| Steely Dan – Midnight Cruiser Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| Could this discuss the relationship between Donald and Walter? It's rarely mentioned in the songs, but it must have been fascinating. | |
| Steely Dan – Aja Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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I've heard this song in the past as a song about LSD. Before you roll your eyes and scroll down to the next comment, I hope you'll hear me out. Steely Dan's lyrics, always so tantalizingly hard to interpret, are sometimes their strangest when they're about drugs. Kid Charlemagne, Doctor Wu... I'm sure you can think of others. I've heard Aja like this: "The hill" is a reference to San Francisco's Hippy Hill, a notorious drug sales hotspot. Hippy Hill was referenced as "the hill" previously in Kid Charlemagne, in the line "On the hill the stuff was laced with kerosene." In Kid Charlemagne "the stuff" clearly refers to LSD, as the whole song is about Owsley Stanley, the famous LSD-chemist. Therefore, Steely Dan thinks of "the hill" as, possibly among other things, a place to buy LSD. Hippy Hill's denizens, due to their countercultural lifestyles and drug use would "never stare," they "just [wouldn't] care," "they [would] have time to burn," and they would "think [the presumably degenerate narrator ] was okay." Now, for a few other lines: "Dime-dancing" refers to use of drugs that can be bought in "dimebags," i.e. cocaine, heroin, and marijuana. Many of those are used with equipment such as pipes, syringes, etc, but LSD is simply swallowed. Hence; "throw out the hardware, let's do it right." Even "double helix in the sky tonight" could refer to the visions of an acid trip. Obviously there's a lot more to the song even if it is about LSD on one level, but I feel like I've made some possibly valuable connections here... Please let me know what you think! Yours, An obsessive college student |
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