LCD Soundsystem — The Finale

James Murphy accepted his fate while sitting in a van outside a club, in a city he can’t remember, on a tour taking him nowhere. He was 26 and traveling as the sound man with a couple of punk acts, Six Finger Satellite and Thee Hydrogen Terrors. But on this particular night in 1996, Murphy was talking with Six Finger’s frontman when he came to a conclusion that most of us reach early and a sad few reach too late: I will never be a singer in a rock ’n’ roll band.

So when the tour was over, Murphy — having rid himself of any lingering frontman aspirations — went back home to New York City and threw himself into producing and engineering, including a record by the gleefully abrasive art band Les Savy Fav. He bonded with the drummer, Pat Mahoney, and with Murphy on bass, the two goofed around in their spare time, playing music designed for dancing rather than thrashing. Despite not venturing out of the Knights of Columbus Hall in Williamsburg where they practiced, Murphy and Mahoney cared enough about this lark to give it a name: LCD Soundsystem.

Around this same time, 1998, Murphy met an opinionated Londoner named Tim Goldsworthy, also a producer, who’d recently arrived in New York expecting to live his own 1981 downtown freakout — to step inside a Keith Haring mural; to see break dancers on every corner. Instead he went to clubs and found a gray mass of bored and boring kids dancing to faceless, feckless music. So Murphy and Goldsworthy decided they had to do something good. They’d host good parties, invite good people, play good music — spinning artistically impeccable bands like ESG and the Fall and Can — and guarantee themselves a good time. (For Murphy, this also involved gobbling heroic amounts of Ecstasy.) So they began hosting sweatily transcendent parties in their West Village office, featuring live sound precisely calibrated for maximum sonic whomp, with Murphy and Goldsworthy as D.J.’s.

Right around 2001, though, Murphy was looking for a track he couldn’t find. He wanted a sprawling disco drum concoction to help him bridge key moments in his D.J. set. By this point, they’d also started a record label—dubbed DFA, or Death From Above — so Murphy decided to put out his own 12-inch. Mahoney would play drums.

For the B-side, Murphy cooked up eight minutes of punk-funk weirdness he called “Losing My Edge.” The track consisted basically of Murphy tapping out a skittering rhythm on the cymbals while yelling a fading hipster’s anxieties into a microphone. The song was credited to LCD Soundsystem. In hindsight, it seemed slightly embarrassing to Murphy — he worried he was revealing too much of himself — but a couple of his friends really liked it, so he thought, What the hell, and released it as an A-side. After all, he wasn’t a singer in rock ’n’ roll band. What did he care?