Katie and I, meanwhile, were enrolled at a mostly white private all-girls school in a different city, where we insisted on taking six years of Latin instead of Spanish or French, and where we once went around earnestly asking all the teachers what they thought the meaning of life was. They were easygoing, well adjusted, and seemingly unconcerned with overly specific things they didn’t, as far as we could tell, go down strange rabbit holes. Our peers attended the excellent local public schools, played in the marching band at Friday-night football games, went to Bible study, and hung out at one another’s houses to play video games. Physics problem sets.īut, even in our own town, we were oddballs. That’s Mandarin for “Harvard.” The year that we discovered Steely Dan, Katie and I spent much of our time at home, dutifully writing papers on “Hamlet” and working through A.P. ![]() “ Hah-fuo,” she would say, sidling up to us with a significant look in her eye. When my cousins and my sister and I were applying for college, the admissions process was all that our parents would talk about whenever we convened for family gatherings. Or they’d say, in Mandarin, “This sounds so bad!”Īt that point, Katie and I lived in the sort of ethnic enclave where we were shuttled to various private tutors during the summers and received packets of math problems to complete. “What are you listening to?” they’d ask on their way to the kitchen or the garage, bemused. Our parents were subjected to replay after replay of Steely Dan’s first seven albums. Our house-a low-slung, nineteen-fifties California ranch-style design-had an open floor plan, which meant that music played on any speaker system was audible to everyone in the house. Over the course of the year, we worked our way through “Can’t Buy a Thrill,” “Countdown to Ecstasy,” “Pretzel Logic,” “Katy Lied,” “The Royal Scam,” “Aja,” and “Gaucho,” all of which I torrented off the Internet. What was with these harmonies, so strange and so addictive? What on earth did “Love your mama, love your brother / Love ’em till they run for cover” mean? Who would make a song like this? Really, we were just playing “Turn That Heartbeat Over Again” over and over again-a jangly, insistently cheerful song in which Donald Fagen sings with gusto about, among other things, a reanimated corpse. ![]() I happened to hear “Do It Again” once, somehow, in the summer before my senior year of high school, and suddenly Katie and I couldn’t stop listening to Steely Dan. ![]() The way that people get into Steely Dan is usually fuzzy, a gradual awakening rather than a bolt of pure feeling. And yet practically every Steely Dan song irresistibly conjures up images from my youth: lying on the carpet in the living room, listening to “Glamour Profession” and staring out at the large, unidentifiable fronds in our neighbor’s back yard, or waiting for my high-school boyfriend to message me on Google Chat on some warm school night, while my tinny laptop speakers emitted the mournful sax solos of “Deacon Blues.” We were, after all, clueless teen-agers growing up in a suburb of Los Angeles populated mostly by quietly wealthy Taiwanese immigrants and their children. My obsession with Steely Dan began when I was seventeen, and, even at the time, I thought it was deeply weird that my sister and I were so into an obscure band that was thoroughly identified with white middle-aged men. You could look up who Cathy Berberian was, learn of mysterious substances such as retsina or kirschwasser or Brut, or discover that a squonk was “a mythical woodland creature, originating in Pennsylvania,” which spent most of its time crying because of how ugly it was. In high school, my twin sister, Katie, and I were constantly visiting the Steely Dan Dictionary, a fan Web site whose creators would define every arcane word that Walter Becker and Donald Fagen used in their lyrics. They have retained a core of perfectionistic, hyperverbal fans ever since. Steely Dan, the band famous for a certain brand of cynical, pristine nineteen-seventies jazz-infused rock, released their first album, “Can’t Buy a Thrill,” fifty years ago. She yells, “Ricky! Don’t lose my number! You don’t have to call nobody else!” In a scene from the cartoon “The Fairly OddParents,” Vicky, the evil babysitter, has a boyfriend named Ricky, who dumps her at the end of the episode. John Mulaney also happens to be a huge Steely Dan fan. I once spent hours locating a video clip in which Stephen Colbert announces, in a bit on “The Late Show,” that he knows the lyrics to every Steely Dan song. “Any Steely Dan come in?” the receptionists at a radio station ask in a Joan Didion essay. Whenever I see Steely Dan referenced anywhere, I experience a nonsensical jolt of recognition and identification, and never forget it.
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