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Steely Dan were simultaneously the apotheosis of the smooth, slick ’70s radio sound now known as yacht rock and the most vicious satirists of the sorts of people who listened to and made it–themselves included! Has there ever been another act like that? Maybe if LCD Soundsystem had found a way to make an entire career out of songs as scathing as “Losing My Edge”? Anyway, that’s just one of the ironic contrasts that makes the Dan so compelling and compulsively listenable to me. You’ve also got the fact that songwriters and core (and by the end, only) bandmembers Donald Fagen and Walter Becker created a “jazz-rock” sound wherein the improvisatory, beauty-from-mistakes heart of jazz was entirely replaced by obsessive studio tinkering. You’ve got them recruiting an army of ace session guys and genuine virtuosos, from Skunk Baxter to Michael McDonald to Wayne Shorter, to support one of the most sardonic singing voices in rock history. You’ve got them devolving into precisely the sort of coked-up abusive solipsistic rich California bohemian assholes they made a career out of skewering. There’s a lot going on–but if you want to just kick back and enjoy the wordplay, the absurd musical proficiency, the summertime grooves, and the sick licks, go right ahead.

This is a collection of some, but by no means all, of my favorite Steely Dan songs from their initial 1972-1980 run. Believe me, it was a bitch to cut it down this far–“Any World (That I’m Welcome To),” “Throw Back the Little Ones,” “Parker’s Band,” and “Deacon Blues” were all in the playlist at one point, and I could just as easily have included “Home at Last,” “Aja” (so yes, basically the entirety of Aja), “Doctor Wu,” “Do It Again,” “Dirty Work,” “Midnite Cruiser,” “Kings,” “Show Biz Kids,” “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies,” “Night by Night,” “Kid Charlemagne,” “The Royal Scam”…really, these guys wrote just a ton of solid, hook-laden songs about their proto-hipster demimonde and the criminal underworld with which it occasionally intertwined. Enjoy.

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