These have been a rough couple of days--weeks, months, years--and sometimes it gets to my household. Maybe a lot of times it gets to us. I've been following the news since, well, Carter's inauguration, and I have journalists in my family, but I am slowly coming to the realization that people who weren't raised this way have a lower tolerance than I do. So when my husband said he couldn't listen to the news this weekend, we bounced around in the car to some K-pop. (What can I say? The man has good taste.)
While out running an errand this morning, I let him pick, and he pulled out Two Against Nature by Steely Dan. This was, for a long time, Our Band. We made a conscious decision, in that way young people do, that we were going to become fans, and we did. First it was a Best Of/Greatest Hits compilation, but then we started branching out into some of their older and maybe a little more disturbing stuff. Listening to this album reminded me why I had thought they were so brilliant even though they proudly owned their status as slightly erudite muzak. They didn't wink at irony, they wallowed in it, and sometimes they could laugh about it, but in their songs, at least, that laughter was pretty bitter.
Two Against Nature was one of their last albums, and they remained bitter and disturbing even when they softened with remorse and nostalgia. But really what I was thinking as I listened to this album from almost a quarter century ago was, "They called it." But maybe better to say, "They saw it."
There is, obviously, a song about proto-Manic Pixie Dream Girl. When the parents of the person who coined that phrase were in middle school, Steely Dan was writing about their obsession with the girl who was screwed up and all the more attractive for it. She shows up here in "Almost Gothic", but she's also makes appearances in "Black Cow" and, to some extent, "Peg".
The song that really jolted me from this album is "Janie Runaway". Yeah, I got it even when it came out, but it sounds much more sinister now, maybe because "Janie" would be even younger than my children are now. Kudos to Becker and Fagen for taking the perspective of a monster and making it clear that's exactly what they're doing. But the human trafficking angle is extra special disturbing today.
What hit me hardest, though, was "Jack of Speed". That was another I understood almost twenty years ago, but addiction hadn't touched my life as thoroughly at that point. Yeah, the band sang about That Life before (see: "Kid Charlemagne"), but by the time we get to "Jack", all of the thrill of the high is gone, and they're singing to the one person who might still be saved.
But the real reason I return to this album is for "What a Shame About Me". That's another one that has a clear meaning you can get the first time you listen to it, but it's one thing to hear it as a young person, another thing in middle age. It's a more romantic, plaintive version of Terry Malloy's plea in On The Waterfront, but at the core the protagonist is still declaring that he could have been something. To which I can only wonder, why is it too late, you whiny man-child?
This album is self-conscious (and if you're going to use "isotope" as a lyric, get it right), but so are all of their albums. They knew what they were doing, which included letting their asses hang out, and they went with it. They took the laughs when they deserved them, and they weren't asses about the praise.
I wonder, did they see what was coming, or did they see what was in front of them when the rest of us didn't want to? Or, as I like to say a lot these days, why can't it be both?
Deb in the City
