There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born there, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size, its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something ….Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion. —E.B. White
LCD Soundsystem has embodied the idea of New York City better than any other band in the 00s. The Strokes updated the city’s previous ur-band, The Velvet Underground. But their method was less about appropriation and more about being endearing apes; in the process, they released the best New York City album of the decade. They also proved that the city has a short attention span.
In the way these things happen, LCD Soundsystem—synecdochically representing James Murphy—had a lot to do with The Strokes’ success. Back in the very early oughts, Murphy’s (and U.N.K.L.E. Goldsworthy’s) DFA Records injected a straight shot of cool back into the notion of antsy guitar music. Their efforts, composed of equal parts killer 12” singles and druggy dance parties, made energetic guitar rock palatable again. Not even Limp Bizkit could vanquish the ineluctable chic of six strings, young bodies, and ample free time. It sounds a little fulsome to say, but if it weren’t for Murphy’s part in it, rock music may have died a quiet death grieved for only by a bunch of 30-somethings concealing tribal tattoos under mourning garb and gaping holes in their ears where formerly there were spacers and other ridiculous objects.
Beside his gift for astute reinvention, Murphy is connected to New York in a few other ways. He was once offered a job to write for Seinfeld, the greatest TV show about New York. Like the former king of New York, Sinatra, he grew up in New Jersey (though not within spitting distance, like The Chairman). He knocked around in bands, DJed, lost his self-worth, and found some (semi-) ironic self-loathing. Murphy has sank in, swam through, and crested above the fray like any other successful New Yorker.
Now that we’re rounding on historical closure of the LCD Soundsystem, it might be interesting to try to figure out what the hell they—and Murphy—mean. At the beginning, let’s start at the beginning. Back in 2005 when the first LCD Soundsystem album came out, Pitchfork ran a The Wire-inspired Jukebox column in which Nick Sylvester created a great dialogue with the nascent indie superstar. It ends with Murphy saying, “I’m 35, an artist with a debut record. I feel like a grandfather.” Of course, Murphy didn’t spring out of the firmament fully-formed. He’d been in bands since he was 12, produced records, and started a label in 2001. But he had a point, which the Jukebox column drew out over and over again: Making pop music is a young person’s pastime, and within the strictures of the format, 35 might as well be 85 or 1 million and five.
Murphy’s music has a particularly implacableness about it, even though, considered discretely, it can be wholly placed. This guitar solo sounds like Eno; this synthesizer is lifted straight from Tom Tom Club; that vocal is all David Byrne. But there’s an even more salient touchstone that you’d hardly ever consider: Gravity’s Rainbow. In a recent profile by Chuck Klosterman, Murphy inveighs against pretension saying, “You know, the first time I read Gravity’s Rainbow, I did so because I thought it would make me seem cool. That was my original motivation. But now I’ve read it six times, and I find it hilarious and great and I understand it.” Like Pynchon (another notorious New Yorker), Murphy draws from droves of source material and cultural accretion to create a decidedly unconventional, almost un-American art. Pynchon’s great novel would never be mistaken for the work of, say, a European writer. But its sprawling Euro-centricism can’t be lost on the reader. In a similar way, even though many of the references in Murphy’s work are American, it falls fairly well into the Factory Records mold of dance-punk. Except that it also doesn’t at all.
Consider Murphy, the face of hip New York City, retreating to Los Angeles to record the final LCD album. Consider Murphy’s stance on his lost opportunity to write for Seinfeld. A 2004 profile by The Guardian mentions that Murphy had the letter offering him the gig pinned on his wall. He called it “the biggest mistake of my life,” and goes on to call himself “a fucking lifetime failure.” Eight years later, in the Klosterman piece, he refers to the Seinfeld job by saying, “But even knowing what I know now, I’m happy I didn’t do it.” Consider the music itself: On the one hand, Murphy almost creates a pastiche of dance music, one that’s not so much filled with but rather just is a thousand points of musical reference; on the other hand, and he’s consistent and unequivocal about this, his only desire is to make music that makes you move your body.
Every successful person is a mass of contradictions, and the more successful the person, the deeper the contradiction. Fitzgerald’s crack-up is well-known. The Googlers “Do No Evil” mantra is undercut by their insidious, pervasive data collection. Murphy’s head-body distinction defines him and propels his music from being merely anything to absolutely this thing. What is this thing?
I made a mistake once, and then I made it a few more times, and then—I think—I never made it again. At least not from negligence. My first semester in college I’d get handed back in this one class papers all marked up. “Don’t use ‘this’ on its own. It refers to something.” The titular “This” that refers to no antecedent is the perfect image for Murphy’s project. It’s the most general pronoun, and Murphy’s music is the most general music because it appeals to everyone. (Or “everyone,” if you’d rather.) While it sounds like it’s built up from a mound of references, it also sounds like what it is: frenetic dance music. It is—probably unintentionally—made for the trainspotters in the crowd, but it’s also made expressly to get asses on the dance floor. Every album (well, not the first one, technically) has a windpunching anthem for/against old age, but they’re most saliently grasped at the beginning of the hermeneutic circle, as a nostalgia to look forward to.
Murphy’s said “I see this band as pure evidence that having a decent idea is more important than being talented,” and neither idea or talent has an age limit. But his relatively advanced age structurally characterizes his approach to music. He’s founded and superseded scene. He’s clearly obsessed with sound. Where the sounds come from, what the sounds sound like, who the sounds were made by—none of those issues is thematic for Murphy. He has an aloofness to reference that is imbued by experience—or absolute innocence. But it’s still contradictory. Like another myriad-minded man, James Joyce, it is clear that he’s obsessed with reference. However, he’s mature enough to deploy sound like a tool. Murphy doesn’t start with reference and end with effect. He doesn’t say to himself, I need an Eno bridge and a Daft Punk chorus, even if that’s what he ends up with almost necessarily. Picking and choosing from a store of sounds, he’s canny enough not to realize his indebtedness to the past while creating dance music for the present. Murphy just picks the very best impetus to get us moving.
In a lot of ways, then, Murphy is less like a grandfather and more like a really good college professor, one who sets the syllabus not to ensure his students have the proper range of, say, literary history and tradition. Rather, his goal is to edify, challenge, and delight. Like any proper art, it is essentially didactic. The LCD project is an object lesson in the pleasures of kinesthetics. It’s dance music for both sorts of people, those who dance and those who don’t. It’s telling that it takes a brainy, referential, super-cool person to make an ideal dance music. It’s hard work.
New York City is often thought to be for young people. You move here when you’re young and hungry. It’s thought of by the flyover states as a playground for the rich, dumb, and ambitious. But it’s not. Have you seen how much an apartment costs? Like a million dollars. No, more. Literally. Think about the heroes of New York City music. Andy Warhol was pushing 40 when he descended on the Velvet Undeground. Thurston Moore was over 30 when Sonic Youth recorded Daydream Nation (in the first third of their career). Now he and Kim Gordon are New York royalty, but they’re basically indistinguishable from any other well-heeled Brooklyn couple pushing a stroller to brunch. Murphy’s just another in the long line of New York’s aged arrivistes. Not a grandfather, barely an associate professor. If his music appeals mostly to young people, it’s because of his talent and knowledge. And the fact that everyone everywhere always feels too old. But New York is an enduring example that if you can make it here, age doesn’t matter.
