How millennials came to unironically love yacht-rock kings Steely Dan

This essay is adapted from Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay’s “Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan. On the day Becker died, Donald Fagen — the other half of Steely Dan’s creative core — issued a statement recalling his longtime writing partner as “cynical about human nature, including his own, and hysterically funny.” Becker’s passing was marked on social media by his generational and actuarial peers — Kiss’ Paul Stanley, the Heartbreakers’ Benmont Tench, Chic’s Nile Rodgers and P-Funk’s Bootsy Collins — but also by Roots bandleader Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, who called Walter an “artist’s artist,” and producer Mark Ronson, who called Becker “one-half of the team I aspire to every time I sit down at a piano.” Opening for U2 in Detroit that weekend, Beck paid tribute to “a rock ‘n’ roll hero” by slipping a few bars of “Josie” into “Where It’s At.” Fans both likely and unlikely came out of the woodwork: Best Coast’s Bethany Cosentino and Bryan Adams, Mac DeMarco and Slash, Julian Lennon and Thundercat, John Mulaney and Just Blaze, not to mention countless regular people testifying that they too had been shaped — or warped — by Becker and Fagen’s work. In the 1979 edition of the “Rolling Stone Record Guide,” writer Dave Marsh — keeper of the flame for a strain of rock and soul that took pride in simplicity and visceral directness — rates no Steely Dan album lower than 3 stars out of 5, but scorns the “unparalleled pretentiousness” of everything they did after 1974’s “Pretzel Logic.” In 1979, Steely Dan’s perceived artiness constituted a betrayal of rock music’s core values — what Marsh, assessing Bruce Springsteen much more favorably in the same Rolling Stone book, calls “the hopes and dreams of the rock tradition as handed down from Presley.” And by the turn of the millennium, the band had come to represent an affront to the values that indie rock had inherited from punk — a genre often romanticized as having emerged as a necessary corrective to slick mainstream 1970s and ’80s music made in expensive studios by self-regarding cocaine addicts. Steely Dan’s Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, from left, Denny Dias, Jim Hodder, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen receive a gold record for “Can’t Buy a Thrill” in 1973. It only took five decades — “Can’t Buy a Thrill” turned 50 last year — but Steely Dan are cooler today than they’ve ever been.