(10) LCD Soundsystem, “All My Friends”
rolled
(8) Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Heads Will Roll”
211-125
and play in the final four

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie at the end of regulation, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/23/24. (Note that Arizona does not do Daylight Saving time, so AZ time now = Pacific.)

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YEAH YEAH YEAHS’ “HEADS WILL ROLL” AND THE MONSTERS OF INFLUENCE BY ERIN KEANE

First, the invocation: Nick Zinner’s synth-ceremonial curtain-raising, an indicator that something electric and epic is about to begin. Karen O, conjured, draped in fabric, raises high her mic like the Statue of Liberty in neon kicks, and layers on her incantation: lose yourself, stop thinking so damn hard, follow your instincts, and sure, swallow some of these, maybe. You summon me like that, I tuck my flip phone I’m too broke to upgrade into the tragic pockets of my skinny jeans, point a drink to the sky, and heed the call. It’s the end of a decade that began with terror, hung together with paranoia, and was only just beginning to reveal how much we were being watched. Facebook had overtaken MySpace and Twitter was still a bunch of nerds shooting the shit, but we were excited about the president still, and it felt good to be in Chicago’s Grant Park, where he had given his election night victory speech last November, and where Yeah Yeah Yeahs were filling in as Lollapalooza headliners after the Beastie Boys bowed out because of Adam Yauch’s diagnosis. We’re two songs in when the dance anthem begins. When Brian Chase’s beat comes in, on the floor is where we already are.
A Yeah Yeah Yeahs jam, especially one like “Heads Will Roll,” is no passive experience but tell that to the bemused audience in Richard Ayoade’s floor show-turned-massacre video. (Indie rock videos were important again for a while there, thanks to music blogs.) The video opens on Zinner’s hands on a light-up synthesizer playing the overture—what Andy Thompson of the delightfully lo-fi site Planet Mellotron dismisses as “really obviously sampled strings,” sourced from the Mellotron M4000D (“described by the manufacturer as 'a Mellotron'. No. No, it isn't.”—Ibid.), and specifically, from the Sound Card 02’s Roxy SFX 2 series, which you can hear in its unadulterated state on YouTube, where in comments, Zinner’s exact sequence can be found. Then the camera pans up and across to Karen, a Queen of Hearts fancy-dress fetish dream, all cellophane and red satin and chrome studs and scarlet lips and those iconic bangs framing her kohl-rimmed eyes. Chase in shades, impenetrable, and the camera spins and we see the audience from the band’s point of view. Couples at little cloth-covered, civilized tables. Watching. Not waiting, exactly. They don’t know something’s coming.
Fifteen years should be far enough in the rearview to say something definitive about the sound of a dance hit, and yet. Yeah Yeah Yeahs put out their third full-length album, It’s Blitz!, in 2009, locking down Karen O’s pedestal in the rock-god pantheon with the one-two punch of its opening tracks. From the first lines of “Zero,” it’s clear It’s Blitz! is an elevation from their previous records, though the precise effect is hard to put into words, a common limitation of writing truthfully about music that we can swaddle in instrumentation details and production reports and clumsy metaphors but never quite overcome. You can call it a ripening of the sound, I guess, but also, it’s not simply that artists—the trio, producer Dave Sitek—plus time equals change, though there had been plenty of that on display: Karen’s fall off the stage and recovery, her move to Los Angeles, that SPIN cover story for Show Your Bones, etc. Take a fist, explode your fingers into a sunburst, trace an arc in the air, like you’ve just pulled off a magic trick. It’s like that. They kind of had to. If a blistering debut like Fever to Tell is a birth announcement via dynamite and the introspection of Show Your Bones a declaration of survival, with a third album a band enters kill or be killed territory. They’re either on their way out or they’re here to fucking stay. (Back then, anyway. Now who knows what you get before the algorithms bury you alive.) It’s Blitz!, and “Heads Will Roll” specifically, displays earned confidence: What doesn’t kill you gets cut up into confetti and blown back at the world.
“Every now and then I’ll hear, ‘Thank you so much, you really got me through high school.’ Or ‘Thank you, you really got me through freshman year of college.’ Or ‘Thank you so much, you really …’ I have heard that from fans who don’t really know what to say to me and I don’t know what to say back, except for, ‘Oh really? Thank you! I’m happy I got you through that,’” Karen says in Lizzy Goodman’s Meet Me in the Bathroom, the indispensable account of the New York City Aughts rock revival. “But really in my head I’m like, ‘I manifested that shit for you! I wanted to get in there like a motherfucker and that’s what I did.’
 “Heads Will Roll” certainly manifested some shit for me. Alice taking over Wonderland and turning it into a revenge blood bath was something I didn’t even know I needed until I heard it. One Christmas, some twenty-five years before this song came out, my uncle gave me the Junior Illustrated Library hardcover copy of Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass, with John Tenniel’s almost-grotesque illustrations in full color on the cover. There’s Alice, looking hassled and indignant, as the Queen of Hearts points at her, commanding. There’s no dialogue bubble emerging from the sovereign’s mouth, but there’s also no mistaking the sentence: Off with her head! The mock turtle and the dodo and the griffon lurk in the background making comments, while the Mad Hatter gawks, useless. I’ve met those dudes a million times over since I first read the book. (Speaking of dudes, another standout moment on Planet Mellotron: Thompson deeming the cello on Oasis’ “Wonderwall” “[f]ar more memorable than it deserves to be” and I’m sorry for the intrusion but I’ve become obsessed with this website, I love contrarian purists, and would absolutely binge a one-and-done season of a TV show about this guy but only if Richard Ayoade directed it. Anyway!) Pretty much everything I needed to know about being born into a finite human-girl life and growing up in a hostile world I absorbed from this book, buried deep in anarchic nonsense so I’d have a shot at paying attention.
The story begins with a jump down a rabbit hole and ends with a death sentence and in between, Alice encounters tests everywhere she goes. She stumbles through a series of nightmare scenarios, quizzed by disturbed creatures who don’t care if she fails, set up for breaches of etiquette she’s never taught, scorned for being a stupid girl, her disgusting, out-of-control body berated at every turn. Eating mystery cakes. Drinking off-label potions. Swimming in a pool of her own tears. Even though she’s never alone, throughout her adventures Alice is still lonely. But when she’s put on trial, she outsmarts the system, escapes her own elimination, and lives to wake another day.
“Was I the same when I got up this morning?” Alice wonders to herself at one point. “But if I’m not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I?”
2009 wasn’t the exact year I started taking that question seriously—that was more of a drawn-out process, a test of how long one could be considered “emerging”—but we can ballpark it. I had had my extensive warm-up, my twenties, all those nights in dive bars and at the shows, every band a bar band back then, some you’d recognize by name now and others you wouldn’t unless you had been there. And my god, the iPod changed everything—a whole CD collection the size of a pack of the cigarettes you could no longer smoke inside, a choose-your-own-adventure with every spin of the clickwheel: the White Stripes, the Walkmen, Interpol, all the bands who sounded old and new at once. If I am telling time by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and why wouldn’t I, when Fever to Tell came out I was in the throes of a prolonged and poorly-hidden adolescence that had bled into my mid-twenties, getting an MFA in poetry, living in a starter home and marriage, both of which I would leave by the time their EP Is Is hit iTunes.
These days the last thing anyone wants to hear are the leftover neuroses of those tagged “academically gifted” as a child, and believe me, I get it. But I regret to admit there was a time—around my second semester of graduate school—when I said out loud that if I hadn’t published my first full-length book by the time I turned thirty I would consider myself a failure. (By failure I meant regular.) This notion—that I had until thirty to break through—would have been laughable in more youth-oriented disciplines like garage rock, but it’s what the literary world told us in the pre-Instagram era: That a writer of thirty-nine, even, could still receive a meaningful title of “Younger Poet,” which was clearly the next best thing to simply being young. What better way to stay younger forever than on a campus? According to our professors, all we would need was that first book, a handful of letters, and a little teaching experience to land a tenure-track teaching job and be set, more or less, for life. Being a (lower-case for us losers) younger poet was fun, and I don’t know why I was in such a hurry to outgrow it. Sure, there was the enduring of things like the calculation of how badly it would, hypothetically, screw my chances to get published in a print journal I wanted on my CV (online journals were considered borderline then, imagine!) if I called out the editor staring down my shirt in the conference hotel lobby bar. But there was also driving my VW with the top down singing “Y Control” and “Maps” through the suicide curves and cackling hills of the rural corners of the region, on my way to present at a conference, visit a friend’s classroom, give a reading in a little series at a cool coffee shop in the middle of nowhere, hoping the machines wouldn’t drown me out. Yeah Yeah Yeahs were always in rotation for my in-car vocal warmup.
How did all that work out for me? I didn’t have a book out by the time I was thirty, but a week after my birthday, I did land a contract, hallelujah, with an indie label, I mean press. I celebrated by barhopping with dudes who were not my husband, who stayed home because midterm election results or something. He was already an adult; I was getting kicked out of a seedy karaoke bar after one of the guys kicked over a chair singing “Night Moves” and we were deemed too rowdy for a Tuesday night. Je ne regrette rien! By the following spring I was living alone in my own apartment, revising my acknowledgments page, building out my record collection, iPod tucked away in favor of vinyl, and a promise to myself that I would never again be with another guy who wouldn’t dance with me.
Then came the book. I applied to every full-time, permanent or visiting, creative writing job, my new and promising boyfriend—who, yes, would and did dance—said he was open to moving with me wherever the AWP Job List would take us. I remember marveling at how far north the rest of the state of New York actually goes. I was a finalist for one job but didn’t land it. By spring most of those searches had been canceled, victims of the Great Recession, sections re-assigned to adjuncts, where they’ve probably stayed. That boyfriend and I adopted a magnificent shelter cat, and then all three of us signed a lease together timed to the academic calendar and I vowed not to acquire any furniture that wouldn’t be easy to move or leave behind.
Do we ever know when we’re out of the exposition and into the real action until it’s over? If I think about it too much it starts to feel like the whole first decade of this century was an exercise in learning how to survive in the beginning of an end. The next year, there were way fewer jobs and they needed more CV burnishing. I kept at it, got a contract for my second book, the deeper one that would mean my work had legs, not just dirty jokes and a couple of good moves. The summer before it came out, we bounced through that Yeah Yeah Yeahs Lolla set at Grant Park’s bucolic North stage, with its trees and skyline lights as a backdrop. It’s hard to really dance during a festival headliner set—you end up kind of jumping up and down in place for an hour, crushed in with the crowd that’s been drinking giant beers or those weird boxes of wine all day. But we did our best. Everything about the last show of the day feels epic after all the side stage antics and heat-addled mishaps, and this set was no exception. Karen was a controlled explosion; the crowd sang our hearts out on “Maps” as she blipped on the words. I spent the weekend feeling by turns younger and old as hell next to the girls in sundresses young enough to be my students. I was tired of living temporarily. I put away the dream of tenure, and the following month took my first full-time job in journalism, scoring a newspaper staff writer job in the last days of the actual paper claiming to be as important as the website. The buyouts, of course, had already started.
Are any of us aware of the weight of our decisions when we make them, or only in hindsight, when the critics start dissecting our moves? Maybe this was my real talent after all, coming in at the beginning of the end of something, and figuring out how to hide out there in plain sight.

*

Ayaode’s “Heads Will Roll” video really picks up when the main character arrives, a ponytailed werewolf in a skinny tie—tailor, introductions—eyeing the crowd, his prey, with contempt. The audience won’t dance, but he will, and they will watch with fascination.
But first, a word about dancing werewolves: Yes, there’s Michael Jackson’s varsity-jacketed “Thriller” routine and Michael J. Fox boogeying in a white suit and full “Teen Wolf” fur. But also, if you haven’t seen this clip, you really should: there’s Tom Cruise as upstart pool shark Vincent in Martin Scorsese’s 1986 adaptation of The Color of Money, his sequel to The Hustler. Fast Eddie (Paul Newman) is on his way to collect his protégé, a baby-monster he can’t control, who’s showboating as he runs a table. Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” is playing over the bar’s sound system, and Vince—wearing a VINCE T-shirt, for chrissakes—is feeling himself and the song. He's sending the balls in one by one, and between, he’s dancing. And there’s this shot, set to Zevon warning us to stay away, where Vince does this little spin then leans down to sink a ball one-handed, and he pauses to grin—presumably he’s aiming this contemptuous pity at his mark, but cut to him looking right at the camera as he bares his teeth and it lands like it’s meant for the viewer. (Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s longtime editor, is a genius too.) The next time the camera is back on Vince we stay with him for a continuous dizzying shot, and with every ball he drops, his arrogance swells, his improvised choreography grows more intricate. He’s wielding his cue like a combat staff, like a sword. He bites off the irresistible line, “his hair was perfect,” as he rakes his fingers through his mane with a leer. I mean, is there anything more terrifying than Tom Cruise’s own teeth?
Back to our wolf: While the band plays cool on stage, our guy’s solo floor show is all balletic menace. The floor lights up in homage but he’s all loose flips and careless elbows, more “Napoleon Dynamite does New Order” than “Billie Jean” en pointe, than “Thriller” precision. A pause, a howl on his lips. Then comes the carnage.
Michael Jackson himself died on June 25, 2009, just about a month after the video for this song, which would hit Number 1 on the Billboard Dance charts on August 1, premiered. How do you outlive a pastiche like that? The night of Jackson’s death, word spread by mouth and text and, probably, Facebook: We’d meet at this intersection and see how big of a party we could throw before we got shut down. This intersection was exactly the kind of spot you’d expect to encounter a flash mob (I’m sorry! It was 2009!) shutting down traffic to “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough.” And all the terrible things we had heard about Michael Jackson were put inside a box and placed on a high shelf for a half-hour of sweaty chaos in the street. We danced, soaked with sweat in the humid river town summer night, like we did when we were kids and “Thriller” first entranced us, like we did in the ‘90s when his elaborate, technically dazzling videos ruled MTV. Almost a decade later, years after I married the boyfriend who went out dancing with me that night, and after I managed to make a career in journalism that feels to this day like it’s borrowed and I’ll have to return it on short notice, we stood outside the Adlon in Berlin where Jackson once dangled his infant son off a balcony with a blanket over his head, and said, Well, that happened here. I have a similar thought when I’m sitting at a red light at that intersection: Once upon a time, when we didn’t pour all our anger or mourning out on the internet, we danced in this spot—not for him, but for our younger selves.
And speaking of monstrous influences, when you’re a girl falling in love with Alice in Wonderland, nobody tells you about the metanarrative surrounding those books. You find that out decades later, and you wonder why so many things you thought were beautiful when you were younger had to have something rotten at their core. What was Charles Dodgson’s damage, exactly? Scholars and historians differ on the specifics, but here’s Virginia Woolf’s observation:  

For some reason, his childhood was sharply severed. It lodged in him whole and entire. … And therefore as he grew older, this impediment in the centre of his being, this hard block of pure childhood, starved the mature man of nourishment. He slipped through the grown-up world like a shadow, solidifying only on the beach at Eastbourne, with little girls whose frocks he pinned up with safety pins.

Woolf did have a flair for the devastating detail. The image of “little girls whose frocks he pinned up” lingers terribly, to say nothing of the myriad psychosexual interpretations of his life and rumored predatory designs on a real girl, Alice Lidell; the contemporaneous gossip, the postmortem literary analysis, and the growing acceptance that there was something deeply fucked up and malevolent about this guy whose aesthetics also, oh yeah, course through my veins. Knowing this, what am I supposed to do with Alice’s persistent body horrors? With the sinister depictions of eating and appetite, of the fantasy that should a girl move enough among monsters she could become one herself?
“It’s no use going back to yesterday,” as Alice told the dudes. “I was a different person then.”
These texts shape us before we can know the people who made them or hope to understand their actions. What “Heads Will Roll” does for me—song and video together—is subvert those formational texts, bending their influences into something new and yes, useful. The video’s wolfman is a monster, but he’s defanged on the dancefloor at least, revealed to be just a chaotic terror. And that’s Alice’s voice that Karen is channeling, not any made-up queen’s—she’s giving the orders now, and she’s not going to settle for being made to feel abandoned in Wonderland for one second longer.

Third books function like third albums in a career; mine was a leveling-up, too. It came out almost a decade ago and went out of print nearly as fast, a casualty of the precarious economies of indie houses. (I have never been the major label type.) In that book I wrote a series of “exam” poems, and at readings I would set them up by saying that while I was writing that book, it felt like life was a series of tests I was failing, one by one. Another way of saying I couldn’t answer the riddles because they didn’t make any sense then.
But what if dance til you’re dead isn’t a curse but a blessing, an invitation, one rule worth following. I wrote a better book, and I found a way to teach on my own terms. I’m not younger anymore, and I’m a more resilient writer for it. What I really am is a slow learner. You could call that being a late bloomer, but blooming is just a response to conditions. When you apply the metaphor to a person, it becomes Wonderland-level nonsense.
Back in the wolfman’s dance, by the time the dance floor turns orange, the audience sees all too late what it sees. They can’t outrun him. But when he slashes them with his claws, confetti spills out instead of blood. His monster eyes match Karen’s dress. He takes her down, too: decapitated and bisected across the torso, Black Dahlia-style, she’s still singing. Inside, she’s all red glitter. I think of this image when I contemplate the “dissection” model of writing about art, of slicing something open to see what it’s made of: Was I expecting a raven or a writing desk? And what, together, do I think they would they tell me?

Erin Keane is the author of three collections of poems, and two are even still in print. She’s the editor of The Louisville Anthology and author of Runaway: Notes on the Myths That Made Me (both from Belt Publishing), one of NPR’s favorite books of 2022. She teaches in the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University and is Chief Content Officer at Salon. She can’t believe she found that photo of herself at the Michael Jackson dance party.

DANCE MUSIC FOR GROWNUPS: KATE CARMODY ON “ALL MY FRIENDS” BY LCD SOUNDSYSTEM

We put Sound of Silver on the record player in the living room. We dance with Corky St. Clair, our shih poo, between us. We are in a band together and play weird, dancey synthy songs inspired by bands like LCD Soundsystem. When the needle wanders into the grooveless black space, I raise it, replace the first Sound of Silver record with the second, and carefully drop the needle on “All My Friends.” Before I moved in with my husband I thought about getting a record player—I have fond memories of dancing to Donna Summer and Michael Jackson with my family in our sunroom—but I didn’t have room in past apartments and instead opted for the best portable Bluetooth speaker I could afford.
Now in our house in North Denver, we regularly listen to records and give them to each other on holidays. This past Christmas we gave each other Rupa, EGS, Can, Funkadelic, and Fever Ray. After I moved in back in 2017, he gave me every LCD record for my birthday and we listened to them all from start to finish. I like listening to an album all the way through. I like watching the needle go round and round, thinking about all the instruments and voices pressed into a sleek sheet of vinyl. I like watching the needle wobble from the old, uneven floors beneath the console but not enough to make it skip a beat. Dancing too close to the console is another story. That’ll make the needle jump with us, so it’s best to keep some distance.
When I hear the piano start on “All My Friends,” I ask my husband if it would be hard to play those same keys over and over for over seven minutes. After years of listening, I’m well aware of the song’s length. “It would take practice,” he says motioning the keys with his fingers. My husband’s a musician. In addition to our band together, he plays in the psychedelic cumbia band Don Chicharrón and the rock band Eric vs the Demons in Denim. He taught me to pay attention to things I never noticed in songs. I’m not sure I ever really heard the bass until the tenth time he said, “How awesome is this bassline?!” It’s through those lessons that I hear this song about aging and friendship, build with accompaniment.

*

It’s 2009. We go back to my friend’s house after dominating the jukebox at Barry’s or Don’s or Candlelight. We crack open beers, though we probably don’t need another, and my friend shuffles through songs while everyone shouts requests. We dance to Hot Chip, !!!, Katy Perry, Beyoncé, always Nelly—we may live in Denver, but there are too many of us from St. Louis to pass him over —and always, always LCD. He plays “All My Friends,” and inevitably, someone starts playing air piano. Another friend bounces their knees up and down like they’re doing a plyometric exercise before a big game. We inch in closer to each other. Some of us swivel our hips, some shake our heads back and forth, a couple have jumped on the couch, we all move together to the rhythm.
My first memories of “All My Friends” and LCD Soundsystem are of dancing. In my forty-three years on this planet, few times have brought me as much joy as those spent dancing with friends. I’ve always been lucky to find friends whose dancing is one part grooving to the beat, one part singing the lyrics we know, and one part making each other laugh. In high school we stuffed pillows under our shirts as we danced to Ace of Base’s “All That She Wants;” in college, we spent way too much money on one of those claw arcade games until I won the Mr. Magoo doll that we desperately needed to prance with around the dancefloor; and after, we use whatever’s in each other’s houses that we think can accompany our routine. Here’s a hot tip, friends: a broom or Swiffer Sweeper can serve as a microphone, dance partner, or guitar. If you extend it into the crowd, watch how quickly someone grabs the other end and a limbo line forms. I’ve got lots of moves but limber limbo moves are not in my bag. I was, in fact, kicked out of gymnastics right before I conquered the back bend, so I relish in my duties as the limbo bar holder. At one friend’s wedding when there was no broom in sight, I picked up a slice of pie and learned that anything could be a calling card for limbo as long as your arm’s extended.
I love dancing. Dancing is an act of communion and personal expression. I like to think that at every moment of the day, there are people all over the planet dancing. You could throw on music right now, and someone across the globe would be dancing with you. If you are in the middle of your workday, surrounded by coworkers or students, this may sound preposterous. But go ahead and try it. I’m willing to bet you can get at least one person to join you.
Dancing is in our DNA. When we hear music, we want to move. When we dance, we are connecting. We are kinetic energy.

*

For most of his life, James Murphy, the founding member of LCD Soundsystem, admits in interviews, he was never a dancer. He says he was in bands throughout his teens and often mentions how uncool he was. As a kid, he struggled with making friends because he was uptight and controlling. When he moved to New York City, he studied writing at NYU and played in a band with another writer. He dropped out of school to focus on the band full-time, but his band never found their footing in the nineties indie rock scene, and he quit playing music. Murphy was turned off by the sameness of indie rock. “Almost everybody in a band wanted to be cool and feel cool,” he tells Sound Opinions. “They wanted to think certain things about themselves, and if you took that away, what was the point?” There’s still a whiff of bitterness when he says this. While he quit music because he was uninspired by the scene, he’s aware that his personality also got in the way of successfully collaborating with others. 
After unplugging the amp on his indie rock, Murphy shifted his focus to sound engineering and built a studio with the help of some friends in the business. It was musician and producer Tim Goldsworthy and DJ David Holmes who introduced Murphy to dance music when they came to New York from the UK to work in his studio. Murphy started going out with them and having fun, which was, as he tells Red Bull Music Academy, “anathematic to my indie rock nineties, which was going out and being judgmental.” But he remained loyal to the indie rock self-serious, too-cool-for-school sentiment, which meant no dancing.
There is social risk in dancing, which is perhaps why so many dance-songwriters remind us how they feel while dancing, instruct us about how to move, or command us to “Get up!” or “Get down!”. Others tell us stories, reminding us why we love dancing. Too often we let our fear of embarrassment get in the way of what comes naturally. Some people need a little help getting out of their heads. For Murphy, ecstasy was the tool to pry open his indie rocker shell and expose a side of him that he didn’t know existed. Once he was dancing and having fun, Murphy realized, as he says in Meet Me in the Bathroom, “This is me dancing. This isn’t the drug dancing. This is the drugs stopping myself from stopping myself from dancing.”
This experience of letting loose led to him starting DFA Records and LCD Soundsystem. “I realized that making people dance had a point that had nothing to do with art,” Murphy tells Red Bull Academy. “It’s like food; if they’re not eating it, then you’ve screwed it up. If they’re not dancing, you’re just not doing a good job.” Murphy didn’t abandon everything he loved about rock-and-roll. He didn’t suddenly become a super laid-back person. Instead, he recognized that with the basic goal of making people move, he could “calm down and stop wondering if what [he] was doing was good or worthwhile;” he could borrow from any genre that moved him emotionally and physically; he could bend and blend genre; he could collage and kaleidoscope; he could be his whole self. Through their DFA label, Tim Goldsworthy and Murphy disrupted the indie rock and dance music worlds, producing bands such as Juan McClean, Shit Robot, and The Rapture.
When The Rapture jumped ship for a major label, Murphy fueled his frustration into making music as LCD Soundsystem. LCD’s first single, “Losing My Edge,” was inspired by Murphy hearing a twenty-something DJ play the same records that he was known for playing at DFA parties—records that audiophiles like him would be well-versed in but ones that were completely new to those in the dance music scene. Murphy realized that what made him cool could be replicated and that he was afraid of losing his cool status. Instead of getting frustrated and quitting as he did in his teens and twenties, he had the sensibility of his thirties to help him lean into his conflicted feelings.
Because Murphy was old enough to have more self-awareness, he recognized that he needed to make music on his own terms, and he needed his friends by his side. He solicited friends and drinking buddies like Nancy Whang to join his band. Soon, LCD would define the sound of the first decade of this century when rock bands were incorporating dance music and other influences as they did in the seventies and eighties.
With the success of LCD’s self-titled debut album, Murphy returned to the studio in rural Massachusetts where he recorded the first album determined to make an even better one. With the recent passing of his therapist, he was ready to dig into more difficult themes. He covered the walls of the studio with silver fabric and tin foil, coating warm wooden tones with reverberations to record Sound of Silver.
“All My Friends” is the Sound of Silver sequel to “Losing My Edge.” “Losing My Edge” interrogates his fear through a cheeky exploitation that equally skewers music snobs like himself and the next generation of DJs, whereas “All My Friends” is an intimate conversation with himself. Murphy’s vocal melodies are the most complex part of the song while the rest of the instrumentation slowly builds with repetition. The four-on-the-floor beat provides the box for him to oscillate between living in the moment and returning to his friends. The guitar and synthesizer comfort his crooning or perhaps accentuate it. His vocals command the most attention and depth. His lyrics are essayistic.
In “Losing My Edge” his feelings are masked with humor, but in “All My Friends” he examines his tendency to use self-deprecating humor as a defense mechanism. He has achieved the level of fame and notoriety that he’s wanted his whole life and he has fun playing music with his friends all over the world, but he also has friends at home who have settled down. He wonders whether this lifestyle is sustainable as he gets older. After he sings, “i wouldn’t trade one stupid decision— / for another 5 years of life,”[*] he questions the sincerity of that statement. The essayist Philip Lopate says, “The spectacle of baring the naked soul is meant to awaken the sympathy of the reader, who is apt to forgive this essayist’s self-absorption in return for the warmth of his or her candor. Some vulnerability is essential.” In the hands of a twenty-year-old, contemplating if he is getting too old for the rockstar lifestyle may come off as disingenuous, but Murphy approaches it with the experience and realism of a man in his thirties, which allows any aging listener to empathize.

*

I put on my Bose over-ear headphones. The ones I impulse purchased at the airport kiosk when I realized I’d forgotten my much cheaper ones at home. The ones I couldn’t afford but convinced myself I needed because how else would I signal to the guy in 16B that I was unavailable for mid-air chatter?
I tap on “All My Friends” and slide in my socks across the hardwood floor to Corky. And so it starts, a simple piano melody with two imperfect notes repeating. It’s humanity apparent. As it chugs along, I hear one key trying to catch up until it’s in sync with the other. Over and over it chases that union. When the drums and bass come in, they support the fragile composition. I shimmy my shoulders with the piano. A minute later, I’m tired, so I stop to sing, “that’s how it starts / we go back to your house.” I point to Corky, who tilts his head and wags his tail. I continue singing, slide over to the kitchen, and open the dishwasher. I’m dance-cleaning the dishes and thinking about all our late-night dance parties. How we gather closer and closer, dancing in a circle, shouting with James Murphy “and if the sun comes up—if the sun comes up— / if the sun comes up and i still don’t want to stagger home / then it’s the memory of our betters / that are keeping us on our feet.”
It was 2015 and I was listening to “All My Friends.” I was 34, single. It was a Friday night, and I’d opted to stay in. I paid too much in rent. But I was the happiest I’d been since my years-long tumultuous relationship ended. My ex didn’t know where I lived, and I had truly wiped off most of the muck of our relationship on the blue carpet outside my apartment door (the one he sat on while begging me to let him in), leaving only a tiny bit to remind me I was better off alone.
I liked living alone. I liked singing to Corky loudly in my apartment, hoping my neighbors didn’t hear me. I liked snuggling with him on the couch and reading or watching TV. I liked putting on socks just so I could slide across my hardwood floors to do cool dance moves, sometimes with music, sometimes without. I liked pacing in my apartment, twirling my hair while thinking without anyone interrupting me. Weekend nights, yes, going out with friends, but also staying in, helped me find myself again.
But this time, what I thought would be a song to remind me of fun with friends while I cleaned the kitchen took a different turn. This time in the kitchen, when I heard: “you spend the first five years trying to get with the plan / and the next five years / trying to be with your friends again,” I felt like I had accidentally bit the side of my mouth while I chewed on nostalgia. The urgency in Murphy’s voice and his honest, vulnerable lyrics invited me to let my fears reveal themselves.
I pressed the repeat icon in Spotify, wandered over to the couch, and laid down. Corky hopped up and climbed on top of me, resting his head on my chest. I scratched the top of his little head and petted his soft black fur. I stretched my other arm across my eyes so there’d be nothing but the song. I listened to “All My Friends” repeatedly until I wasn’t thinking about dancing with my friends:

you spend the first five years trying to get with the plan
and the next five years
trying to be with your friends again

After one of our numerous breakups, I remember saying to my ex, “You wasted my good years.” He was almost six years younger than me. He had plenty of time. But when I said, “You wasted my good years,” I really meant, “I wasted my good years.” I knew the third go wouldn’t work, and I knew I was only staying with him because I was afraid of starting over.
The song was playing over and over but those were the only lines I heard. I came apart. I started crying, but I didn’t remove my arm from my eyes. I let my tears soak into my sweatshirt and stayed in the darkness, tapping my toes with the downbeat of the kick.
To tell the truth, I wasn’t where I wanted to be. I was never one of those people whose ultimate goal was to be married with kids, but I didn’t like the worry that everyone else had their shit together. Maybe it was the approaching holidays, but I was already dreading hearing friends and family comment about how they wish they had time to go to concerts and have fun like they did before having kids.

oh if the trip and the plan come apart in your hands
you can turn it on yourself you ridiculous clown

Murphy’s words bounced off the silver of the studio and rang in my ears. When my years-long abusive relationship ended, my friends were very supportive, and I took it as an opportunity to purge myself of the trauma. For weeks, I’d tell anyone willing to listen. I thought telling people would make me feel better. In some ways, releasing it from my body did. Soon, I grew tired of being treated like a wound, and instead of crying about it, I morphed it into a punchline. In a culture obsessed with trauma porn, joking about how I was Maury Povich’s dream guest was a lot easier than confronting shame. Eventually, when I started writing again, I vowed never to let another person consume my thoughts and creative energy again.
I swear, after the sixth or so time hearing Murphy belt, “where are your friends tonite?” I heard his voice crack and the silver walls crumble into a ball of aluminum. I was the leaves and twigs left in the street after the street sweeping machine came through. My friends tossed the dead and broken bits in the air and somehow I was alive again. If I could see all my friends tonight, I would thank them. If I could see all my friends tonight, I could get out of my head. If I could see all my friends tonight, I would remember that this song is meant for moving.

*

I still like listening to “All My Friends” with friends and on my own. I still listen on my old Bose headphones. I still slide around in socks. When I play it now, I think about that time in my apartment and realize I’m in the in-between once again, looping like the galloping piano, fighting to get in sync.
I started trying to have a baby when I was too old. Someone told me they were surprised I didn’t get pregnant like all the other millennials who did during the pandemic. But I wasn’t ready. We hadn’t even gone on our honeymoon and I’d just graduated from my MFA program. I was supposed to be jumping into being a writer, not a mother. By the time I decided that I’d rather have tried than not tried and always wonder, the miscarriage rate was over twenty percent. After over a year of trying and two miscarriages, my OB/GYN recommended IVF, which I learned would have been easier at 40 instead of 41. One year later, the time I had blocked off to work on my book was filled with appointments and shots and trying to keep my head straight with the hormones. Then the waiting and disappointment and confusion about what steps to follow, what any of the jargon and numbers mean, and how we’re going to pay for everything.
I’m afraid that this will be yet another thing started late that never comes to fruition. I’m afraid I’ll never finish the books I’m working on. James Murphy may have been a late bloomer, but what do you call a late bloomer who has never bloomed? I’m still emerging. I’m constantly in a state of becoming. I realize that instead of growing up, I’m growing old. It’s not that I want to go back. I just don’t want to be behind. I just want to move in time. If I could see all my friends tonight, I could get out of my head.
This is what I think about when I’m lonely and anxiety plays puppet master. This is what I think about when I feel the frantic hits of Pat Mahoney’s hi-hats and what I feel like when Nancy Whang’s fingers are going to fall off from playing the same keys for what seems like an eternity. I’m not looking for sympathy here. I’m saying this because “All My Friends” makes me nostalgic for dance parties in my younger years and gets me to reflect on my current fears. It’s a song that ages with you.
I think each of us is like the one-chord progression. Advancing at a steady, slightly wavering rhythm. What makes our lives more interesting is who we choose to accompany us. I text my friends and ask them to share thoughts and memories of “All My Friends” and dance parties. One friend says, “LCD is dance music for grownups.” Another sends a video of us dancing on New Year's Eve last year. Right at the crescendo a friend slides on her knees through our dancing circle and across the floor in her silver sequined pants. I laugh watching it and even harder as I read the comments that follow.

* 

to tell you the truth—this could be the last time

“I really wanted to end it while I was making Sound of Silver,” Murphy tells Chuck Klosterman in Shut Up and Play the Hits, the documentary of LCD’s farewell show at Madison Square Garden in 2011. He says he hinted at it in the lyrics to “All My Friends.” Touring and appeasing the record label had taken a toll on his physical and mental health. After kids, after making movies and coffee and the world’s greatest sound system, after David Bowie told Murphy to do what made him uncomfortable when Murphy told him he was making music again, after almost five years, LCD reunited.
I’ve been to three LCD Soundsystem shows since they came “Back from the Dead” as they said on their concert poster, and each time they ended the night with “All My Friends.” The focus on the rotating giant disco ball replaced with red moody lights shining on the band, my friends and I, several of the thousands of fans, arms in the air belting the lyrics with LCD like it’s the last time, the memory of our betters keeping us on our feet. 
When my dad’s friend was dying, he took every opportunity he could get to tell his friends he loved them. “I love you,” he’d say while golfing. “I love you,” he’d say after dinner. So if I don’t say this enough, I love you, friends. All of you. Friends from home, friends from college, friends here, writer friends, I feel lucky to be your friend.

[*] Lyrics appear as they do on the record sleeve.

Kate Carmody, pie limbo innovator, lives in Denver, Colorado with her husband and dog. The three of them are in the band Dadafacer. Find her work in Fence, Electric Literature, Porter House Review, and The Rumpus, among others. She encourages you to support local music. Here’s a start: Don Chicharrón, Eric Vs The Demons in Denim, Body, Language Barrier, Bellhoss, Self Help, Tyler Breuer, Jackie Zubrzycki, Alright Alright, Faceman, Los Mocochetes, The Xisme, Austen Carroll & the Better Neighbors, Townie, Bolonium, Bud Bronson & The Goodtimers, High Plains Honky, Many Places, Zealot, Conductora, Bluebook, Funk Hunk, Ritmo Cascabel, Nikbo, and Uniflora.