LCD Soundsystem: Authenticity in the 21st Century
“This is the way pop ends,” laments Simon Reynolds in the introduction to his 2011 book Retromania. “Once upon a time, pop’s metabolism buzzed with a dynamic energy, creating the surging-into-the future feel… [but] the sensation of moving forward grew fainter as the [aughts] unfurled.” Music in the 21st century, Reynolds claims, has lost the emphasis of NOW that defined each discrete decade of the previous fifty years. Instead, the industry has become “ever more crowded out by the past… instead of being about itself.”
Reynolds is not alone in his anxiety. A general uneasiness has permeated much of online music culture, many journalists noting the ‘slowness’ that has become characteristic of the 2000s. The originality that music-lovers recall from their childhoods seems now a distant memory, a spectre that only reappears in the half-hearted mash-ups and remixes that pollute the once-innovative industry. What happened to the original, authentic, bona fide medium that was inseparable from our own political and social past? How did we become so removed so as to lose ourselves in the skin-deep revivals of eras long gone?
In the depths of this identity crisis James Murphy formed LCD Soundsystem, a dance-punk electronica group that felt aggressively out of place from its inception. Like the misguided bands Reynold’s critiques, LCD Soundsystem borrowed heavily from 20th century groups, blending and mixing the styles of untouchable artists like David Bowie and the Talking Heads. But unlike the kids with whom he was sharing the decade, Murphy, who was 35 years old at the drop of LCD Soundsystem’s first album in 2005, was exhaustingly aware of the music environment in which he was surfacing. “Is the problem… that I’m not being original enough?” he asked Reynolds directly. “Because if it is, then let’s just dump rock in the fucking ocean and call it a day, because I’m doing the best I can for the moment!”
If Retromania illustrates how pop music has become victim to surface-level pastiche, LCD Soundsystem shows us how it can recover. In an age where retro-rock is maligned for “leeching” off ancient styles, Murphy and his band mates offer us an alternative way forward. Through music that self-awarely borrows past sounds while articulating a fear of shallow mimicry, LCD Soundsystem creates something as original and honest as the predecessors they emulate.
LCD Soundsystem
James Murphy’s career resides on the edge of the digital frontier. A child of the 70’s and 80’s, he lived through what Reynolds calls the “death of music as an object,” the gradual digitization where music transcended tangible distribution methods (cassettes, records, CDs, etc.) The proud owner of a “gargantuan record collection,” Murphy is shining example of a growing population of curators-turned-artists who, due to the explosion in music access, have taken their encyclopedic knowledge of the industry and translated it into their own original music. Reynolds writes:
“The aspirational use of the word ‘curating’ by musicians suggested that the same skill set required to run an art gallery or organise a museum exhibition was being applied to the formation of a band’s sonic identity.”
For LCD Soundsystem, the ‘sonic identity’ that Reynolds describes was a long time coming. “I was really a failure.” Murphy said in a 2012 interview. “Like really really really really really really really really a failure.” A college dropout and former wunderkind, Murphy drifted through his twenties in “dead end” bands like Pony (described as “an average post-hardcore band with heavy debts to its inspirations” (Kellman)) and Speedking where, although he didn’t know it yet, he was seeing exactly what kind of musician he didn’t want to be. “I was just really afraid of failing,” he reflected “I could claim some sort of safety from doing nothing.”
But at twenty-six Murphy dug his heels in and began DJing around New York, eventually producing and engineering tracks for other artists under his own record label, Death From Above (DFA) Records. “I had made music my whole life… [but] it was the first time I had made music… where I wasn’t trying to be another thing that I thought I’m supposed to be. That I was just trying to actually be as much myself as I possibly could… and I was actually rewarded for it.” In 2002, with the help of his new collaborator and producer Tim Goldsworthy, Murphy dropped the challenging and provocative track “Losing My Edge,” a meditative and self-deprecating reflection that, according to Pitchfork, “articulated the central absurdity of forming a band in a time of such excess. What do you do when everything has been done?”
The eight-minute track consists mainly of Murphy talk-singing over a simple upbeat TR-808 rhythm, complaining about flatness of modern music, made by the “kids” who weren’t alive for the careers of the artists they sample. He sings: “I’m losing my edge to the art school Brooklynites in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia from the unremembered eighties.” “I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables / I hear that you and your band have sold your turntables and bought guitars.” As the track begins to wind down, he begins to chant “You don’t know what you really want” over and over.
Murphy contrasts his earned credibility with the infinite resources of the new generation. “I’m losing my edge to the Internet seekers who can tell me every member of every good group from 1962 to 1978… I heard you have a compilation of every good song ever done by anybody,” he sings bitterly. “But have you seen my records? / I used to work in the record store / I had everything before anyone.”
Murphy’s catchy identity crisis found thousands of sympathizers, a generation of music-lovers feeling debased by the explosion of digital media. The song peaked on UK music charts, blasting his newly minted group into international fame, and solidifying Murphy’s role as the charismatic voice for the music junkies of a bygone era.
Over the following decade LCD Soundsystem would herald a new wave of authenticity in popular music. The group’s subsequent albums Sound of Silver and This is Happening were each released to growing critical acclaim and popularity, resulting in a massive loyal fanbase and series of successful tours across the United States and Europe. Blending together elements of acid house, post-disco, dance-rock, post-punk, alternative rock, garage rock, and psychedelic pop, LCD Soundsystem’s increasingly popular sound evaded a convenient label. In his piece “North American Scum: The Undeniable Legacy of LCD Soundsystem,” Blake Baxter writes “[LCD Soundsystem] mashed genres indifferently and challenged the notion of what dance music was supposed to consist of and sound like.” In the Slate review of the track “All My Friends,” Hua Hsu writes “[LCD’s] aesthetic compresses about 30 years of parallel traditions — the spastic aggression of punk and postpunk; the glamorous thump of disco and house — into a lean, polished but unclean, posteverything sound.”
The Modernist Aesthetic
But how, one might argue, is this different from the eponymous Retromania that Reynolds condemns? The difference lies what Fredric Jameson calls the “modernist aesthetic”. In his famous essay “Postmodernism and Consumer Culture,” Jameson describes the modernist aesthetic as “organically linked to the conception of a unique self and private identity, a unique personality and individuality, which can be expected to generate its own unique vision of the world and to forge its own unique, unmistakable style.” Then, with little fanfare, he announces “[this] kind of individualism and personal identity is a thing of the past.”
LCD Soundsystem, unlike Reynolds, embraces the death of the modernist aesthetic. The second half of the 20th century could afford to define each decade by a certain personality or “unmistakable style.” With the rise of the digital, however “nobody has that kind of unique private world and style to express any longer.” Karl Marx himself wrote in a different context, “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” but today his insight remains extremely relevant. Jameson continues, “In a wild in which stylistic innovation is no long possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of styles in the imaginary museum.” Notice, however, that Jameson does not claim that there is nothing new to say, just that “cultural production has been driven back inside the mind.”
Here lies the crux of LCD Soundsystem’s success, and where they differentiate themselves from the blind pastiche that Reynolds criticizes. When there’s “nothing new under the sun, and unlike the kids, we don’t have the advantage of not knowing,” as Pitchfork put it eloquently, the postmodern artist has the obligation to acknowledge and embrace the shift in their medium. Jameson writes:
“One of [contemporary or postmodernist art’s] essential messages will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past.”
LCD Soundsystem does just that. In “Movement,” off of the band’s self-titled breakout album, Murphy laments the false culture that has been “imprisoned by the past,” as Jameson put it. “It’s like the culture / Without the effort of all the luggage,” he calls despairingly. “It’s like a movement / Without the bother of the meaning.” They’re the same kids from “Losing My Edge,” the ones with the bottomless catalogues of the Internet behind them with nothing to say. But Murphy insists he sees through the fog. “You’re fast and easy, and I’m tapped,” he sings. “You’re pillaging and I’m tapped.”
Authenticity
So in an era when music is shared, copied, sampled, and remixed with such violent frequency, what does it mean for music to be original? Since the beginning of time artists have stood on the shoulders of those who came before, but with the death of music as an object, the question becomes that much more perplexing. Music-making has reached such a high level of abstraction that to claim that anything new is “real” is to be blind to historical context. In his seminal piece “Simulacra and Simulation,” Jean Baudrillard goes further:
“When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production.”
The “panic-stricken production of the real and the referential,” can be interpreted here as the shallow resurgence of nostalgia in mainstream pop today. Artists like Katy Perry, Carly Rae Jepsen, and Miley Cyrus will sample 80’s synths or 90’s grunge, not to bring attention to the medium, but to capitalize on the public craving for the perceived authenticity and substance of the past. Reynolds describes ‘retro,’ as “a self-conscious fetish for period stylisation… expressed creatively through pastiche and citation,” and this is what he’s referring to. But is there a way to cite the past without fetishizing it? Here LCD Soundsystem delivers where modern pop cannot.
When Murphy is whining to be recognized for his authenticity, (“I was there,” he repeats exasperatedly in “Losing My Edge”) he knows exactly what he’s doing: whining. He knows if he tries to meet the “kids” on their playing field, fighting to sample the most “original” or unheard track, he’s bound to lose. In “Losing My Edge,” Murphy is not trying to establish himself as an authority on authenticity, but rather to open up, to show how petty and futile a quest for the “true” can become. Reynolds writes that Murphy is “agonisingly aware that he’s slipping, as younger kids outdo his recondite knowledge with even more obscure reference points.” Reynolds calls LCD Soundsystem’s music “acerbic meta-pop commentary;” I call it “honest”.
That will be the true question moving forward: can popular music ever embrace this honesty? Baudrillard claims that, honest or no, consumers will valorize anything that claims “truth, objectivity, and authenticity,” regardless of whether or not it really does. But any music that brings this paradox of values front and center, while never truly turning back the tide, will offer a refreshing perspective. And if LCD Soundsystem’s success means anything, it’s that consumers crave that perspective, far more than Reynolds gives them credit for.
Retromania is real; the draw of the “true” past that we collectively misremember nostalgically continues to weigh down an indecisive industry. But honesty — embracing one’s place and inconsequence in the oversaturated world of art — it’s not just insightful, it offers us a way out. Pitchfork put it best: “Make music anyway, and do it so well that no one cares what you actually know and whom you’re borrowing from. Which is what [Murphy] did for the rest of the decade.”
Bibliography:
Barshad, Amos. “The LCD Soundsystem Leak: What is James Murphy Sad About Now?” Vulture.com., 13 Apr. 2010. Web. 6 May 2016.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulations. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Book.
Baxter, Blake. “North American Scum: The Undeniable Legacy of LCD Soundsystem.” Saying Something. Wordpress.com. 20 Aug. 2014. Web. 6 May 2016.
Galtney, Smith. “How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love LCD Soundsystem.” the record: Music News From NPR. NPR Music. 18 Jul. 2012. Web. 6 May 2016.
Hsu, Hua. “All My Friends: The melancholy greatness of the LCD Soundsystem hit.” Slate Music. Slate. 12 July 2007. Web. 6 May 2016.
Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” Whitney Museum Lecture, 1982. Lecture.
LCD Soundsystem. “Losing My Edge.” LCD Soundsystem. James Murphy. Rec. 2002. DFA Records. MP3.
LCD Soundsystem. “Movement.” LCD Soundsystem. James Murphy, Nancy Whang, Tim Goldsworthy. Rec. 2004. DFA Records. MP3.
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Reynolds, Simon. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. New York: Faber & Faber, 2011. Book.
thezeronewsz’s channel. “Interview with James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem about how to deal with Failure.” Online video clip. Youtube. 20 Jan. 2012. Web. 6 May 2016.