25 Jul 2006

Steely Dan time travelling karma hackers!

It all started to make sense after reading this article:
Steely Dan cry foul over Dupree.
Steely Dan are accusing Owen Wilson of theifing off with the plot (do songs have a plot?) of their song Cousin Dupree, for his new movie You, Me and Dupree. And they're mad about it. How mad? From the article:
Wilson, they claim, is "generating some major harsh-ass karma for himself" for leaving the band "totally out in the cold".

And that's why they did it.

See, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen aren't only songwriters who have continued to turn out quality music year after year. They are also time-travelling vigilantes.

Consider the following quote from this website. Donald Fagen is talking about the meaning of some lyrics in his song Pretzel Logic:

"When it says, ’I stepped up on the platform / The man gave me the news', we conceived the platform as a teleportation device. And there are other key lines like ’I’ve never met Napoleon but I plan to find the time'


And we're expected to believe he just somehow knows what a time travel device looks like? He knows because Steely Dan are in possession of a time machine!

OK, stick with me here. We've established that Steely Dan ave the keys to some kind of time machine. Is it a TARDIS? Or is it a phone box like in Bill and Ted? And why are they always phone boxes? We don't know. But they have something, and they're using it to pursue their own twisted vendettas.

Because when they said Wilson was generating the harsh-ass karma, they took it on themselves to meet out the vengeance of the universe. What they did is travel back in time to 1999 and made sure that this programme never got made!

Sure. Owen Wilson's career has been okay, but how much more stellar would it have been if he had played the talking, crime-fighting motorcycle sidekick in Heat Vision and Jack!

So what can we learn from this? First of all don't piss off Steely Dan! They've got the skills to make you pay. But there's another lesson to draw from all this, a lesson for the Steely Timemeisters.

Owen Wilson was Lightning McQueen.

Obviously, meddling with the time stream can lead to strange side effects and this is surely what happened here. The universe had decreed that at some point Wilson was going to be the voice of some kind of talking vehicle. Thwarted by Steely Dan, reality bends such that Pixar decide to make a film about talking cars. Yes, I know that the script for Cars was written in 1998, before both the Cousin Dupree and Heat Vision and Jack. But this is what the universe does.

So you may have gotten away with your meddling this time, Steely Dan, but beware! who knows when your next adventure will leave us all speaking French, or turn Britney Spears into Hitler? When you mess with the time stream, sooner or later the time stream messes with you. Please abandon your time-travelling ways and go back to crafting quality pop. The fate of the universe depends on it.

1 comment:

Grant said...

That's the thing though. Lassetter didn't have to have written the whole thing in '98. The universe just retrofitted the germ of the idea then. That's the thing about messing with the time stream - it's playing four-dimensional chess with the universe.

Of course, we'll never know. Now that Steely Dan have altered the timeline we're effectively in a different universe. You know, there's probably a universe where the last three Star Wars films didn't suck. Damn you, Steely Dan!