Credit: Far Out / Spotify
Sat 3 October 2026 19:48, UK
Steely Dan remain one of the most exciting and eclectic bands ever to decide to make music. Their catalogue comprises an array of great music that touches upon various subject matters and branches into different styles and sounds. The band were able to really explore their music by giving up playing and focusing purely on being a studio band.
This was seen as a controversial move at the time, given the best way for people to connect with the artists they liked was through live performances; however, by stopping playing live, Steely Dan was able to apply different effects to songs and layer instruments without worrying how it might transfer to a live show. The result was a great deal of experimentation in their music, which impacted both their sound and lyricism.
This worked to the band’s advantage a lot of the time, as they were able to create exciting songs that touched upon a range of different subject matters. However, there were instances where the experimentation fell flat, as the sound of their songs was poor, and the subject matters they touched upon were just plain weird.
One of the best examples of this is the track ‘Cousin Dupree’. Released in 2000 on the album Two Against Nature, the song isn’t one of the band’s best musical outings, as the synth used is lacklustre, and the melody feels rushed throughout. However, that isn’t the biggest controversy in the song, as this comes from the lyrics.
The timing made its strangeness even more pronounced. ‘Cousin Dupree’ was recorded in 1998 during the long sessions for Two Against Nature, but it was not released until the album arrived in 2000. That record marked Steely Dan’s first collection of new studio material in 20 years, meaning every song was bound to face more scrutiny than usual.
Credit: Far Out / Steely Dan / Shockwaves Records
After two decades away, Becker and Fagen could have returned with something warm, familiar and easy to welcome. Instead, one of the album’s most prominent tracks introduced listeners to a grubby narrator lusting after a member of his own family. As comeback statements go, it was certainly difficult to ignore.
While Steely Dan has written a number of songs that talk about strange themes, ‘Cousin Dupree’, which sings about an incestuous relationship between cousins, is by far one of their most unsettling. The peculiar theme isn’t mentioned subtly, either, as throughout the chorus of the song, the line “How’d you like a kiss from your cousin Dupree?” is repeated again and again.
Further reading: From The Vault
In fairness, Steely Dan were not asking the listener to admire Dupree. Becker and Fagen had spent their career writing from the viewpoints of creeps, failures and self-deluding men who rarely understood how unpleasant they sounded. The joke here was largely at the narrator’s expense, as he returned home, saw his cousin as an adult and somehow convinced himself that she might welcome his advances.
That intention does not necessarily make the song easier to enjoy, though. Satire still has to leave the listener wanting to hear it again, and ‘Cousin Dupree’ pushes its central joke until the discomfort overwhelms much of the music around it. The character may be deliberately awful, but the chorus remains deliberately awful too.
Of course, whether or not it’s the band’s worst song is up for debate, given they wrote a great deal of bad lyrics throughout their time. In the song ‘Throw Back the Little Ones’, one of the opening lines of the song states, “Lost in the barrio, I walk like an Injun,” which feels outdated. ‘My Rival’ is also strange as the band sings about a husband getting jealous of his son, who has a scar across his face and gets all of his mother’s attention.
While Steely Dan might have written some questionable numbers, it shouldn’t take away from some of the excellent songs that the band has written as well, which massively outweigh their more questionable outings. They were victims of their own ambition a lot of the time, as they put themselves in a position where the sky was very much the limit. Unfortunately, there were some instances where they crashed back to Earth in their pursuit of it.
