For while the music of Steely Dan might have been revolutionary, their lyrics were ultimately jaded and cynical. Having previously been beatniks, the band’s Donald Fagen and Walter Becker became pop’s first postliberals, with their most celebrated songs railing against the progressive excesses and naïve dreams of the 1960s and ’70s.

Their first album was released in 1972, with their early hit “Only a Fool Would Say That” alleged to be a riposte to John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, which had been released the previous year. It criticised the hypocrisy of a man in a multimillion-dollar penthouse apartment singing about a world without possessions — I heard it was you/ Talking ’bout a world where all is free/ It just couldn’t be/ And only a fool would say that — and supposedly invited Lennon to consider what the ordinary working man would think of his message: 

While Steely Dan songs are often about drugs or sex, and in some cases both, they nonetheless contain a critical awareness of the ultimate nihilism of this lifestyle. According to Alex Pappademas, one of the authors of the recent book, Dan lyrics are often “about people who can’t help driving headlong toward one form of destruction or another […] even when they know the truth” of what they’re doing. 

Their 1976 song “Kid Charlemagne” — familiar to most under-40s from the Kanye West sample — was written about LSD pioneer Owsley Stanley. But after paying homage to his exploits in 1960s San Francisco, they lament that he was ultimately a failure.

Son, you were mistaken/ You are obsolete/ Look at all the white men on the street refers to the displacement of hallucinogens by cocaine. As Steely Dan knew in 1976, the expansion of drug consumption from a niche activity to something done by normies — whether in the San Francisco summer of love or the UK rave scene of the late ‘80s and early ’90s — led not to consciousness expansion and social and economic transformation, but more often to loneliness, mental illness and death.

Their song “Peg”, famously sampled in De la Soul’s “Eye Know”, was written about a woman desperate to find stardom, who ends up appearing in porn films (“foreign movies”). While she obtains the short-term fame and fortune she had sought, the chorus warns, Peg, it will come back to you — a salutary lesson for young women on OnlyFans today, who may feel a brief empowerment and even earn some money, at the cost of having their content on the internet forever, to be stumbled across by their children and grandchildren. 

It is about time the hipster music press gave Steely Dan their due, but we shouldn’t ignore the core message of their lyrics. And it’s no surprise these words resonate with Gen Z TikTokers — in many ways a more cynical, sober, and even conservative generation than the two that came before them.

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David Swift is a historian and author. His next book, Scouse Republic, will be published in 2025.

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