[ilostabet]

Tried to find a thread about this band but couldn't, so here it goes.

Their music is as complex as anything in Pop music (they are unparalleled in my opinion), and the lyrics are well beyond the platitudes of most other bands. They usually tell stories in non-linear ways, and capture scenes and situations in poetic ways that portray some ugly realities.

I'll leave some here that are about women and the relationships between the sexes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATTU-g_hiNk
Haitian Divorce - about rushing to marriage on a whim, hypergamy. A tale we know all too well. The words are so well written it almost plays out like a movie (there is even a cinematic reference in there for this exact purpose).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhxiK4f-NPU
Everything you did - about a woman who cheats on her SO (and turns out she is quite kinky when it's not with him) and him being an AFC instead of nexting her becomes obsessed with what she did and wants to hear all about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1njBdAyNGI
Josie - about the crazy slut in your neighborhood that gets sent to a religious school only to come back the same or worse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAuPMJlK92s
Babylon Sisters - about an older guy still playing the field but now resorting to decadent chasing of younger girls who are essentially only with him for his money.

this is just a sample (and mostly about women/relationships), they touch many other topics and paint many different pictures of a degenerate culture. almost all of their songs are incredible (and Donald Fagen's solo albums as well), and are pretty fun to decipher as to their meaning.

if you don't know them, given them a try. if you do, share your favorites, interpretations, etc.

hope this is of value to some of you.

[BadgerHut]

Steely Dan gets knocked for being too soft-rock by the "rock and roll" fans, but they are legit.

I don't know who was writing their songs, but in general I think the lyrics of popular music were a lot more deep and realistic up through the late classic-rock era, for the reason that the bands themselves were writing most of their own stuff from their own experiences. Those experiences obviously contain a lot of red-pill lessons for musicians keeping their eyes open...even Bill Joel's later stuff discusses how his success brought him girls beyond his wildest dreams.

As sensibilities in top-40 music shifted towards R&B, dance and synthesizers, musical groups shifted to being creations of record execs and producers, with the producers writing a lot of the songs. Those songs tend to be engineered for radio play instead of the expression of the artist, with feel-good rom-com-type lyrics.

It's like the difference between a dedicated painter composing his own pieces and painting them, and being commissioned to paint something sketched out by a marketer who wanted the painting to sell.

[questor70]

I think it's really hip-hop that removed the poetry from lyrics and replaced it with prose. In other words, instead of saying squeeze my lemon like Led Zeppelin did they'd just go ahead and say make my cock cum on your leg and slap a warning sticker on the label.

It was also around this time that the modern cock carousel as we know it was forming. This was sometime in the 90s.

The thing is, the early "explicit" hip-hop tended to be kind of tongue-in cheek, almost parody. The modern stuff isn't.

[stugatz]

Saw them live in 2013. One of my favorite bands to be sure - they more aim for your head than your heart, but the music is SO good I'm not complaining.

Want to calibrate your stereo? Fire up Donald Fagen's solo album The Nightfly. (It's so well mixed, it sounds good enough without calibration too.)