It took a couple of decades longer than the man himself forecasted, but James Murphy finally and irrevocably lost his edge — which is to say, he became a target for overstated Twitter dunking. A few months ago, someone posted a video of Murphy talking about making LCD Soundsystem’s debut single “Losing My Edge” in the Meet Me In The Bathroom documentary, and he sounded a little too sincere about the aging-hipster anxieties that motivated him. The tone was like “lol was this guy serious?,” and my feed immediately filled with people talking about how LCD Soundsystem had never been cool and how millennial media forces had conspired to push them down everyone’s throats or whatever. It happens. It comes for us all. You make a classic cult hit about snark and aging and your own inability to hold onto social capital, and then you describe it in ways that summon dark clouds of online snark about your age and the disappearance of your social capital.
@remembershuffle James Murphy explaining how he spent his whole life dinging through record stores looking for obscure songs, only for Napster to make it 1000x easier for others to do the same . Big L #meetmeinthebathroom original sound – remembershuffle
I’m kidding. Kind of. James Murphy didn’t just lose his edge, and it wasn’t a single TikTok video that unraveled whatever mystique he and his LCD Soundsystem project built up. I remember people vigorously eye-rolling at plenty of the things that Murphy has done: releasing a self-serious documentary about the end of his band, opening a Brooklyn wine bar, reuniting his broken-up band just a few years after he ended it, charging a lot for concert-residency tickets, playing a party for some NFT people. Every little perceived infraction chipped away at the foundation. During LCD Soundsystem’s initial run, Murphy was so conscious and deliberate about the ways that he expressed his own ideas of coolness, even when those ideas were about not being cool, but he couldn’t keep it up. He became a rich guy catering to nostalgia for a certain era of New York hipsterdom. That’s nice work if you can get it, which is why I am currently writing about the anniversary of LCD Soundsystem’s self-titled 2005 debut album. It turns 20 on Saturday. Happy birthday, LCD Soundsystem.
But here’s the thing: James Murphy has a lot to celebrate. In 2002, Murphy was relatively hale 32 years of age — the prime of his life, really, even if he didn’t feel that way. He’d been living in the underground-music ecosystem for as long as he could remember, and he’d finally caught a wave. The DFA, the production duo of Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy, were the coolest thing out there. They were producing important records for the Rapture, for Radio 4, for the Juan MacLean. They were remixing Le Tigre, Metro Area, Fischerspooner. They forced Death From Above 1979 to add the year to the end of their name. You could see stickers of their lightning-bolt logo all over the backs of no-parking signs in all the cool New York neighborhoods. But Murphy knew that this kind of cultural wave couldn’t last, and he translated his aging-hipster anxieties into the thudding-jibbering music-dork anthem that ultimately decided the next few decades of his life.
Let’s back up. James Murphy. You know him. New Jersey native. Had a late-’80s goth-rock band in high school. Played in a few ’90s angular-guitar bands of no great note. Became the soundman for Six Finger Satellite, the Providence synth-noise act that stuck out on the ’90s Sub Pop roster. When I saw LCD Soundsystem play at the Metro in Chicago in 2009-ish, Murphy told the crowd that he’d once run the sound booth at a Jesus Lizard show in the very same room. Those were the circles in which the man traveled.
Murphy was living that scummy dive-bar existence, barely scraping by, and he couldn’t do it forever. But Murphy knew how to put sounds together. He studied records — mic placement, mixing techniques, methods to achieve maximum loudness. That got him an engineer gig, working on Let’s Get Killed, the 2000 album from Northern Irish DJ and Ocean’s 11 film-score guy David Holmes. Working on that record, Murphy met Tim Goldsworthy, and the DFA were born. Goldsworthy introduced Murphy to dance music and to ecstasy, and those two things unlocked something in him. Soon, Murphy and Goldsworthy were playing ultra-cool New York DJ nights when ultra-cool New York DJ nights were a relative novelty. Murphy was playing Daft Punk to the rock kids, and the rock kids were ready to hear it.
For the first time in a decade-plus quasi-career, James Murphy was the right guy in the right place at the right time. The Strokes and the garage-rock revival brought a lot of attention to the New York underground scene, and certain parts of that scene were ready to dance. The DFA guys were perfectly suited to match the moment — one loud and ambitious American who came up through the noise-punk underground, one quiet and shy Brit who got his start in the rave world. They were natural collaborators, and people wanted to work with them. “House Of Jealous Lovers” was an instant sensation, and the Rapture initially seemed like perfect avatars for the DFA’s ideas about fusing these different kinds of left-of-center music, but those guys had their own ideas. They didn’t want to be avatars. The Rapture landed a big major-label deal, and their DFA-produced 2003 album Echoes is a total classic. But the Rapture didn’t become stars, and their relationship with the DFA fell apart. Murphy, intense and controlling and competitive, resolved to beat the Rapture at their own game. His efforts were already in motion.
“Beat Connection” actually came first. James Murphy and drummer Pat Mahoney had been fucking around with the idea of a band for a little while, and LCD Soundsystem initially started as an excuse for them to cover Liquid Liquid songs at a Christmas party. (The “LCD” supposedly stands for “Liquid Christmas Display.”) Murphy concocted the thumping eight-minute dance workout “Beat Connection” so that he could impress Tim Goldsworthy with his drum sounds, but he jumped on the mic toward the end of the track, bleating about “the saddest night out in the USA,” a dance party full of shy and nerdy egomaniacs too self-involved to fall in love or get any play. Murphy worked on that track for months, while “Losing My Edge,” the song that actually made LCD Soundsystem into something, was a relatively quick process, a real-time freakout over the cool-world status that Murphy couldn’t possibly hope to maintain.
What James Murphy didn’t convey in that Meet Me In The Bathroom interview is that “Losing My Edge” is funny. Maybe Murphy really was stressed that too many New York DJs were tapping into his prized reserve of record-collector gems and that the internet was rendering his hard-earned aesthete tendencies obsolete. But the song’s target is James Murphy and guys like him. He spins impossible zelig stories about being there for all these underground-breakthrough moments and reels off a laundry list of carefully curated names, but he’s supposed to sound tiresome and pathetic and old. That’s the point. Rock critics, whose cool-hunter tendencies neatly align with Murphy’s perspective, recognized “Losing My Edge” as the withering self-skewering that it was. Murphy dragged us as he dragged himself, and we loved it. The “Losing My Edge” b/w “Beat Connection” 12″ single became a hot commodity, and LCD Soundsystem transformed from a one-off project to something greater.
LCD Soundsystem weren’t really a band yet. The DFA nominally produced both “Losing My Edge” and “Beat Connection” though those tracks were way more Murphy than Tim Goldsworthy. Nancy Whang sang backup on both songs. Other than that, everything was James Murphy. He sang, played guitar, programmed the drum machines, and played live drums along with those drum machines. He put together a band when it came time to perform live, and that band remains a thundering force to this day, but the records were mostly Murphy for a long time. He followed “Losing My Edge” with a bunch more singles, and those became critical favorites, too. The two versions of “Yeah,” totaling up to 20 minutes, showed Murphy’s total mastery of the groove, the build, and the exquisite freakout. Those of us who weren’t buying 12″ singles in New York had to make do with vinyl rips downloaded off of Soulseek, but it wouldn’t be that way forever. James Murphy was making moves.
LCD Soundsystem’s early singles era ran from 2002 to 2004, and it ranged from the blaring disco haze of “Yeah” to the squalling Stooges pastiche of “Tired.” Murphy brought in other people to play on some of those records, but nobody was questioning his authorship. The DFA’s partnership drifted apart as Murphy got more and more into making his own records, which Goldsworthy couldn’t stand. Soon enough, LCD Soundsystem had a label deal with Capitol, and the major had the option to pick up and distribute any other DFA record that it wanted. When LCD Soundsystem released their self-titled debut, they included all their early 12″ singles on a bonus disc. This was a smart, buyer-friendly gesture, an opportunity for most Kazaa users to hear these cult-favorite jams at full fidelity. It also meant the band had to live up to something serious.
They succeeded. Or he succeeded. Once again, most of the sounds on LCD Soundsystem came directly from James Murphy. You can hear his masterful studio craft in every moment on the album, which sounds like the work of a sweaty and locked-in live band even when it’s just the one guy. As an obsessive record collector, Murphy understood the demands of the full-length and the difficulty of transitioning from singles artist to albums artist. Some of the songs on LCD Soundsystem started as jokes, and Murphy likes to tell the story of how he wrote “Tribulations” to demonstrate for a friend how easy it was to write a pop song. But his intense focus still shines, and maybe that speaks to the flow-state in which Murphy existed at that moment. If it was that easy to knock out a merciless synth-stomp rager like “Tribulations,” more people would do it.
“Daft Punk Is Playing At My House” was the opening track and the mission statement. That song, much like “Losing My Edge,” is music criticism that works as music. This time, though, Murphy wasn’t snarking at the world — not exactly, anyway. Instead, he envisioned a utopian reality in which the mythic French house robots might play a basement hardcore show next to the washing machine. He had a whole fictional scenario in his head — some kid scraping together tens of thousands to book the Daft Punk punk-house party — and he tried to make that vision a reality before he turned it into a song. Murphy really attempted to book a Daft Punk house party and to make a documentary about it, but that quixotic event didn’t come together. Instead, he made a total banger about the idea. The end result is one of the most simply pleasurable LCD Soundsystem songs, and it was one of many cultural moments that helped burnish Daft Punk’s legend status ahead of their momentous pyramid tour.
“Daft Punk Is Playing At My House” laid out James Murphy’s ideal scenario — the worlds of larger-than-life dance-music wizardry and noisily scuzzy DIY guitar music colliding to make something beautiful. He realized that collision on his own, and he did it in spite of seemingly-disqualifying factors like his gen-X schlub status and his nonexistent singing voice. Murphy recognized that those detriments could be assets. He embraced the everyman anti-image even as he wrote self-deprecating lyrics about a fat guy in an T-shirt doing all the singing, and he leaned into his own shouty talk-sing ability.
The obvious formative influence on James Murphy’s vocal style is the Fall’s Mark E. Smith, the man who ultimately figured out how to build a compelling frontman persona out of withering, atonal talk-singing word-spray. In his best moments, Murphy sounded like your fired-up friend making some arcane musical argument as the bartenders yell out for last call. LCD Soundsystem happened to arrive at a very good moment for that kind of erudite white-guy ranting. Murphy and the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn had very different musical goals, but they were kindred spirits in my mind.
If you only knew “Losing My Edge” and “Daft Punk Is Playing At My House,” then you might’ve assumed that LCD Soundsystem would be an exhausting nonstop firehose of proper nouns and trainspotter signifiers. You wouldn’t be wrong, exactly, but the album goes deeper than that. It’s got stylistic left turns, even if those stylistic left turns are pure pastiche. Murphy wrote “Never As Tired As When I’m Waking Up” mostly as an excuse to fuck around with the Beatles’ “Dear Prudence” chord progression, and album closer “Great Release” is Eno to the bone. Still, those songs are pretty, and they express things, even if those things are just as simple as an impatient and incoherent attempt to get laid. All through the record, the specter of Murphy’s advancing age hangs heavy: What will he do when the day comes, when it’s no fun, when it’s all done? Another major undercurrent is the natural insecurity of the dilettante. Who, after all, is the disco infiltrator if not James Murphy?
At least for me, the most complete dance-punk fusion in the entire LCD Soundsystem catalog is “Movement,” a song that represents a bit of a road not taken for the band. The entire LCD Soundsystem album sounds harsh and grating and intense; that’s one of the great things about it. James Murphy learned about the power of screech and squall in the basement-show world, and then he applied that to dance music. It never sounds harsher, more grating, or more intense than on “Movement.” Murphy hectors about the neutered nature of internet-era quasi-underground worlds — “a culture without the effort of all of the culture” — over an squirming, insistent squiggle-clap. It builds and builds, and then it explodes into cathartic jagged-guitar mayhem. When LCD Soundsystem would play “Movement” at their early shows, people would go off. We needed that release.
As LCD Soundsystem grew into a successful and self-reliant institution, one that mostly worked outside of the DFA bubble, James Murphy mellowed out too much to make another song like “Movement.” I’m not complaining; I’m just glad we got that one out of him. Initially, LCD Soundsystem was received as expertly crafted critic-bait, which is mostly what it was. The album might’ve come out on a major label, but it was not shooting for stadium status or even for light radio rotation. A few songs actually charted in the UK, which must’ve been a nice surprise for everyone. The album and “Daft Punk Is Playing At My House” both got Grammy nominations in the dance category, and LCD Soundsystem lost both of them to the Chemical Brothers. Critics were on board with LCD, if not wholeheartedly. The LP landed just outside the top 10 in the Pazz & Jop poll — #11, behind My Morning Jacket’s Z and ahead of a Monk/Coltrane reissue. LCD Soundsystem toured with a similarly-ascendant M.I.A., a show that gave plenty of people their own “I was there” moments.
James Murphy was and is an ambitious man, but I can’t imagine he had any idea where his pet project would go. A couple of years after LCD Soundsystem came out, I interviewed Murphy and told him that I’d just heard “House Of Jealous Lovers” piped over the speakers in Madison Square Garden, just before Justin Timberlake walked onstage. He was delighted. When I talked to Murphy, he was about to release the LCD Soundsystem song that would become a stealth generational anthem. A few years after that, the band would play their grand sendoff at the Garden, and then they would reunite to play for festival crowds way bigger than what you could fit inside that building. Now, Murphy has reached the point where younger generations are making fun of the shit that he says in interviews. That’s good. That’s how it should be. You can’t become embarrassing if you never had the juice in the first place, and LCD Soundsystem had the juice.
