(...Story Continued from Previous Page) Do you see
anyone out there today offering the kind of perspective you did?
Becker: I don't think other people have ever been ambitious to do what we
wanted to do, I suppose because most people are not that interested in jazz. And
starting in the late '70s a kind of neo-primitivism — the Ramones, Clash thing — became the dominant aesthetic paradigm, which
works against any jazz elements.
There are lots of people that are as original, as true to their idiosyncratic
vision, as we are, but not in the same flavor.
Fagen: There are some smart people out there. Martha Wainwright is good — it's far away from what we do
musically, but she writes good songs. I play on her new record. The guy who goes
under the name Eels [Mark Oliver Everett], he's smart. Almost every single
song is about death, but that's OK with me.
There's been a lot of talk lately about the decline in recorded sound
quality, especially in digital formats. Steely Dan was always known for an
obsession with sound. Is this something that you still pay attention to or care
about?
Becker: I care about it. Obviously, MP3 is a compromised sound format. On
iTunes, if they wanted to, they could use higher-quality files; it would just
take longer to download. But I think that will happen, and that people will have
more choices, not fewer.
I enjoy hunting around on iTunes and searching out stuff, but if I find
something I like, then I'll go buy the CD and have higher-quality files to
download.
Fagen: MP3s don't sound so good, they compress the recordings and I can hear
it. But, then again, CDs — though they've greatly improved — they don't sound as
good as a perfect vinyl pressing, either. It's like everything else in life in
the 21st century — the gradual degradation of everything. I'm kinda used to
that.
If there was any good music to listen to, it would be different. People are
so inured, they can't really hear detail anyway. They've been brainwashed by
listening to drum machines and to synthesizers that don't play in tune.
Everything gets coarser and coarser — so maybe it's good that sound is getting
lower fidelity, so people don't notice.
Alan Light is the former editor-in-chief of Spin, Vibe and Tracks
magazines and a former senior writer at Rolling Stone. His writing has also
appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, GQ and Entertainment Weekly. His
book "The Skills to Pay the Bills: The Story of the Beastie Boys" was published
in 2006. Alan is a two-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for
excellence in music writing.
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