOTIFY? No label?... POWER STATION saved by BERKLEE... RIP DAVE HLUBEK, TODD HONEYCUTT and MURRAY LERNER. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| | | | | Burnt Sugar Arkestra conducted by Vernon Reid |
| | My all-time favorite performance of a Steely Dan song. From Burnt Sugar's Steely Dan tribute at Lincoln Center, New York, March 1, 2012. |
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