For a 1970s experimental jazz-rock duo who grew more fringe with each successive album, Steely Dan is surprisingly present in modern pop culture. From Vince Gilligan’s drug crime series Breaking Bad (2008-13) and Judd Apatow’s romantic comedy Knocked Up (2007), to John Mulaney’s stand-up comedy, the band receives plenty of references decades after their heyday. Their songs, too, feature frequently in TV and film. The Farley brothers’ 2000 comedy Me, Myself & Irene hosts a soundtrack full of Steely Dan covers. “Deacon Blues” grooves through David Fincher’s cop drama Zodiac (2007), and “Reelin’ in the Years” rocks out in Cameron Crowe’s showbiz drama Almost Famous (2000).
No Steely Dan song, however, graces the screen quite as often as “Dirty Work”, the second track from their 1972 debut album, Can’t Buy a Thrill. According to biographer Brian Sweet, it was lucky to make the cut. He claims that Steely Dan’s masterminds, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, didn’t want to include it on the album, considering it too commercial. Their producers, craving catchy radio hits, overruled,and the song was set loose.
“Dirty Work” did not become the song you’re most likely to hear on the radio or at the start of a Steely Dan playlist. That honor belongs to its album mates, “Do it Again” and “Reelin’ in the Years”, whose pop structure combined with funky cowboy sleekness and manic rock energy, respectively, make them widely recognized hits. Neither, though, has been as frequently featured on screen as “Dirty Work”, their quieter, less flashy little sibling.
To my knowledge, the first time “Dirty Work” accompanied a major screen production was in 2001, when Tony Soprano sang along to it on The Sopranos, arguably one of the best American television shows to date. In Season 3, Episode 1, “Mr. Ruggerio’s Neighborhood”, James Gandolfini’s infamous lead croons the “Dirty Work” chorus in an off-key monotone as he is unknowingly monitored by the FBI. It’s a brief but memorable moment that makes the hardened criminal almost endearing.
“Dirty Work” appears again in the opening credits of David O. Russell’s 2013 film American Hustle. Con artists played by Amy Adams and Christian Bale, alongside Bradley Cooper’s undercover FBI agent, walk in slow-motion to the rhythm of the song down a lavish hallway on their way to a sting operation. The song appears again in a 2018 Robin Williams documentary by Marina Zenovich, Come Inside My Mind. “Dirty Work” is heard again in the trailers for James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad (2021), as a secret branch of the US government assembles a team of villainous misfits.
A year later, in the Season 2 premiere of HBO’s hit show Euphoria, “Trying to Get to Heaven Before They Close the Door”, Zendaya’s Rue watches a tense drug negotiation in a seedy apartment, “Dirty Work” cranking in the background. A cover version is used in Season 3 of another HBO show, Hacks, as Hannah Einbinder’s Ava returns to work for Jean Smart’s domineering and manipulative Deborah.
In perhaps the song’s greatest claim to fame, it is sung (albeit with sillier lyrics) by no less than Homer Simpson in his show’s 28th season, episode “Dad Behavior”. Our lazy hero is absolutely chuffed to have home helpers so he does not have to do his dirty work “no mooooore” and that he can “leave [his] socks and dirty shirts… on the flooooor.”
What Gives Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work” So Much Screen Appeal?
The song is simple. The music is smooth, with a pop structure that is easily palatable. It has a slow, toe-tapping ease that makes it gentle enough to serve as background music, but also some biting edges powerful enough to leave a mark. That mark is easily understood.
Its lyrics are not the enigmatic stanzas that make up most of Steely Dan’s discography. “Dirty Work” possesses as repetitive a chorus as Fagen and Becker ever wrote. The verses require no deep analysis. They tell of a man who, despite the dread he feels, cannot stop sleeping with a married woman. Those beddings are the titular dirty work, and even though the chorus repeats its insistent dismay, the chess simile in the second verse (and who doesn’t love a good chess simile) tells us that the narrator will “stay here just the same.”
That easily grasped self-loathing, that longing and yet inability to escape a torment of one’s own creation, is a filmmaker’s dream. It quickly conveys to the audience a complex blend of emotion. It captures the reluctant but inescapable mob violence of Tony Soprano. The anxiety that is buried beneath the surface of American Hustle’s forced sting. The forced service under threat of death by criminals-turned-heroes in a suicide squad. The humiliating drug dealings of Euphoria. Hacks‘ return to a toxic employer, even at the cost of a breakup with an awesome girlfriend. The song can even serve as the lazy anthem of a cartoon man who needs hired servants to clean his dirty laundry.
Indeed, Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work” has a catchy dread that is infectious and instantly understood. It can slip in amongst the story on screen, making your head bop and your gut twist in one fell swoop.
If you happen to be equally familiar with early Steely Dan and the oeuvre of Paul Thomas Anderson, you know I left one glaring omission off the “Dirty Work” screen list. The most recent addition came in the 2025 hit and Best Picture winner, One Battle After Another. Spoilers ahead. In the film, “Dirty Work” serves as a bridge, transporting viewers across a 16-year time jump that occurs a quarter of the way through. Before the song starts, we hear the voiceover of Perfidia Beverley Jones, played by Teyana Taylor.
“Sixteen years later, the world had changed very little,” she tells us. We see her daughter, Willa, in close-up, and “Dirty Work” begins with its wail of electric piano. Willa, dressed in a karate gi, smiles and bows before beginning a kata.
Both times I saw this scene in theaters, tears pooled in my eyes. This is no ordinary karate lesson. This is the child of Perfidia and Ghetto Pat. We last saw her as a baby, with her revolutionary parents’ history playing out in crushing fashion. Perfidia, haunted by the question of her daughter’s parentage after sleeping with Sean Penn’s Colonel Lockjaw, is unable to connect with the family she created.
Captured after a robbery gone wrong, Perfidia sells out her French 75 comrades, forcing Pat and Charlene to go on the run and change their identities to Bob and Willa. When Perfidia says “the world had changed very little,” and we see her daughter, suddenly a teen, we are struck not only by the crushing weight of all the years Willa grew without her mother, but also by an admission of failure.
For all the revolutionary zeal that began One Battle After Another‘s story, no real change was delivered. The world has remained just as cruel. No salvation came for all the people the French 75 hoped to liberate. “Dirty Work” is a perfect vehicle for that dread, that defeat, that desolation, allowing the weight of all these pains to land fully upon the audience’s chest. Without the song, my eyes would have likely stayed dry.
When the chorus arrives, One Battle After Another cuts to Bob, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, distraught in his car. He smokes a bowl and enters Willa’s school. As a comical parent-teacher conference unfolds, we see that Bob is a shell of his former self. Sixteen years in hiding have transformed him into a neurotic has-been, chastising a schoolteacher for historical figures displayed in her room. “Dirty Work” fades along with Bob’s composure as he breaks down in tears.
The song’s power has deepened. The dirty work can refer to Bob being a single parent to Willa, the daughter of the woman who betrayed and abandoned him. Unbeknownst to him (spoiler alert), Willa’s biological father is Lockjaw, the ruthless military colonel who hunts them. Bob’s dirty work is unknowingly raising his enemy’s daughter. It is also the act of hiding out, a criminal all these years later, wanted for acts that ultimately did nothing to achieve the change he craved.
Yet the flash-forward begins with Willa, not Bob. That’s because most of the dirty work is hers. She is the innocent, carrying the weight of the past, about to have her world turned upside down by the shadows of a triple inheritance.
I can’t imagine a song in that film, in that place, in that moment, that could so perfectly capture the emotional complexity of that burden. Recency bias has me salivating over One Battle After Another, but “Dirty Work” has been brilliant wherever it’s used. It is the perfect anthem for the reluctant soldier, the shit-upon sufferer, the worn and weary self-sabotager. It’s no wonder film and television keep returning to its simple brilliance.
“Dirty Work” is a song Steely Dan never wanted on their album. Now, though, it is a fixed part of their legacy. Interestingly, it’s one of the few Steely Dan tunes not sung by Donald Fagen. Its actual singer, David Palmer, left the band soon after the song’s release. Even when it was brought back to Steely Dan concerts, Fagen passed singing duty to his backup singers, remaining silent.
Was this in protest? Did he feel, as Anthony Burgess did while watching his least favorite child, A Clockwork Orange, become his only book left on shelves, all thanks to the film stylings of Stanley Kubrick? Did he resent his song’s popularity?
“Dirty Work”’s screen legacy means that, for many, the song is the primary window into Steely Dan’s world. I can’t help but wonder if the song, too, is tired of doing so much dirty work for a band that never wanted it.