Those Days Are Gone Forever: Steely Dan’s Grumpy Old White Guys’ Blues Kevin Fellezs Music/African American and African Diaspora Studies, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA ABSTRACT Steely Dan has always been a grumpy old guy’s band. In this essay, I listen to the ways in which Becker and Fagen turn their critical misandry on middle-aged American boomer generation males, adrift in vats of self-pity, marinating in melancholy and regret, and fermenting inexorably into elderly obsolescence. The duo masked their baleful assessment of white masculinist anxieties in music which blended jazz and rock sensibilities painstakingly polished to a smooth glossy aural sheen – all of which articulated an adultifca- tion of rock music culture in the 1970s. Keywords Middle-aged; jazz; white masculinity; nostalgia When men reach the age of forty or fifty, they tend to observe a curious change. They discover that most of the individuals with whom they grew up and maintained contact now behave in a disturbed manner. One may stop working so that his business fails; another may break his marriage, though the fault does not lie with his wife; and yet another may embezzle money. Even those individuals who show no such striking behavioral changes still show signs of degeneration. Conversation with them becomes shallow, threadbare, and boastful. Previously the aging individual found mental stimulus in others but now he feels that he is almost the only one to present objective interest. (Adorno, 2000, “Adorno, 2000” 240). Steely Dan has always been a grumpy old guy’s band. “Reelin’ In the Years,” the second single from the band’s 1972 debut album, Can’t Buy A Thrill, written when they were in their twenties, offered the world-weary perspective of someone far older, perhaps none the wiser but certainly more experienced. Time did not mellow them. If anything, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen only hardened Steely Dan’s perspective as cynical white male boomer curmudgeons, putting to music Adorno’s dour assessment of the middle-aged male bourgeoisie as described in the epigraph (with the duo replacing Adorno’s still-vital “aging individual” observing his “shallow, threadbare” peers). In this essay, I listen to the ways in which Becker and Fagen turn their critical misandry on middle-aged American boomer generation males, adrift in vats of self-pity, marinating in melancholy and regret, and fermenting inexorably into elderly obsolescence. The duo masked their baleful assessment of white masculinist anxieties in music which blended jazz and rock sensi- bilities painstakingly polished to a smooth glossy aural sheen – all of which articulated an adultification of rock music culture in the 1970s. CONTACT Kevin Fellezs kf2362@columbia.edu Music/African American and African Diaspora Studies, Columbia University, 438 West 116th Street #34, New York, NY 10027 ROCK MUSIC STUDIES https://doi.org/10.1080/19401159.2022.2008164 © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group