The Acerbic, Jazz-Infused Lament of a Digital-Age Love Triangle, Where the Old School Hipster is Replaced by the “Dot-Com-Slash” Geek
The year 2012 felt like a seismic shift, a moment when the analog past truly became the digital-present. For those of us who grew up with the smooth, cynical perfection of Steely Dan, the return of Donald Fagen with his fourth solo album, Sunken Condos, was a welcome, if highly anticipated, event. And nestled among its tracks was a piece of perfect, late-career melancholia—the slyly funky, characteristically acerbic “The New Breed.”
This track, though not released as a major chart-climbing single, is a crucial entry in the Donald Fagen canon, illustrating his enduring fascination with the shifting landscape of American coolness and the inevitable march of time. The album itself, Sunken Condos, was a considerable commercial success for a veteran artist in the modern era, peaking impressively at No. 12 on the US Billboard 200 chart and reaching No. 23 on the UK Albums Chart. While “The New Breed” was an album track that primarily earned its stripes as a fan favorite and critical deep-cut, its placement on such a highly charted album ensured its resonance among a mature, well-informed readership seeking the sophisticated wit they’d grown up with.
The story woven into the rich tapestry of the song is a classic Fagen drama, executed with a devastating economy of language. It centers on an aging, world-weary narrator—the quintessential Donald Fagen persona, a self-described “old dude” who, in a flash of painful realization, recognizes that he’s been replaced in his lover’s affection. The antagonist isn’t a rival jazz musician or a drug dealer, but a character that perfectly captures the cultural anxiety of the early 2010s: a “hipster computer geek.”
The dramatic tension builds instantly as the narrator bumps into the younger rival—the “kid who’s been upgrading all your stuff.” The irony is dripping like an icicle on a hot radiator: the same smooth, world-class production values that defined Fagen’s own sophisticated sound now frame a story about obsolescence. His lover, a “slinky thing,” has traded her appreciation for his “flatline attitude”—that detached, ironic cool that defined the Aja generation—for a “keener spark.” In one withering line that must have resonated deeply with any older man watching the world sprint past him, the narrator concludes: “I get it, you look at me and think, he’s ready for Jurassic Park.”
The meaning of “The New Breed” is a sorrowful, yet undeniably funky, meditation on generational and technological displacement. It’s an elegy for the original hipster—the jazz-obsessed, literary, cool-but-neurotic type that Fagen embodied—who is now being superseded by a younger, digitally native type. The New Breed is the individual who thrives in the “new dot-com-slash life,” a world that values technical prowess and digital fluency over analog cool. But, in true Fagen style, the character retreats with a stoic, if stinging, farewell: “It’s best if I just leave you here / Before you twist the knife.” The music—a signature blend of yacht rock ease, jazz precision, and R&B groove, complete with a wonderful bass harmonica that sounds like the voice of a skeptical amphibian—makes this devastating tale of being deemed a relic an irresistibly smooth listen, a truly perfect piece of nostalgic, melancholic funk.