Producer Steve Albini is not a fan of Steely Dan and he let everyone know about it. Albini, who has worked with artists like Nirvana, PJ Harvey and The Pixies, went off on a Twitter rant about the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame band, writing, “I will always be the kind of punk that sh*ts on Steely Dan.” He added, “Christ the amount of human effort wasted to sound like an SNL band warm up.”
Albini then seemed to shoot down fan arguments about why Steely Dan was so great. “’They spent three weeks on the guitar solo…’ Three weeks of watching guitar players give it their all while doing bumps and hitting the talkback, ‘More *Egyptian* but keep it in the pocket…,'” he wrote.
As for the argument “Their engineer invented a machine to play the bass drum,” he shot back, “Did he now. And yet it sounds like this.”
He then described two types of perfectionists, offering, “One will prepare, revise and rehearse carefully, with intent, honing an idea to a keen edge, ready to cut the cloth of execution. The other makes other people responsible by saying, ‘do it again,’ until by chance they are satisfied, then take credit.”
He added, “There’s some video where they talk about every song on an album, and each one begins with the not-bald one saying, ‘this song is based on my deep love of the blues, just a very bluesy blues. Deep blues.’ Then lays his jazz dork hands on the f***ing electric piano…”
And if all of that wasn’t enough, at one point he described Steely Dan as “Music made for the sole purpose of letting the wedding band stretch out a little.”
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