Music That Moves Through You
On LCD Soundsytem's James Murphy, making art to connect with people, and some reading and Auckland event recommendations
In Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern’s music documentary Meet Me in the Bathroom about New York’s 2000s indie music scene, based on Lizzy Goodman’s book of the same name, LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy stood at the periphery. While The Strokes, The Moldy Peaches, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Interpol mingled in Brooklyn, Murphy, then a producer, slept in his studio and obsessively worked on other bands’ music. He ripped apart their tracks with Frankenstinian fervor to turn their work into his own. He made their music better but made very few friends in the process.
“I can get really anxious if I feel like I’m compromising on music. I feel a compulsion to make the music exactly the way I think it should be,” Murphy said. His sadistic production style caused irreparable friction with his client, The Rapture, when he remade their post-punk single “House of Jealous Lovers” into a genre-defining dance track and almost broke them in the process. “[James] was really pushing me. I was in a lot of pain... everyone around him was telling him ‘You’re domineering and you need to make your own fucking record,’” Rapture frontman Luke Jenner said. Tim Goldsworthy, who founded DFA Records with Murphy, agreed with Jenner. “There was a part of James that wanted to be in the band, that wanted it to be his band. He didn’t have his own outlet,” Goldsworthy said.
Murphy’s tyrannical perfectionism eventually caused The Rapture to leave DFA Records and sent Murphy into a spiral. “We were Rapture Records. That’s what DFA was. But they left,” he told Goodman. Their departure forced him to reflect on his personal and professional behaviour. “I was never good at friends... I wanted connection and friends. But I’d always end up in fights. There was just something wrong with me that wasn’t wrong with other people. So I made music fuckin’ alone,” Murphy said. Shortly after The Rapture’s departure, Murphy went to a bar and heard someone playing his DJ set that they’d ripped from Limewire. He realised the Internet was robbing him of his “edge,” or his curatorial instinct, went up to his studio, and exploded.
In his studio, Murphy recorded LCD Soundsystem’s debut hit, “Losing My Edge,” a surreal electronic dance track about getting usurped by the next generation. “I’d really wasted 30 years of my life. And I locked the studio. Sang this song about losing my edge,” Murphy told Goodman. A new sound came from him as he did. His obsessive work mastering and remixing others’ music had turned him into a kind of palimpsest upon which a new sonic language had formed. “It was the first time I made music where I wasn’t trying to be another thing that I thought I was supposed to be,” Murphy said. By shucking his self-consciousness which prevented him from dancing and connecting with others, he was able to step out of his own way and transmute his experience of isolation into sound. The result was a genre-changing masterpiece that launched LCD Soundsystem to stardom.
I thought a lot about Murphy after Meet Me in the Bathroom because I think his experience captures something fundamental about the art-making process. The artists I gravitate to and I are trying to communicate something through our respective mediums—the essay, the ballad, the play, the poem, or the painting—that we can’t otherwise communicate through casual conversation. I think we feel something which isolates us and our art is a way of asking others “I see the world this way, do you see it this way too?” In my case, I’m trying to communicate my skepticism when someone tells me a movie “healed their trauma,” my discomfort when people lazily judge middle-aged white women on their identity rather than their behaviour, and my Sysphean exhaustion when I deal with reporters who extinguish their critical discernment to tell me their right-wing political operative friends are good people just because they’re nice to them. In these situations, I often can’t question these people’s ideas without criticising their identity. When I do that, their defensive reaction invariably grinds the conversation to a halt. So I articulate those otherwise inarticulate feelings in essays and hope the people who read them will understand me. I plan on publishing more in the next few months and I hope you follow along.
Housekeeping
I made a website, which I hope you’ll check out. I’ll post upcoming features and bigger essays to it. I’ll keep using my Substack for missives like this and for both reading and event recommendations, which I’ll make in the sections below.
In the past few months, I wrote an essay about how New Zealand media remains in wilful denial of racism’s resurgent political power for the New Zealand socialist website 1 of 200. I’ll be appearing on their podcast this week to talk about the rise of New Zealand’s ACT Party amidst far-right movements internationally and what we can do to slow it. I also wrote another essay about The Bear’s Potemkin kitchens for my friend Fran’s Fran Magazine. Today, I wrote about twenty songs I like and why in response to a Twitter prompt.
Reading Recommendations
A few years ago, I used to select magazine stories for a website called Longform.org that got a few million unique visitors a year. I’d read between 5-20 magazine stories a week to select four for the website. Over time, I developed an instinct for distinguishing between technically masterful but emotionally lifeless writing and wring which had what writer Emily Gould called “a quality of aliveness... that’s the opposite of trying to get an A+” in journalism. I still read a lot and post my recommendations to Twitter but I’ve decided to start collecting them properly here. I hope to do this around twice a month, but we’ll see how it goes.
New York Review of Books online editor Lucy Jakub wrote the best and most comprehensive essay I’ve ever read on the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. She covers his personal history, his politics, his family life, and does a close read of his films to explain how he went from being a youthful leftist to one of the hardest taskmasters in animation. She also describes how that tension was central to him becoming one of the greatest animators in history and how his wishful fantasies related to Studio Ghibli’s labor realities. If you can’t afford an NYRB subscription, you can read it for free here.
My friend Roro wrote an essay on “The Fag-Hag Dialectic,” an homage to the love between women and gay men and it’s far and away the best writing I’ve ever read on the subject. Roro’s a friend, but I mean it when I say they’re the most promising writer I’ve encountered in years. Their work’s intellectual vibrancy and joie de vivre reminds of Patricia Lockwood’s, and I hope their success heralds a shift in contemporary writing’s tone away from abnegation and back to Dorothy Parker-esque cleverness, wryness, and unselfconscious delight.
Lucie Elven’s two London Review of Books essays on María Gainza’s “Portrait of an Unknown Lady” and the Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña were spectacular. I stumbled onto Elven’s work through a Twitter recommendation and I immediately felt like I was in the presence of an immense mind at work. Her connections are associative rather than explicitly literal and she moves through her ideas the way one would the rooms of a house. She’s also, on a technical level, a very, very good writer. Her line “Gainza’s idea is that absorption is only one kind of attention: becoming distracted in the course of looking at something might be a sign of meaningful engagement. It’s when María’s mind wanders in front of a painting – or back to a painting – that we learn something interesting about her character,” made me rethink how I move through galleries. If you like her work, as I do, I strongly recommend reading through the rest of her LRB archive.
Auckland Recommendations
I go to a lot of events in Auckland and I’m always evangelising the ones I like to my friends. I decided it’d be easier to put them here instead so I’m not saying the same thing to ten different people.
The Capitol Cinema Film Club: New Zealand writer-directors and cinephiles Tom Augustine and Amanda Jane Robinson run a monthly film club on Wednesdays from The Capitol Cinema in Mt. Eden. Tom and Amanda are far and away the sharpest cinephiles I’ve met in New Zealand, and they often screen movies I’ve never heard of but which invariably change the way I see the world. Recent examples include Michelangelo Antonioni’s “L’Eclisse,” about two 1960s Roman lovers trying to connect in a town where death barely stops the stock market for a second, Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil,” a Monty Python alum’s dystopian science-fiction flick that taught me the best way to communicate totalitarianism’s spine-chilling horror is to smuggle it between comedic bits so audiences don’t shut down in response to didactic hectoring, and Luis Buñel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” a surrealist masterpiece about a group of rich people who’re endlessly trying to eat but are never satiated.
The Capitol Cinema Film Club meets once a month on Wednesdays and its next showing, William Friedkin’s “French Connection,” is tomorrow on Wednesday, August 30 at 7pm. Tickets to every film are $10 and the theatre’s across the road from Barilla Dumpling, New Flavour, and Kung Fu Noodles, so it's an easy spot to grab a cheap and delicious dinner beforehand. I can’t recommend The Capitol Cinema Film Club enough. I haven’t missed a showing in two years and I don’t plan on doing so as long as I’m in Auckland.
so nice to see your name in my inbox. i’ve been meaning to read meet me in the bathroom...