2005: LCD Soundsystem, LCD Soundsystem

By Shelley Gaske

Most of us know Katsushika Hokusai’s wood-block print, The Great Wave off Kanagwa, for its larger than life seascape, banishing a pint-sized Mt. Fuji to the background. Lesser known in The Great Wave are the three boats tucked between the swells, like record needles nestled into the grooves of an LP. There’s a sense of atmospheric doom, and upon seeing those ships have passengers, also questions. Who would go out in that? And why do they all look like they are hunched over working a TR-808 or futzing with a tambourine? I mean, I feel for them, I really do, but do you hear that? Seriously, does anyone know if those boaters have a mixtape or a MySpace?

The Great Wave off Kanagwa by Katsushika Hokusai (1831)

The party vibe is most painlessly accessible by youth. Early adulthood is exactly when one would sail straight into an epic storm. Because that’s when we want epic. That’s when we believe we can survive. 

In my late-early 20s I had a “cool” job. But I was learning the cruel reality: it was awful. I woke up at 3:30 a.m. I was told I didn’t need a raise (because I wasn’t a mother). I navigated daily sexual harrassment. I was edged out of promotions. When the older guy landed the gig, he immediately grumbled that he’d need my help “setting up a damn email account.”

I bought LCD Soundsystem’ self-titled debut in 2005 because “Daft Punk is Playing at My House” was blasting in the CD store. I didn’t know LCD Soundsystem, but I knew Daft Punk, and any fan of theirs was a friend of mine. After clawing off the wrapping, hearing the opening “ow, ow!” I lost contact with the seat, buoyed by the water rushing in around me. I didn’t know it, but I’d just landed in the boat.

The album was lush with minimalism. My personal soundtrack to that point had straddled rock and electronic. Between the altars of post-grunge angst and sexy club anthems, I worshiped equally – but never at the same time.

When the clap of “On Repeat” started, I panicked, feeling like I didn’t know which parent’s house I was in. Without full car-alarm wails or Billy Corgan’s manic-pixie lullabies, I squarely fell into new territory. A vast expanse just for me.

Reviews of LCD Soundsystem called the album disjointed, a bit unfocused. Yet the astigmatism was the same prescription as my own. I’d fought to get the career I’d said I wanted. So why was I empty? My depression was under control (or gaining speed, you choose) and I was ready to party. Party with like minded hustlers, against the man, and for the sake of living my own life.

I understood the violent shifts in pace on the album. The tingly venom of “Tribulations” to the punk pillaging of “Movement” to the whiplash crash of “Never as Tired as When I’m Waking Up” are an accurate portrait of the writer staying out until last call, sleeping in her car for 60 minutes in the work parking lot, and then regretting everything before clocking on.

And because I was younger, I could pull it off. Make no mistake, LCD Soundsystem is an album of youth. It is the shots across the bow we all fire at adulthood. Could I really go to the club on a Thursday and pull off work Friday? If I was old enough to look down on the “kids,” why did I still feel exploited by the “adults?” If this was my time, I decided to take it. Storm be damned.

In our 20s, are we looting or liberating, waving or drowning, choosing or chosen? Time is the ultimate photo filter, and a life without mistakes is over-blanched sepia. Weeks after the album’s release, a website called YouTube went live; purportedly to bring Janet Jackson’s Superbowl Halftime Show wardrobe malfunction to the masses. It too attempted to punch above its weight and found success by redrawing the boundaries and retreating to stay within them. Today it’s settled into a monolith that puts shareholders above risk. Maybe that’s why it doesn’t feel as fertile as it once did. Does anyone over there look back and wonder if the window to do something great has closed?

This idea of impossible timing, of not yet, not yet, too late, would be something Murphy considered before and after LCD Soundsystem. 2002’s “Losing My Edge” was a 7 minute and 53 second pontification on seeing the new guard arrive on the scene while realizing he’d somehow become the old guard. In Sounds of Silver’s “All My Friends,” he finds relief in passing the torch: “When you’re drunk and the kids leave impossible tasks, you think over and over, ‘hey I’m finally dead.’” With each album, Murphy circles back to this idea that he’s missed the golden moment, because that last moment was actually it, even if that moment was spent lamenting the loss of previous moments.

Even when he looked back, Murphy was writing about stumbling forward. During my love affair with LCD Soundsystem, I learned that if I really had missed my shot, no one would care if I took another one. There’s a win-win in mortal doom. If I tried and somehow succeeded in surviving the storm, amazing. And if I failed, it felt good to be right.

This disregard for the judgment of others also worked within the music scene, where who you saw when and where is the king currency. It encourages the, what have you seen lately, inquisition with the implication being you’re only as cool as the last underground phenomenon you witnessed. Those clinging to their fading street credentials turn the grandiosity goes up to 11. If the whippersnappers are going to dismiss whatever you say, you can say some wild shit that you wish were true. Again, there’s the freedom in doing what you want if you’ve already been condemned. Maybe I was there when Daft Punk descended the bus; you weren’t even born yet.

Sometimes the passable lies can be used for an inclusive good. “I heard that everyone you know is more relevant than everyone I know,” Murphy offers, with only a heap of irony. He knows it will work. Flattery gets you everywhere, it might as well keep you relevant.

We’ve been told, shown, and threatened that the world will devour us. Gobble us whole if we aren’t careening towards cynicism. But we too can do the feasting. We can turn our hunger inward, tricking ourselves to think our Machiavellian victories don’t count as metaphorical suicides. Like a Golden Retriever alone with a holiday turkey, we don’t know how far is too far until we fall asleep in our own barf. 

Seventeen years later, I put the album on for three specific reasons: when I need to be reckless; when I need to be brave; and when I need to feel safe to make mistakes. When Murphy circles back to this idea of timing, I think he’s using it as a good luck charm. He touches it before once more venturing into the unknown.

On LCD Soundsystem, we hear a fledgling band trying to find that magical line between too much and not enough. We’re locked in a lifelong struggle to find the line. At some frustrating point, we realize the line moves; person to person and second to second. What we thought was the harbor becomes the storm, and we go ass over teakettle into the depths. Playing it safe won’t keep us safe. We learn to push in the directions that call to us, knowing things will shift and break along the way. That we will shift and break along the way. And these messy experiments, these unbalanced excursions end up being our lives.

At the end of the album, the party ends. The undertow swallows those little boats as the ethereal swell of “Great Release” kicks in. We have to choose who we are versus who we tell ourselves we want to be. We can stay under the water, grasping some adult freedoms and rejecting others, only to find our lungs failing to translate water into air. Or we can rush, with large amounts of panic and fear, to the surface willing to swim away from what we thought we wanted, and face the breathable future.

I was there, in that storm. And I saw you there too.

 Shelley Gaske lives and writes in Oregon. She is a Writing by Writers 2022 fellow and was awarded a residency at Dar Meso, in Tunis in 2021. She is currently working on her first book, a memoir about her treatment-resistant depression.