
By beating Puffy to the “Black Cow” sample and mooting whatever plans he had for the song, Gunz said, he and Lord Tariq had inadvertently scotched an undoubtedly lucrative P.
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Combs was riding high in those years with a series of hit singles built around big sloppy bites from ultra-familiar Top 40 hits like the Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” flaunting his ability to pay bank-breaking sample-clearance fees in a way that mirrored the diamonds-and-Bentleys lifestyle-porn subject matter of the music. We got stuck up.” Gunz alleged that around the time “Uptown Baby” broke, Steely Dan had just approved the use of a “Black Cow” sample in a forthcoming song produced by Sean “Puffy” Combs. “People are under the impression that we put the record out and got sued,” Gunz said. But they’re also “one of the most widely sampled white rock bands of all time,” writes Pappademas, who later places his finger on a higher artistic connection between Steely Dan and hip-hop: “But even if nothing about Steely Dan was hip-hop, everything about them was hip-hop… They also wrote with name-brand specificity about decadent luxury lifestyles and sang in the voices of criminals and sociopaths, withholding moral judgment to get at colder truths about human nature.” Peter and Tariq are Peter Gunz and Lord Tariq, who forked over 100 percent of their publishing to Becker and Fagen to sample “Black Cow” on their lone 1997 hit “Deja Vu” and Daniel is Daniel Dumile, better known as MF Doom, who rapped over an uncleared sample of “Black Cow” on “Gas Drawls.”įagen and Becker are notorious for snatching the “Deja Vu” publishing, and could even be impudent about it, as evidenced by a famous scene in their episode of Classic Albums, which Pappademas describes at the start of the chapter. “Peter/Tariq/Daniel” - excerpted below - is ostensibly about Aja opener “Black Cow,” but delves deep into the group’s complicated relationship with hip-hop and sampling. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch that gave the band its name (it turns into a really thoughtful essay on cock rock machismo).

There’s even a whole chapter about an inanimate object, “Dan” - the “Steely Dan” dildo from William S.

But there are also chapters devoted to real life figures (“Rikki,” of “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” for instance), musicians they played with, and artists they admired (Charlie Parker) or lightly feuded with (the Eagles).
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Quantum Criminals, the upcoming book by journalist/critic Alex Pappademas and illustrator Joan LeMay, is a comprehensive Steely Dan biography that doubles as a wild trip through the extended Steely Dan universe - the dazzling, seedy, romantically unromantic world Donald Fagen and Walter Becker created together.įor the most part, the chapters use characters from Steely Dan’s songs as windows into the band’s history, legacy, and lore - from the jilted outlaw gambler Jack on “Do It Again” to the titular Gaucho in his spangled leather poncho, wreaking havoc in the Custerdome.
