The Steely Dan Lexicon - part 3: 'Only A Fool': More references to 'Imagine'

CATEGORY: MUSIC

The song under analysis is Steely Dan's Only A Fool Would Say That (from the album Can't Buy A Thrill). As we have observed, the song addresses John Lennon's hit Imagine, in which the narrator seems to describe how he imagines an ideal world would be; whereas Only A Fool 'responds' to Imagine's narrator, in part by depicting a cynical view of the real world. In part 2 of the analysis, we left off with the part of the Only A Fool lyrics that say, "The man in the street / Draggin' his feet / Don't wanna hear the bad news." As described in part 2, these are references to certain parts of the Beatles' song, A Day In The Life (1967). "Bad news" refers to the part of the Beatles' song that mentions the narrator reading a news article in the paper, about a man shooting himself while sitting at a stoplight in his car.

The next verses of Only A Fool say, "Imagine your face / There in his place / Standin' inside his brown shoes / You do his nine to five / Drag yourself home half alive / And there on the screen / A man with a dream." "Nine to five" and "drag" are additional references to A Day In The Life, in specific, to the part of the Beatles' song in which the narrator is a man who begins by describing his activities upon first awakening for work: "Woke up, fell out of bed / Dragged a comb across my head..." Shortly after this, the man arrives at work: "Found my way upstairs and had a smoke..." Evidently, the narrator of this part of A Day In The Life is a workaday man.

The first five of the above-quoted seven verses of Only A Fool, directly address the narrator of Imagine, i.e., the man imagining an ideal world - the verses are meant to suggest to this man that he'd be viewing things with a more cynical perspective, if he were an 'ordinary' man. (As an aside, "Brown shoes" is a reference to the Beatles' song Old Brown Shoe (1969)). Only a Fool's "And there on the screen / A man with a dream" suggests that when our workaday man gets home from work, he watches TV, and on it, he sees Imagine's narrator, or someone like the narrator. Following this point in Only A Fool, the chorus is repeated (the chorus was deciphered in part 2 of the analysis).

Following the second playing of the chorus, the lyrics of Only A Fool are, "Anybody on the street / Has murder in his eyes / You feel no pain / And you're younger / Then you realize." The first two lines taken together are a 'rebuke' of the 'no killing'/'no wars' aspects of Lennon's narrator's ideal world. "You feel no pain" and "You're younger" are, again with the lyrics of Only A Fool directly addressing Imagine's narrator, meant to suggest that this narrator is too young and naive to realize that there can be no world without war. "Then you realize" implies that once this person (Imagine's narrator) has gotten older, he will see how the real world is, that it is not at all like the one he imagines.

At the end of Only A Fool, the chorus is repeated.

Generally speaking, Only A Fool is an answer to the narrator of Imagine, not an answer to Lennon himself; for John Lennon himself could not have been as naive as his song's narrator. In this respect, the Steely Dan song serves to elucidate the fact that Lennon was knowingly having his narrator depict a naive world-view. One way to think of things is that Only A Fool is, in reality, a 'hint song', in that it suggests that Lennon was only being sarcastic or satirical by having his narrator speak as idealistically as he does. Note that in this scenario, the use of the word "I" in the lyrics of Imagine is the narrator's "I", not Lennon's.

This concludes the analysis of Only A Fool Would Say That.

Only A Fool Would Say That
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Lyrics (scroll about half way down in the separate window that opens)

Imagine
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Lyrics

A Day In The Life
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Lyrics

All song lyrics in this post are believed to be used in accordance with the U.S. Copyright Fair Use Act (Title 17 U.S. Code).