“It seemed almost miraculous to me, back then, that two white guys from New York in the ’70s could manage to capture something of how it felt to be a misfit teen-age Taiwanese American girl circa 2010,” ChelseaLeu writes. “It still seems miraculous.”
Whenever I see Steely Dan referenced anywhere, I experience a nonsensical jolt of recognition and identification, and never forget it. “Any Steely Dan come in?” the receptionists at a radio station ask in a Joan Didion essay. 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.also happens to be a huge Steely Dan fan.
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. 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.
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. 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. Our parents were subjected to replay after replay of Steely Dan’s first seven albums.
But, even in our own town, we were oddballs. 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. 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. They listened to KIIS-FM.
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