Maybe it's the musical theater coming out in me, but I always heard this one as a kind of story song. There are these internal rules to Steely Dan songs, specifically, the men are always losers, even when things are going relatively well, and the women are always dangerous in some way. In this one, I think we have a Dan-typical loser guy, specifically a game programmer or comic book author type, who creates a spy adventure game fantasy girl partly for fanservice reasons ("just a flash of spectacular thigh") and partly based on a girl he loved and lost. ("Flash back to cool summer nights/Freddy can we cut to the chase?/In the room above your garage")
As the song goes on, though, his creation begins to take on a life of her own, and the featured female vocalist goes from mere backing to a full-on character. The line "Everything about me is different" is where Pixeleen stops being a mere fantasy based on a former girlfriend with spy/adventure tropes thrown in. The game-dev guy's hacky plot about "Her cellphone rings/It's like, her stupid father/Be in the door by ten, again" was foreshadowing all along. The former girlfriend's inspiration and his creativity have produced an A.I. teen dream, a fantasy icon beloved in games, movies and more, who is, by the last stanza, off to conquer more than her creator 'father' ever imagined.
The women are always dangerous. The men are always losers.
And what's harder to lose than your little girl, even when she's a Galatea-style videogame super-spy? It's at once deliciously interesting and kind of heartbreaking, the shift from salacious fantasy thoughts to protective, fatherly ones that happen across the song. The snarky college guys from Bard have grown up a lot.
Maybe it's the musical theater coming out in me, but I always heard this one as a kind of story song. There are these internal rules to Steely Dan songs, specifically, the men are always losers, even when things are going relatively well, and the women are always dangerous in some way. In this one, I think we have a Dan-typical loser guy, specifically a game programmer or comic book author type, who creates a spy adventure game fantasy girl partly for fanservice reasons ("just a flash of spectacular thigh") and partly based on a girl he loved and lost. ("Flash back to cool summer nights/Freddy can we cut to the chase?/In the room above your garage")
As the song goes on, though, his creation begins to take on a life of her own, and the featured female vocalist goes from mere backing to a full-on character. The line "Everything about me is different" is where Pixeleen stops being a mere fantasy based on a former girlfriend with spy/adventure tropes thrown in. The game-dev guy's hacky plot about "Her cellphone rings/It's like, her stupid father/Be in the door by ten, again" was foreshadowing all along. The former girlfriend's inspiration and his creativity have produced an A.I. teen dream, a fantasy icon beloved in games, movies and more, who is, by the last stanza, off to conquer more than her creator 'father' ever imagined.
The women are always dangerous. The men are always losers.
And what's harder to lose than your little girl, even when she's a Galatea-style videogame super-spy? It's at once deliciously interesting and kind of heartbreaking, the shift from salacious fantasy thoughts to protective, fatherly ones that happen across the song. The snarky college guys from Bard have grown up a lot.