Real Life Rock Top 10: October 9, 2023

1. Alex Pappademas & Joan Lemay, Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan (University of Texas).  This is as imaginative a book as anyone has written about pop music, and maybe the funniest.  Pappademas, who seemingly knows not only every written or recorded variant of every song but also everything Walter Becker  (1950-2017) and Donald Fagen (1948-) ever said about anything (he does misspell Jerry Leiber’s name), fashions a history of the band by creating biographies of the characters in their songs, bringing out more than the songs say themselves, spinning the men and women from Rikki to Jack to Dr. Wu into their own worlds and out of them into the world of the charts and the millions of inhabitants of the radio world trying to picture them (“They’re practicing to be a marginal band that somehow still has seven platinum albums”)—as Lemay, with amateurish illustrations of everyone, doesn’t.