Words By Dimitri Kalagas // Illustration by EAMO
Since the huge success of LCD Soundsystem’s self titled debut in 2005, James Murphy has been leading a hectic lifestyle, working on building his own musical empire as co-founder of the seminal DFA records, and aiding peoples fitness with his Nike collaboration titled 45:33. A hugely important figure in the massive rise of punk funk, Murphy has been credited as being the genres very own super-producer. With so many years in the music industry and an endless number of accolades behind him, you’d be forgiven for thinking the man behind the movement might want to take some time out to reflect on his incredibly prodigious career. But as we found out when we caught up with him on the eve of the release of his latest offering Sound Of Silver, far from slowing down, Murphy has a whole new set of ambitions, including turning the music industry on it’s head by getting Sound Of Silver to number one in the charts, essentially heralding a new era in the world of pop music.
DK: How did you get into music originally?
JM: I actually don’t even know, I was always interested in music since I was a little kid. I had an older brother who had a lot of classic rock records. It was the early seventies when I was a kid, so I think it was kind of normal, everyone was into music.
DK: What sort of music did you grow up with?
JM: I listened to classical rock, and FM radio rock until I hit nine or ten, then I started listening to new music that wasn’t my brother’s, it was more for me, like B52’s and eventually Violent Femmes and stuff.
DK: A lot of the acts that are creating some of the best dance music right now seem to have come from a serious punk background, what prompted you to make the transition?
JM: I don’t know, I think I just took a bunch of ecstasy and started dancing to punk rock and rock. Then I read a book about disco and started to get into that.
DK: So how and why did you start DFA records?
JM: I met Tim Goldsworthy doing the David Holmes record in ’99, and we were very different people, we really didn’t think we’d get along. He was this English guy from Mo Wax, into all this trip hop stuff, and had all this press and coolness, and I was a big grumpy American punk rocker. Then we started talking about music and we both had a lot of the same feelings. We realised that we both had a similar younger development, both of us had siblings into classic rock etc etc. We started talking about how there were a lot of talentless jerks around the world who were really successful, and there were a lot of people who loved music who were grumpy, but didn’t really do anything, just complained. Including us. So we asked ourselves, do we really want to be those people? How many times had we thought about some music and then not done anything about it, and then a year later some jerk makes a record that sounds like it and we’re all ‘man, what the fuck! We were listening to that before this guy.’ It just seemed like a really empty way to live, so we figured we’d throw our hats in and go fight the good fight rather than talk about it. That led to discussions about New York. Tim came to New York from London and was like ‘Fucking New York! Excellent! It’s going to awesome, it’s the home of hip hop, disco and punk rock’, and then he gets here and it’s really boring. I was the same way, so we thought ‘well why don’t we make the city into the New York we dreamed about, instead of accepting the shitty New York’, we thought we could just go and make the party we wanted. The great thing about New York is that if you actually do something, the city will dance and respond really heavily. There’s an endless amount of opportunity and potential that I think you’d have a difficult time finding in other places. Warhol is a perfect example. He went for it and everybody responded, from crazy kids to rich art collectors to journalists. So we made DFA. We had a very clear vision about it. We made it exactly like we wanted, and New York started dancing.
DK: So do you think it was pretty timely on your part that you introduced a sound that maybe people were ready for?
JM: Oh hell yeah. Our reasoning was, ‘you’re from London, and you were in Unkle and you like all this type of stuff, and I’m from New York, and I was in punk bands, and I also like this sort of stuff.’ Clearly there were people that were going to respond to this. There was obviously something in the water, I mean there were two of us from completely different sides of the globe from totally different musical worlds, and we were both suddenly feeling the same stuff. So we thought if we just went with our gut, then it’ll communicate to a bunch of people, and it just worked.
DK: You seem to be very aware of pop culture and your place within it, and you wrote a song about losing your edge. Do you actually feel like you’re losing your edge even though you have achieved so much in the last few years?
JM: No, I mean I feel like I should be, but quite frankly bands suck. So it’s not that hard to kind of keep ahead of people when they’re totally content with just being mediocre. (laughs) That sounds totally bitter, but people are just staggeringly content with not competing. They’re really happy to be like, ‘Oh you’re music’s really crazy. I’m just going to do my thing. I don’t understand it at all.’ I feel like every record is a challenge, but in a healthy, good way. The Arcade Fire record is a good record, so I see it as a challenge, I gotta go fight. I’ve also gotta go fight Antony of Antony and the Johnsons, Any good record gets me all excited, and I want to get back in the ring. But there’s just not that much to fight against.
DK: After all these years in the music game, do you feel cynical about a lot of new music and the industry that surrounds it?
JM: Yeah, I have an enormous amount of cynicism for the music industry, but I had that going in you know. I’m not getting beaten down, I’m just getting old. It’s a little different.
DK: Well having said that, you’ve been posting on the DFA boards for some time that you aim to make Sound Of Silver number one in the charts by making the total sales from the last album on the first day of release of this one. Apart from the obvious, why would you want to be number one on the charts?
JM: Ha, I’ve gotta keep things interesting for myself! I mean in some ways you’ve gotta wonder, whats the point of being in a band, it’s kind of stupid, and it’s certainly not dignified in a lot of ways. But I’m curious about the popular culture aspect, and I’m still engaged in this relatively optimistic, childish punk rock notion putting interesting things into the cycle of popular culture. Take Laurie Anderson for instance, she was this totally crazy person, and she was on the Muppet Show. So you’re this little kid playing baseball when you’re like eleven, surrounded by AC/DC and classic rock, you know what a boy is and you know what a girl is, then you come home and start watching the Muppets in your pyjamas, and there’s fucking Laurie Anderson, a weird, kind of pretty, kind of mannish woman in men’s clothes playing with Kermit. That’s a fucking life changer for one in a hundred kids. It’s like a weird lightbulb might go off and some kids will start asking, ‘What’s a boy? What’s a girl?’ This is a weird person, but there she is on the Muppets. I’m really interested in that pop culture debate that seems to have floated away a bit, where these genuinely strange people have these moments, just because they’re so engaging and unusual that the audience responds to them. Pop music in general has drifted away from that. They pat themselves on the back for Björk being a success, but that’s about it. They’re very happy to just say, ‘Björk’s a crazy person, that’s why she’s like that, she’s crazy’, as opposed to saying ‘Well this is interesting music, and interesting music is supposed to be popular and relevant. It’s not all about verse, chorus, verse, chorus and haircuts.
DK: So do you think that pop music is something that has decayed over time?
JM: Yeah, part of it is that it’s harder to be original as time goes on, because so many things have already been done, and so many reactions to those things have already happened. It’s much easier to be Brian Eno making Music For Airports and have it be new, rather than somebody else making some droney music at this point in time and calling it new. There’s a whole section in the record store full of droney records. You can go and by ambient records at the ambient record store, it’s a different world. Also it gets more boring, because as things become globalised and less regional, people start aiming to please the lowest common denominator. Bands then become less competitive with one another, and less engaged in what it means to be in a band, and the energy that is relevant becomes less attached to the energy that is young. In 1967 relevant energy was young energy period. You could be sixteen years old and be into The Who, and be dead on with culturally relevant things, whereas now that energy has moved on a bit from that age group. Sixteen year olds have so much to distract them now that they didn’t have then, and marketing is so much more savvy that the natural reaction of a sixteen year old is more codified, and less shocking and unusual and new. They have whole marketing brands and marketing professionals that design radical rebellion T-shirts for them. It’s like trying to paint after abstract expressionism, it’s bit difficult when someone’s like, ‘Check me out, I’m cubist.’ And you’re like ‘Dude, people have been getting wasted, punching themselves in the face and throwing paint at canvasses for the last five years, nobody gives a shit about your cubism.’ But rock is still selling the notion of the abstract expressionist artist. The notion of a guy who is deep and dark, and FEELING it, and you’re supposed to appreciate that they’re still selling the same bullshit. Whereas in the art world you had Warhol, and then nobody could do that anymore, because it looks silly. With rock we had punk, post punk and Roxy Music, and people went, ‘Right, well that’s cool but I’m just going to wander back into FEELING it.’ In some boring rock pose just cause it still works.
DK: Well I think I’ve gotta wrap it up, thanks for the chat, sorry we couldn’t talk more about the album.
JM: Ha, it goes on forever, it’ll never stop, I’ll just say the same bullshit and go blah blah blah, fun means this, blah blah blah! Just make it up, I’ll cop to whatever you say. You can always check out the forum, I usually discuss all that shit there anyway.
LCD Soundsystem’s new album, Sound of Silver is out now through Inertia, and because I got lazy and didn’t check out the forum, you guys can do that yourselves at www.lcdsoundsystem.com.
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