“I find it sort of hilarious that everyone is all creaming their pants about The National now, when you’re probably the same people who left their show back when you thought Alec Ounsworth was going to save music. Just remember that!”
The Doree Chronicles: Fairweather Friends
This is such a good point! You know, people have always worried that ‘we’ lack a proper understanding of history. Aristotle, the lay inventor of teleology, would have us know a thing’s cause above all else. Cicero, Tacitus, Lucretius, et alia would have us learn that all are connected—what’s come before and what is now and what will in the future come. Machiavelli, Goethe, Kant: They all pimp history. And Hegel—later Husserl/Heidegger—really brought the notion of history into its most finely elaborated enunciation.
The Owl of Minerva flies at dusk and all.
So I’m finding it harder and harder to understand what I take to be the popular resistance to—and sometimes outright scorn for—history. From Beinart’s piece in the New York Review of Books on the perhaps future effacement of American Zionism to Joanna Newsom’s not-at-all controversial remarks that Gaga is not exactly the dawning of a new era in progressive pop music, it seems like there’s a damned cultural amnesia setting in like a bad plot twist on a (now cancelled—*ahem* history) Law & Order episode. Guys—history’s important! How else are you going to know whether you’re getting ripped off on that gallon of gas/eight ball of coke/slice of pizza/presidential election/amendment to the state constitution/new LCD Soundsystem album???
Since I wasn’t in New York for DFAmania, I had never really considered LCD Soundsystem to be a particularly great band. It wasn’t until Stylus Magazine’s final issue that I even took to contemplate whether James Murphy was some sort of genius pop agent provocateur. I’m (still) working on a review of This Is Happening, and I honestly cannot tell if I really love the album or kind of dislike it. I mean, it’s really shaggy! I understand the first record was a double album (really?), but it is ten minutes longer than Sound Of Silver. It’s more than an hour. I’m not fully acquainted with the nexus of reference Murphy works in. I mean, duh, I’ve heard all the bands he mentions in “Losing My Edge,” but I’m having a hard time discerning the genealogy of, say, “One Touch.” To be honest, it sounds like a (somehow!) worse version of “Sound Of Silver.” That song wasn’t very good! But I can tell he’s trying to sound like something. This music obviously didn’t gestate in a vacuum.
So I’ve been going through and listening to and relistening to all the previous LCDS records. I find that they create a fairly hermetic continuum even though they’re heavily allusive. It’s like—to compare Murphy to someone I’m sure he falls short of, but for aptness—it’s kind of like the V-Gravity’s Rainbow fin de siècle Euro-colonial world-spirit that Pynchon creates so effectively. You can tell there’s metric shit tonnes of history/allusion/reference on the page, but Pynchon’s also able to create an entirely persuasive attitude of paranoia and crapulent grandness. Murphy does that, but differently. You know?
