The Odyssean Masculinities of Steely Dan’s Aja

Abstract

ABSTRACT To judge from the liner notes, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen recognized a connection between 1977’s Aja and the Homer’s archaic Greek epic, the Odyssey. This paper offers a reading of the album with the goal of revealing some of the nuances and effects of the intertextual overlap between album and poem. In particular, Odysseus’s masculine performances are used to explore the masculine persona of Aja’s narrating voice, who, like Odysseus, deploys a trickster poetics in navigating their fluctuating song-worlds. Thereby, these singing personae make their strange homes in and through their ambiguous masculine performances.