Surrender to Steely Dan

How the insufferably perfectionist duo captured the hearts of a new generation of listeners

- Jack Hamilton

The first time I ever heard Steely Dan’s music wasn’t on a Steely Dan recording. It was the mid-1990s, and I was in my early teens, listening to a cassette of De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising (1989), a hip-hop album that blew my young mind. I wanted to hear one track in particular, a love song called “Eye Know,” over and over again: It was so effervescent, so totally joyful. A few years later, I learned that “Eye Know” was constructed around a sample of “Peg,” the fourth track of Steely Dan’s 1977 album, Aja. Meanwhile, another Aja sample was making the rounds in hip-hop: The opening track, “Black Cow,” was the bedrock for Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz’s 1997 rap-radio blockbuster, “Deja Vu (Uptown Baby).”