Aja

The smart-ass Steely Dan fans in college (my best buds) insisted that their pinnacle was the virtuosic and cynical Pretzel Logic, and who could disagree? Meanwhile, the slick jazz-rock of Aja was a sell-out: still the Dan, and still excellent, of course, but fully satisfying to neither the Dan fanatic nor the jazz aficionado. And yet... the (2nd?) greatest hip-hop collective of all chose to sample "Peg" for a reason: the slick over-production had a devious purpose... that every word and every note of every song would drill straight into the pleasure center of your brain. Or so it seems to me nearly 40 years after the fact.