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Time To Get Away: LCD Soundsystem Bid Farewell Tonight

Ben Yakas

Published Apr 2, 2011

Modified Apr 2, 2011

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Ben Yakas

Published Apr 2, 2011

Modified Apr 2, 2011

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After a decade of Daft Punk references, white suits and Muppet videos, James Murphy announced the dissolution of LCD Soundsystem a little over a month ago. And now, with ticket scalping drama and four celebratory, three-hour-long shows at Terminal 5 past, their alleged final show ever as a band will take place tonight at MSG. But even if you didn't get tickets, you can watch an exclusive stream of the whole show at Pitchfork starting at 9 p.m. In the meantime, you can check out the collective mourning process going on across the internet.

Pitchfork has an excellent, definitive look back at the complete LCD Soundsystem oeuvre, which comes to a tidy 46 studio tracks, spread over three official albums, one instrumental album, and various singles. It's especially appropriate considering that LCD Soundsystem were arguably the Pitchfork band of the decade; after all, they ranked Sound of Silver #17 in the 2000s albums of the decade list, and named This Is Happening the second best album of 2010.

Esquire has an oral history of the band, told through interviews with six of his bandmates, peers and friends. The Times ventures further back, tracing Murphy's career from his time as soundman for several small time punk bands, turning down sitcom jobs on Seinfeld (really!), to the release of his fluke hit single "Losing My Edge."

Even if you loved LCD Soundsystem's reference-laden music and sweaty live shows, you might still be confused as to why Murphy has generated as much orgiastic adoration from music critics, a typically hard-to-please crowd, as he has. The AV Club has a sweetly genuine open letter to Murphy which does an excellent job of summing up just why Murphy has been honey to rock music lovers of any ilk:

Like a lot of music critics, I feel a special kinship with you, because we are you. Or, rather, you are a better, smarter version of us. The relationship music critics have with you is similar to what film critics have with Quentin Tarantino, who, like you, started out as a know-it-all fan who, unlike most critics, took all the trivial, microscopic specificities he absorbed from every corner of his fan experience and found a way to create something new with it. But even if you guys are big-shot artists now, you’re also still critics at heart; you did it like Godard, critiquing art by making better art. Any time you’d take pains to find just the right detail to make a track really snap—a crisp snare, a squiggly synth, a warmly bouncing bassline—you were both nodding to the records you felt did it correctly, while also making an argument against the relatively chilly, slapdash way music is made in the point-and-click ProTools era. They say writing about music is like dancing about architecture, but your records actually were architecture, built from the spare parts of closely observed sounds you deconstructed and recontextualized from countless songs in your impeccably curated collection.

But LCD Soundsystem isn't just a band for music critics and krautrock jam aficionados. Beating at the heart of every one of their songs was NYC, from the smells and garbage of the Bowery to the post-punk sounds seeping out of shitty bars. This relationship is best summed up by the closest thing they have to a torch song, the brilliant "New York I Love You, But You're Bringing Me Down." At the time, Murphy wanted to write a love song for Sound Of Silver, but he hated love songs, so instead he wrote this ode to the city. He expanded upon the importance of the city to his music to the Voice:

I think it's a really diverse, weird country filled with lots of weird people, but New York's the place where weird people have some actual power. And that's why I love it. It's the place where you can piss and moan, but you're never going to hear 'love it or leave it' here because being patriotic doesn't mean being retarded. It's just an irrelevance. I love New York. I super love New York. It is expensive and it is retarded and filled with assholes, and so's everywhere else. I just wouldn't live anyplace else. I don't see the need to make New York seem like it doesn't have things which make me want to shoot myself in the fucking face as a way of explaining that I love it. I don't see the point. I love it. It's my home.

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Music

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Ben Yakas

Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.

Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations

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