MUSIC INTERVIEW
DANCE THIS MESS AROUND LCD Soundsystem’s Mission to Make Disco Cool Again BY JOHN DAVIDSON
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t’s been threatening to happen, this concept that white kids might like to dance. 1970s disco cast a horrible black cloud over the rock audience, and despite perennial interest in dub, R&B, hip-hop, and line dancing, the boys of rock have mostly been hesitant to shake their booties for the better part of three decades. Operating from the underground as one of the hippest tastemakers in New York City, James Murphy and his machines in LCD Soundsystem pack in hip-hop backbeats and washout guitars with funkytown riffing until they hit dancefloor glory. He recently spoke to INSITE about his punk past and disco future. Do you listen to a lot of new music? I recently read this interview with David Byrne, and he was talking about how his contemporaries don’t go to shows or listen to new music, and that made me kind of embarrassed. Not that I’m a contemporary of his, but I don’t pay that much attention. When I’m done with the tour, I’m going to remedy and work on that. Mostly what I listen to is dance music, because that’s what get sent to me and so there’s a little bit of a utilitarian thing to it. I might DJ it, so I’ll listen to it. I’m not a big Internet music guy, so I don’t know how people listen to music as much now. I gotta know how people find it; I don’t really go to a record store and hear it, like I used to.
It was no fun, it was just straight white dudes who may or may not have had beards. Look, I’m a straight white guy who sometimes has a beard, but I can’t get all that hate on me. I’m just saying that if I look around, and everybody looks just like me, the party’s over. The fun is gone. All the ponderous bullshit just didn’t work for me, really. A friend of mine in New York contends that the punk movement ended as soon as it got really macho and people quit dancing at shows. Totally. Punk, to me, was always arty and faggy and thuggish, all kind of mixed together. I always hated hardcore. Really macho stuff really bugged me, just jock bullshit and low-I.Q. stuff. I grew up in a small town where there was no scene, there wasn’t really anybody else. There was no one really telling me that I
routine. I mean, you get off the plane and somebody helps you with your record bags, then they drive you to a really nice hotel where you play records for a couple of hours. But on the other hand, I also take it really seriously because there’s kind of a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. I try to be really respectful of people. If people feel like you’re being snotty and above them, then you’re a bad DJ. I don’t care what records you have or what you did last weekend. You kind of have to show people respect. If they don’t know shit about music, you still are there to make them happy. If you wanna be a punk and think, “I’m gonna play whatever I want because I know what good music is,” that’s great. But you have to make an effort to get them to hear it and enjoy it or you’re like a child who is screaming and yelling. You try to play records that make people happy, and once you show them that you respect their taste, then you can start playing them something new that they might listen to. You have to play things that the audience understands, and then find a way to bridge the gap. Is this starkly different than the approach you take with LCD Soundsystem? With LCD and DJing and stuff, it’s all part of the same body of work. DJing is related to the band, but they have to balance each other or be of the same gesture. I don’t see any of it as more or less of a two-way street, because you have to feed off the audience and assess the environment. Some artists have kind of a “Take it or leave it” attitude about their music. That could be good, but it all boils down to whether they are good at it or not. If they’re good at it, then fuck it. I’ll take Lou Reed doing whatever he wants, because he’s Lou Reed. But if it’s some regular old band who suddenly wants to do electronic music, and they suck at it, then fuck ‘em.
Did you grow up listening to a lot of dance music? No, I hated dance music. So what was the epithany? I was working with an English guy in ’99 and we went out and did ecstasy. It’s not that exciting of a story, but it’s true.
I liked what you did with Nike, and I disdain the argument over “selling out” or not. I think it’s a worthwhile argument, but I think most of the people who bring it up are wrongheaded. I think what they really mean is that what I’m doing is not cool. What they really mean is, “Nike’s not cool” and they resent the fact that be associated with me because they own the record or something, and then they might have that “not cool” rubbed all over them. I find that to be an indefensible argument; I couldn’t care less how those kind of people feel. But on the other hand, it’s a worthwhile thing to ask. Like, should I be doing things for some giant company? I think that’s a good question. I certainly thought about it, and I asked myself what was bothering me and made a little list. It wasn’t part of an ad for a product I didn’t endorse, you didn’t have to buy some kind of other product to get the music that I made, it wasn’t packaged with anything, I wanted to be able to get it back to put it out myself. And so after they’d addressed all the things that I was worried about, then the only reason to say “no” was, “It’s not cool.” And I just couldn’t turn it down for that reason.
You recently described yourself as a colossal failure at one point. Was that because you didn’t know what you wanted to do with your life? No. I was just undisciplined, spoiled, and lazy. I was self-defeating and overwrought. I was failure. I was spoiled, but not like my parents had spoiled me. When I was a kid, certain things came very easily to me, and the things that were difficult for me, I just abandoned. It just seems like an embarrassing way to live your life. I was around 26 when I realized that I was wasting my time and needed some discipline. I quit making music and became a technical person, and that really helped me. Doing technical work made me really happy and I always found it rewarding. There was a beginning, a middle, and and end, and you couldn’t really get lost in your creativity or other soft-logic shit that keeps you trapped. And then in about ’99, I started making music again, and I had a really different headspace for it. I was really happy. Was part of the attraction to dance music that you were really bored with following the same path of satisfaction for the previous ten years or so? I just couldn’t answer the question, “Why do I make indie rock?” There was no good reason for it. To talk about my feelings? I don’t care, nobody cares about that. What was the point? With dance music, it was really clear: I make people dance. If it doesn’t make people dance, then it’s not good. Rather than, “They don’t understand it!” or the other kinds of bullshit that goes on in other kinds of music.
WITH DANCE MUSIC, IT WAS REALLY CLEAR: I MAKE PEOPLE DANCE. IF IT DOESN’T MAKE PEOPLE DANCE, THEN IT’S NOT GOOD.
Is that a little bit of a legacy with the way punk reacted to disco, at least to a small degree? I don’t think punk reacted to disco. I think punk reacted to classic rock. At least, if you’re talking about REAL disco and REAL punk, not the sort of cartoonish bullshit punk. Cartoonish bullshit punk didn’t like disco because it didn’t know shit about disco, and probably didn’t know shit about punk. John Lydon, a pretty fucking respectable punk guy, listened to the exact same shit that Larry Lavon listened to, had a lot of the exact same influences, and had a lot of the same disdain for mass culture. One was a depressed, English, working class guy in one situation, and one was a gay black DJ in New York. So where those kinds of impulses emerge are a lot of times, situational. I find someone like Larry Lavon to be just as punk as John Lydon, at least in the kind of punk that meant something to me. It seemed like part of the 90s embrace of the indies and the underground was a rejection of happiness. PG 26 • insiteatlanta.com • June 2007
Do you have those same sorts of boundaries set up when you get asked to produce a record or remix? It’s very mechanical. First, we ask if we have enough time, and usually we don’t so that stops about 90% of the work offered. Number two is, “Do we think we can do anything with it?” There are a lot of things that we like that we didn’t do, because we didn’t think we could do anything better. And then there are things that we’ve actually done that I haven’t liked because there was an easy way in, but I wasn’t sure what I could do to make it interesting. Then the last is whether or not they will be able to pay what they should pay, given who they are. So, if it’s a small band, then it shouldn’t be a lot and if if it’s a big band then it should be. We go through them in that order. Big names sometimes want to underpay you because they think it’s an honor to work with them, and I take great umbrage to that.
couldn’t listen to Black Flag and Heaven 17 together. I had mixed tapes of stuff like that, and it was all fine to me. There are people who could make an argument that you couldn’t put the B-52s and the Replacements together, but I remember being about 12 years old and being on a trip to the beach where I bought “Stink” and “Wild Planet”. Those were two of my favorite records; they blew me away. “Fuck School” and “Planet Claire” seemed to be totally compatible at the time. As soon as music started being accompanied by arguments of, “Look, you don’t understand!” then that’s the end of it. If I like the music, then I understand. You can’t tell me I don’t understand. Is that part of the inherent attraction of DJ’ing for you, that you impulsively play whatever you want to see if it will work? I don’t take myself very seriously as a DJ. It’s a pretty easy job. As a guy who used to carry his drums around and set them up for a hundred bucks a night split three ways, DJ’ing is a comedy
Didn’t it seem sort of left-field, in a metaphysical way, that you were working with Brittney Spears? Um, no. It came up when we really didn’t know what to do with ourselves. The Rapture had just left, and we were really lost. It came along, and we asked those questions. We thought we should at least try it. What if we met her and she was amazing? You can’t pre-judge somebody just because you perceive them in the media in a certain way. You could meet her and she could blow your mind, or you could meet her and she could be a moron.
