LCD Soundsystem, "Dance Yrself Clean"

I didn’t write last weekend, because I was going to LCD Soundsystem shows instead. They did a four-night stretch at Roadrunner in Brighton. I bought tickets well in advance for the Friday night gig, after which I swapped out friends and went back for a second hit on Sunday. Friday brought the surprise—the ascent from I expect I’ll really like this to HOLY SHIT WHAT AM I SEEING?!? Sunday night, over the course of a close-to-identical set list,¹ I was able to attend more closely to what I had seen two days earlier, break it down into components, work it through in my head—basically, I cracked open my brain to allow all of this rocking disco genius to splash over the gray matter.

Sometimes you’re just late to something. Years (decades?) late, and you have to own that. The irony of being late to LCD Soundsystem is that right around the time you’re finally starting to catch on, James Murphy in on stage in front of you singing “Losing My Edge” (Apple Music, Spotify), a song premised entirely on the essentiality of getting there first. Or at least on time.

I was there in 1968, James incants. I was there at the first Can show in Cologne. Oof: I didn’t discovered Can until 2013, and I’ve never been to Cologne—only Munich, for that 90-minute layover on Lufthansa. Later in the song he name-drops Yaz, and y’all know how I feel about them, see “Mr. Blue.” You can cut me some slack for failing to clock Alison and Vince in ’82 when “Situation” (Apple Music, Spotify) first dropped: I was nine. But by ’89 at the latest I was a true believer. And I’ll be goddamned if on Sunday night I wasn’t wearing my Tago Mago T-shirt, pointing two thumbs at the Mushroomhead logo when Murphy sang the Can line. Ready and waiting, too, with a hoot and a holler when Nancy Whang slipped the synth scramble from “Don’t Go” (Apple Music, Spotify) into the live arrangement.

This was me signaling to the null set of anyone looking and listening that [ahem] I had a modest amount of common ground with LCD Soundsystem. That seemed important, because one thing that becomes apparent when you see this band live—what jumps right out at you—is that Murphy et al. are rock omnivores, rock historian, rock obsessives. Just like us. Of course James wasn’t in Cologne in ’68, either. Nor was he in the crowd with so-they-say David Niven two years later, taking in Damo Suzuki’s first gig as Can’s vocalist, fresh off the street where Schmidt and Czukay had found him (Damo, not David) busking earlier that day. But I’d bet the equity in my house that James knows that whole fun story.

“Losing My Edge” for sure means to poke fun at the here-first-and-before-it-was-cool mentality that prevails to this day among the rock literati. But it’s clear, too, that Murphy identifies a fair bit with the unreliable narrator with the lost edge. James himself occupies (I’ll say) the 91st Percentile of Cool, after all, and through the narrator’s catalog of his rock travels, LCD proffers the songwriter’s own itemized list of everything he thinks should be in The Canon.

But have you seen my records? This Heat, Pere Ubu, Outsiders, Nation of Ulysses, Mars, the Trojans, Black Dice, Todd Terry, the Germs, Section 25, Althea and Donna, Sexual Harassment, a-Ha, Pere Ubu [again], Dorothy Ashby, PiL, the Fania All-Stars, the Bar-Kays, the Human League…²

It’s notable that this was LCD’s first single, which is like leading off a book with your bibliography. Sure, you could trust Christgau et al. to back out your influences from the music, but the surer bet is to call them out by name in an exhaustive list within the four corners of the track.

… Joy Division, Lower 48, the Association, Sun Ra, Scientists, Royal Trux, 10cc, Eric B. and Rakim, Index, Basic Channel, Soulsonic Force (“just hit me!”), Juan Atkins, David Axelrod, Electric Prunes, Gil! Scott! Heron! the Slits, Faust …

Only an unrepentant music geek would be as forthright as this. And from my rightful place way over yonder in (I’ll say) the 44th Percentile, I admire the hell out of the approach.

Backtrack now, to Friday night (again, so very late, and I’ll get back to this) and I’m standing in the crowd at the Roadrunner while they’re playing this song. By this time I’m looking past the fact that I’m rickety and old, that between work and the Hold Steady show I’d stood for ten hours Thursday—bad planning: should have lowered the standing desk—so that I can’t feel my legs anymore. Paresthesias be damned: I am fully locked in to the LCD Soundsystem experience. Gripped, triggered, loving it. I’m not perfectly tracking the vocals, but I can pick out some of the names, and I think, Yeah, Dude is a geek like me.

And beyond “Losing My Edge,” there are these additional drop-ins: excursions from “The Model” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Your Silent Face” (Apple Music, Spotify), leading into and out of “I Can Change” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Someone Great” (Apple Music, Spotify), respectively. U2 do this a fair bit in their live shows, but never so deftly, so seamlessly as here, because LCD’s references are perfectly attuned to what they’re doing. Earlier in the show, in fact, when my brain started to go to work (autonomically, as it does) on the question of what combination of earlier artists does this act sound like?, I had decided that if LCD Soundsystem had to have just two parents—which is how meiotic reproduction works and that’s not necessarily a requirement for musical generativity, but let’s go with it right here right now as a metaphor—egg and sperm would be sourced from Kraftwerk and Funkadelic.

But then, as I continued to study the project and its constituent parts—synths, programming, drums, percussion, guitar, bass, vocals—I couldn’t help but think New Order. And the ease with which they were toggling between fill-the-room electronica and swaggering guitar rock: that’s New Order, too. In spades. It’s just that, with all due respect to Barney Sumner, LCD Soundsystem can also claim sophisticated lyrical messaging. And a bit more shimmy in their hips. It’s a party, Carla had promised me, when she first heard I was going to this Friday show—and after asking: Wait—you haven’t seen them before?

How was I so late to this? Years and years ago, my friend Shaun told me all about LCD Soundsystem. On matters of music I trust Shaun more than probably anyone else in the world. (For more about Shaun, see “Golden Slumbers”/ “Carry That Weight”/ “The End”.) He mentioned that he’d seen them touring with Arcade Fire. Ooh: that’s another one. LCD are a lot like Arcade Fire, in that there are a ton of ’em on stage, jumping from one instrument to the next as they work through the setlist. Now just make Arcade Fire way more goddam fun. Like, if the Butlers, Regine et al. decided to push their sound entirely in the direction of “Sprawl II” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Here Comes the Night Time” (Apple Music, Spotify). Anyway, so yeah: LCD Soundsystem toured with Arcade Fire on their respective second albums, The Sound of Silver and Neon Bible.

I most definitely saw Arcade Fire when they toured on Neon Bible. I don’t think I arrived on time for the opener, or at least I don’t remember any of it. Interesting: the Internet cannot confirm or deny that LCD opened for Arcade Fire in Boston on that tour, but Setlist.fm says they played the Avalon on May 11, 2007, the day after I saw Arcade Fire in the Orpheum. Hm. Anyway, on Shaun’s recommendation I went out and bought Sound of Silver, and I really liked it. I especially dug “North American Scum” (Apple Music, Spotify), which felt on-point as ever, by the way, when LCD played it to open their second sets last weekend. We are a shallow, crass, and hapless people, but all things considered, we carry it well on a Friday night.

I dug that second record enough to buy American Dream when it came out ten years later. Turns out I missed the third LP completely. For as much as I like Sound of Silver, I certainly never wore it out. Never learned the songs or even the running order by heart. Still, I had enough of it kicking around in my head that I was able to recognize “Time To Get Away” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Someone Great” (Apple Music, Spotify), “All My Friends” (Apple Music, Spotify) when they turned up in the set list. But it wasn’t until Sunday that I fell fully in love with these songs and the band that played them.

I hit the snooze button on this band for so long. What was I thinking? I figure a lot of it was anti-Brooklyn bias. As I scorn my yuppie elders, so do I detest my hipster juniors. While the former ride in black cars around Midtown and the latter swap kombucha recs in Brooklyn, I take my stand in Union Square, looking up- and downtown with a curl in my lip. This Gen Y Brooklyn scene never made sense to me. The trimmed beards and rimmed glasses, the Mitski and Sufjan Stevens and judgment: I have zero time for any of it. Now and again, friends send me links to Brooklyn Vegan. All of them are on matters of interest to me, and the underlying content is well-received, but couldn’t they have pulled the same LP drop dates, the same reunion tour announcements from some other-named platform? Whatever happened to The Village Voice?

But this is a thing we call prejudice, and its application has an equal and opposite reaction that rebounds on the user. For all the satisfaction one derives from marginalizing the object (here, Brooklyn-based LCD Soundsystem), it also denies the subject (me) the benefits of assessing and appreciating the object on its merits. Did my blind bias against All Things Brooklyn—which now I think of it was a particular way to process having lost my edge—cost me 10+ years of chasing LCD Soundsystem ecstatically at least around Boston, if not up and down the Eastern Seaboard? Seems like it did. And for all that I completely overlooked that James Murphy is three years older than I am.

So I arrived late late late to the party Carla described, and this was a missed opportunity. Putting aside the Brooklyn bias question, this whole experience speaks to the importance of trusting my friends. Shaun and Carla, for sure, but Mark, too, went positively evangelical about LCD Soundsystem’s live shows, in an early episode of The Mixtape Diaries (Apple Podcasts, Spotify)—describing a gig he saw in LA in 2016 as an electronic hootenanny … with disco and funk and dance … you’ve got keyboards and synths and computers and guitars and percussion and cowbell … and everybody’s freaking out and screaming and singing. And randomly and coincidentally, at 7:11 PM last Friday night, T-minus two hours, four minutes from Murphy et al. taking the stage at Roadrunner, Bob sent “Dance Yrself Clean” (Apple Music, Spotify) to the MTD text thread. Apparently he just thought it was important to bring up, as we all started looking toward the weekend.

I was out to dinner and didn’t thumb into the link. In fact, the first time I heard this song was three hours later when the band were on stage playing it, with the entire assembled crowd save for one uninformed clown singing along. In that particular moment I felt a little out-group—excluded from the present company, one might say.

You all know this already, but there’s a build to this song. Or not even a build, really, just three minutes of tuneful- and pleasant-enough groove before the beats and electronics come crashing down and blow up the room. The rest of the crowd knew this was coming—hence their enthusiasm. It hit me like a ton of bricks, like the Monty Python God-foot announcing something completely different. This was extraordinary, and enough on its own to draw me back on rested legs to the Sunday show. Just go and throw your little hands up, James sang, through the ionic crackle-blanket his team had slammed into the event space. It’s late. Oh, honey, it’s late.

But not too late.

1. Here’s Friday’s. Here’s Sunday’s.

2. This goes on for a bit, but I wasn’t going to pull the trigger on the ellipsis until I got to the Human League.