That was the year in which Steely Dan's brilliant comeback album Two Against Nature upset Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP in the lofty category "Album of the Year". Complaints were registered, the Grammys were again pronounced dead, and a young man in Virginia couldn't believe his eyes and ears.
One of the top three albums I own, Two Against Nature is a tour de force of jazz/blues/rock that improved on Steely Dan's already impeccable career. Relying on even more obscure reference material than their 1970s fare, the duo of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker crafted oblique story-telling around metaphors as varied as New Orleans voodoo (title track) and 1940s cinema ("Gaslighting Abbie"). Commenting on the musicality of the album, Fagen admitted that Two Against Nature dove more into the jazz side of their musical swimming pool, and tracks like "Almost Gothic" and "Negative Girl", whose charts are about as complex as Charlie Parker tunes, confirm this.
But it is the denouement of the album which I find instructive even today, and hence prescient in its own time. "West of Hollywood" is an upbeat cut of some 4 minutes with a surprisingly apropos coda of an additional 3 minutes during which Chris Potter discovers and reinterprets John Coltrane inside of a pop tune (albeit one with a far more interesting rhythm section).
The lyrics of "West of Hollywood" tell a story the listener can reliably follow, though the vocabulary and phrasing still retain Steely Dan's patented cryptic tone. The protagonist reminisces about a fling he started on holiday. The new couple loses themselves in thoughtless indulgence, first metaphorically, but then later in reality:
Just a thrill away from punching through to the cosmic wow
It started out good
Then it got lots better
Makin' up the rules as we went along
And there's the rub. "Makin' up the rules" can often be a recipe for disaster. Thinking not about right and wrong, but only about what churns out dopamine can blind us to what is truly good for us and bind us to what is ultimately bad for us. And so as the story continues, just when the couple has found a kind of superficial perfection, they receive some grave news. As a result of their fling, they have both been afflicted by some seedy side effect. It isn't apparent whether the culprit is drugs, disease, or something else, but it's implied that the fling itself, i.e. the source of their euphoria, was in the end the very cause of their downfall. And so the protagonist must come to terms with their new reality,
Look in my eyes
Can't you see the core is frozen?
You can't ask me to access the dreams I don't have now
Sadly for us
Our little talk is over
So together we'll endure the tyranny of the disallowed
In the end, the protagonist is left with a three minute sax solo under which to contemplate why he finds himself, "way deep into nothing special, riding the crest of a wave breaking just west of Hollywood".
Thankfully for us, the story doesn't end with our mistakes or past failings. We are promised remission from even our most egregious faults. With Christmas approaching, we have a wonderful opportunity to consider how to become better people. We can ask ourselves:
What have we indulged in which later became an object of regret? (Hershey's Kisses is a valid answer). Do we learn from our mistakes? Do we treat ourselves with the same dignity and love with which we treat others? Do we forgive ourselves?
As Catholics, we know that Christ's coming has ended the tyranny of the disallowed. That's the Great News!
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