Since it’s release in 1980, “Hey Nineteen” by Steely Dan has made a shit-ton of money, keeping Walter Becker and Donald Fagan happily supplied with speedballs for at least a decade. The song reached number ten on the Billboard Hot 100 chart; the album on which it was released, Gaucho, has been certified platinum many times over. It’s a staple on oldies radio stations and at suburban cocktail parties everywhere. However, it can also be read as a commentary on the type of mindlessly enjoyable, leisure-time-soundtracking popular music it embodies. It’s bleakly ironic and spent in that 80s kinda way, suggesting the constant threat of nuclear annihilation and the hopeless existential wasteland between nihilistic drug-fueled oblivion and cold-blooded capitalistic ambition. That is, of course, unless one embraced one of the burgeoning alternatives to mainstream American values, such as hip hop or punk rock, but the rich white men of Steely Dan weren’t so keen on that idea at this point in their lives.

The lyrics of “Hey Nineteen” advance a narrative of aging and malaise. The narrator laments his lost youth and the current dissociation he feels from his surroundings and from other people: “Way back when, in ’67/ I was the dandy of Gamma Chi/ Sweet things from Boston, so young and willing/ Move down to Scarsdale, where the hell am I?” The narrator’s college years represent to him a time when his worth as an individual was validated by the world around him: as “the dandy of Gamma Chi,” he both belonged to and was recognized as exceptional amongst a group of his peers. Eager-to-please young “things” were in ample supply; life was good. However, his post-graduate move to Scarsdale, a wealthy, lily-white suburb of New York, puts an end to this youthful enjoyment and prompts the bewildered question, “where am I?” In this context, the narrator’s nostalgic memory of his youthful self can be seen as representing for him a time when his identity, his subject, was firmly established: he “was a dandy Gamma Chi.” He knew who he was, and the world knew it too. This nostalgia for a validated, unified identity is intensified by the contrast between his memories of college and his sense of self in Scarsdale: whereas the recollection of his younger days is characterized by affirmative statements of identity, his current self-concept is characterized by doubt and dissociation. His question doesn’t merely suggest detachment from his surroundings, although that’s certainly part of it. Rather, the disconnect between the narrator and the glossy, affluent town of Scarsdale throws his whole identity into doubt; the idealized “I” of his memory is almost nowhere to be found.

When verse gives way to chorus, the narrator’s alienation from other people, and from his notion of a (younger) self, is framed as an interaction between a woman at least ten or eleven years his junior: “Hey nineteen/ No we can’t dance together/ No we can’t talk at all.” This inability, self-imposed or otherwise, to connect with the young woman in any way signals his complete disconnect from the world that once affirmed him as a worthy subject—specifically, the world of nineteen year-old women, but more generally, the social world of privileged young adults. The next verse brings his youthful self, the object of his nostalgia, into sharper focus, and reveals its contradictory and ultimately illusory nature: “Hey Nineteen/ that’s ‘Retha Franklin/ She don’t remember/ the Queen of Soul/ It’s hard times befallen/ the sole survivors/ She thinks I’m crazy/ but I’m just growing old.” As he says, Aretha Franklin was the Queen of Soul; she can be read as representative of an authentic, expressive, dying form of black musical culture. The nineteen year-old’s inability to remember Aretha Franklin makes the narrator feel old, and he imagines himself as one of the “sole survivors” of this cultural tradition. The punning on “soul/sole” is no accident; it links his nostalgia for the days when he (supposedly) possessed a unified, validated identity with nostalgia for the authentic culture of soul music and its heroes. He sees his former self—by which he still defines himself, as evident in his fantasy of being a “sole survivor”—as part of the same vitally expressive culture that gave rise to Aretha. For the narrator, it seems as though soul music, and black musical culture in general, serve as signifiers of his own “authentic” lost identity.

However, he isn’t a part of that culture, and he never has been. His nostalgia for a subject characterized by “soul” is disingenuous—such a subject never existed. Even “way back when,” the narrator’s identity was borrowed, appropriated; he cobbled together a convincing sense of subjectivity from, at least in part, the unique, expressive languages of African-American culture. The valid, authentic, autonomous self of his memory is an illusion; his actual “self” was mimicry, an image. Therefore, his present-day attempts to reassert his subjectivity by invoking the past are doubly disingenuous: his nostalgic memory of his former “identity” is an image of an image. Affluent, all-white Scarsdale is no different from the affluent, all-white fraternity the narrator belonged to in college—they’re both discrete lived moments within the upper-middle class status quo lifespan. His current lack of identity has always underlain his veneer. He most likely remembers his youth so fondly because the unreality of college shielded him from the utter falsity of his appropriated “identity,” whereas the mansions of Scarsdale chased away any illusions he still harbored.

It’s also no accident that the narrator specifically adopts black musical culture as a signifier of his own “subjectivity.” This relationship of inauthentic signification also serves as a metaphor for the musical relation of “Hey Nineteen” to its nominal ancestor, the blues. The song’s take on blues music has been polished of all grit and emotion—sapped of all soul. It’s limp and bland, almost intolerably “smooth.” Just as the narrator is not a subject, but rather mimicked subjectivity through association with the unique cultural expressions of African-Americans, the song is not expression, but rather the homogenized, depersonalized reproduction of the expressive forms of others—namely, of the blues. The parallel between the narrator’s appropriated “identity” and the song’s composition suggest that the song, and popular music in general, aren’t excluded from the blues tradition by any fault of the musicians, but that the exclusion is predetermined by some trait of popular music itself. According to T.W. Adorno in his essay “On Popular Music,” “Hey Nineteen” would be an example of standardized and “frozen” style: once somebody in charge realized that the blues made money, the style was pinpointed and reproduced ad infinitum. In this context, the moment music becomes reproduction for profit, rather than self-expression, it is no longer authentic—no longer blues. The inauthenticity inherent in the standardization and mass production of an art form as personal and expressive as the blues seems obvious. However, according to Adorno, this standardization is concealed by what he calls “the ‘backwardness’ of musical mass production, the fact that it [still operates] on a handicraft level and not literally an industrial one.” I would argue that Steely Dan actually seem to counteract this concealing effect by foregrounding the generic, mechanized, overly-produced qualities of their sound. “Hey Nineteen,” and indeed all of Gaucho, sounds like it was recorded, at great expense, on many tracks, over many takes, by many session musicians in a major label studio—which, of course, it was. The sound is so brutally smooth and relentlessly insincere—so aggressively inhuman—that this emphasis on music making as industrial production could only have been deliberate. In this way, the song seems to comment on its own inauthenticity, and on the inauthenticity of popular music in general. By its own doing, “Hey Nineteen,” can be seen for what it is: a standardized commodity masquerading as unique expression, and achieving the illusion via the signification of dead forms of “authentic” expression.

Just as the narrator of “Hey Nineteen” revels in nostalgia for an authentic subjectivity he never possessed, so does the listener take pleasure from the notion that a piece of popular music is the expression of a distinctive subject. And, just as the narrator’s former “subjectivity” was actually composed of borrowed identities, the ostensible expressions of individuality in popular music are often themselves mass reproductions, mimicked and inauthentic. This phenomenon—the replacement of unique expression with the automatized reproduction (or “cannibalization”) of dead or dying styles—resembles Jameson’s description of pastiche.

As the song reaches its climax (an inappropriately sexy word for such flaccid music), Steely Dan introduces a denouement of the chorus. The old chorus declared: “No we can’t dance together/ No we can’t talk at all/ Please take me along/ When you slide on down.” In the denouement, the narrator sings: “The Cuervo Gold/ The fine Columbian/ Make tonight a wonderful thing.” The new chorus follows the same rise-and-fall pattern of the old one: it occupies the same structural ground. However, whereas the old chorus followed a minor key chord progression, the denouement is in major keys; where the old one petered out, the denouement soars with warm vocal harmonies and good-natured guitar lines. Musically, it seems like a happy “resolution” to the tense, downbeat chorus that preceded it, and it is, in a sense—more on that below. However, the lyrical content complicates this simple interpretation: the narrator, no longer sustained by his nostalgia, turns to cocaine and tequila for solace. And, since the narrator is metaphorically linked to both the listener and to the role of pop music itself, we can read his escape into the temporary bliss of drug use as our own “use” of popular music. The composition underlying his words supports this interpretation: the warm, enjoyable immediacy of the chorus seems a kind of simple-minded utopianism, an uncomplicated and illusory resolution to the crisis—the death of the subject—suggested by the rest of the song. It’s the drugs, and only the drugs, that “make tonight a wonderful thing.” Similarly, it’s the blissful, easy melodies of the chorus, and the fleeting, drug-like utopianism they convey, that briefly pacify a troubled listener. Problems aren’t overcome; authenticity isn’t rediscovered; thought is merely blotted out, temporarily, by the artificially induced pleasure of the music.

At this point in their careers, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker made the most disingenuous kind of popular music, and they did so intentionally. The result, in “Hey Nineteen,” is a song that paradoxically embodies the inauthenticity of mass-produced art, while simultaneously calling attention to the creative exhaustion and capitalistic designs of the popular music industry as a whole.