If Ralph Edwards were alive in 2023, would he be amused to hear the phrase a "bizarre proto-reality show" used to describe his creation, "This Is Your Life"?
Then, there's a report this week that the Steely Dan song "Dirty Work" is appearing in TV shows, movies, and thousands and thousands of TikTok posts. "Are Steely Dan Songs Secretly Cool?" asks the title of the article. The author attempts to answer the question in this writerly paragraph:
To someone steeped in proto-punk and indie of the same era, Steely Dan represented everything unappealing about the excess of the ‘70s studio sound — a band so into cocaine and cleverness that they engineered all the passion and energy out of their music. Their overtly literate lyricism was clever but self-conscious, a far cry from the visceral howl emerging from the heart of punk rock, while their musical inspirations — show tunes, easy listening, jazz, funk, and lounge music — were always handled with a sense of fundamental irony and distance, subverted with strange chords and quirky lines to distract from the music’s foundations in kitsch. No matter how complex the songs were, they always felt too clean to stand out. Like particularly high-end elevator music.
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