Originally published at: The song Steely Dan wrote calling out the "dangerous insensitivity" of Lennon's "Imagine" | Boing Boing
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That video of celebs singing Imagine doesn’t seem quite a cringey now does it…
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Steely Dan?
More like Shady Dan, amirite?
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And, an odd one, eh? I get when something newsworthy gets re-boinged. But this seems kind of random, especially since this article links to a recent Far Out tak eon it. The pre-boing is something else.
That’s rich coming from the guys who are the musical equivalent of a trip to your financial planner’s office.
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And they were nerds. Here, this video explains everything.
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Steely Dan’s hipster cynicism is not an improvement over Lennon. Rather than imagining a better world, they capitulate to the present one. And I get no sense from the song that Steely Dan actually cares about the “man in the street”. That man is just a rhetorical figure to be forgotten as soon as the song is over.
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Imagine is one of the most overrated songs of the 20th century, so…
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Honestly I’m fine with the idea of taking famous white men, who come from and acquired massive privilege, less seriously on social issues, even if they were massively talented musically.
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Spoken like no other Dan of Steel could.
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i love Steely, but meh — they were also dicks.
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Straw man in the street?
So was John! One of the things that made me love him was his determination to point the critical spotlight on himself as often as anyone else. The Double Fantasy album is a pretty searing portrait of infidelity, regret, forgiveness and admiration of a partner’s brilliance. That he and Yoko always used their real names in the songs going back to The Ballad of John and Yoko always made it feel almost invasively personal and, to me, deep life lessons learned from not just living through pain, but working through pain together.
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Eh, so was John. He was still a great and important figure in music.
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Yeah pretty much
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Hell, most musicians are dicks, I have found out. Especially the buskers I hung out with. Something about making music for a living, I guess. Once you accept that, it’s easer to keep hanging out with them.
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Yeh one always has to be careful how one idolizes very talented musicians. Miles Davis was arguably among the greatest musicians that ever lived, yet this:
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Possibly, although I don’t know of anything specific, but they’re almost choirboys compared to Morrisey, Roger Waters, Van Morrison and a number of abhorrent redneck American rock musicians.
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I think it’s great you have something positive to pull out of his expression as a person. Me personally it just seems like another flavor of pop idolism, rather than anything essential or significant wrt the underlying collective social issues. I.e., it’s there’s more about John here than we should really invest ourselves in.
There are also a ton of musicians in that era that have a deeper connection to these social issues and I think it shows on how they express it.
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