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WEDNESDAY

As pre-punk pop acts go, few inspire more hostility than Steely Dan: Pitchforkmedia.com unfavorably equated the jazz-rock duo’s Grammy-winning 2000 comeback Two Against Nature to the buttock of a baby. But the Dan’s smooth, produced-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life sound is exactly the point: Fagen and Becker are holding a mirror up to the cold, technology-obsessed world that we live in. Elevate naiveté or sloppiness or nostalgia all you want, but these guys know that if you’re singing about Odysseus in this day and age, you had better recast that major dude on a superhighway. Besides, I’ll take the psychotic stalker, the miniglock-toting assassin, and the margarita-soaked CEO of Steely Dan’s latest, Everything Must Go, over doing it yourself and keeping it real any decade of the century. Steely Dan plays at 7:30 p.m. at Nissan Pavilion, 7800 Cellar Door Drive, Bristow. $48.50-$77.50. (202) 432-7328. (Brent Burton)