Song of the Day 1/31: Steely Dan, “Barrytown”
Another song from the ’70s that remains sadly relevant today, though I suppose Donald Fagan would have to update “I just read the Daily News” to “I just listen to Fox News and swear by every word.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWVhvoAeaFk
Though Dan obsessives like to dig for autobiographical references — Barrytown is a hamlet near Bard College, so they make of it what they will — but the narrator’s smug, defensive superiority (“I’d like to see you do just fine, but look at what you wear”) can be found all over the country, and most of the world besides.
I thought that Barrytown became an enclave for the Moonies, and that that was what the song was about. Was I wrong?
Yes. The Moonies didn’t move in until 1975, several years after the song was written but around the time it was released on “Pretzel Logic,” which contained a number of their older tunes that had been bypassed for previous albums.
Barrytown was the liberal river community near Bard; the narrator seems to be a blue-collar, conservative resident of another nearby hamlet called Red Hook.
It’s not a simple correlation, though, the way “My Old School” tells the tale of the drug bust G. Gordon Liddy (then Dutchess County DA, “Daddy G” in the song) carried out at Bard.