Geeze, I thought someone would have something to say about this little gem of ditty apparently describing a classic "hipster" love triangle -- that between a man, a woman, and that evil mistress known as heroin?

Myself, I have been in more a painting mode, than a writing mode, lately, so here?s an excerpt from an essay entitled, "Hot Licks and Rhetoric: Inserting the Burroughsian Dildo into the New Frontier," by Davis Schneiderman. I?m not sure that I totally agree with his interpretation, but it?s a good little read...

Quote:

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In the enigmatically scripted "Doctor Wu" which is more "jazz-pop" than
"rock" will ever be, language disguises itself as a forlorn love ditty:
"...You walked in/and my life began again. . . .all night long we would
sing that stupid son/And every word we sang I knew was true." Initially, we
are given the typical, hackneyed convention of the love song, but the lyric
surprisingly alters at the chorus: "Are you with me Dr. Wu?/Are you really
just a shadow of the man that I once knew?/Are you crazy?/Are you high?/Or
just some ordinary guy...?" Dr. Wu is a personified non-sequitur of the
stock Asian mischief character, escaped from the enigma of a Zen riddle. He
boggles the song's narrator with seemingly unexplainable presence and
purpose; his form is undefined, and causes the narrator to question the
reality of his appearance. The simple love story dissolves completely by
the first saxophone solo, and we roll through a second scenario of musical
convention, the drug-wasteland: "I've been waiting for the taste you said
you bring to me..."

We feel grounded, if not disturbed, by the apparent explanation of Dr. Wu
as a junkie's hallucination, but it is only in the song's final moments
that this position is questioned: "Can you hear me Dr. Wu?/Are you with me
Dr. Wu?" repeats and disintegrates into bits of chopped phraseology,
dropping the "Dr. Wu" tag, only to pick it up again several beats later,
separated from context and, like the language used to both pacify the
quiescent lovers or appease the strung-out loner, disconnected from its
original intent.

Fagen and Becker exploit the semiotic possibilities of the pop song with
"Dr. Wu's" establishment of two narrative frames and the subsequent
dissolution of these same schemas. This is a relative anomaly when held up
to the entire Steely Dan catalog, but only in the easily identifiable
decomposition of expected signs. Where "Dr. Wu" makes explicit, with its
atrophied ending, the precariousness of a listener's faith in the
"truthfulness" of lyric, this effect comes to predominate the latter phases
of the Steely Dan output in a more subtle manner.

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