Purchase LCD Soundsystem's "Someone Great" from the 2007 full-length Sound of Silver
In life--in our understanding of truths, or our philosophizing a way to a discovery--simple doesn't necessarily mean simple--the most profound truths are the most relatable and easiest to understand. The same goes for songs: sometimes the simplest melody can be the most addictive. “Three chords and the truth” ( I think Bono said that, though the phrase itself has a long history—perhaps in another post?). Think of some of the great rock songs: the power is in the simple structure, repeated over and over again ("Wild Thing", "Baba O'Riley", "Bad Moon Rising"). Things need not be overly complex to be enjoyable. The groove gets cut into your mind, and the song has a nurturing sense. There’s a science to why pop music is so addictive, and so pleasing to listen to--it feeds into pleasure sensors in the mind, which produce the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine is the same chemical reaction one gets from good food, alcohol, illicit drugs--it creates a physical pleasure, and in the car of music, joyfulness. Music is a language that speaks on multiple levels, and while music can be complex, there is no denying that a simple melody, or a fun, jumpy pop song, is addictive. And the understanding of what a guilty pleasure is comes in to play--it's usually the silly, cheesy--simple--songs that get the most play, get stuck in our heads. The songs we keep rewinding when no one else is in the car. I fully admit to having put some serious strain on the speakers to a few Ke$ha songs, and the Black Eye'd Pea's "I Gotta Feeling." Music's power to uplift and raise the spirit is a certainty of our human nature, as real as breathing, engrained right into our DNA.
LCD Soundsystem, James Murphy's now cult-status musical collective, is an endlessly fascinating band with a wildly interesting catalog of music. LCD Soundsystem are a modern, definition-and genre-defying musical experience. Are they rock, are they electronica? Post-punk, art-rock, indie, or dance? Dance rock? The soundscapes are large, looming, immersive. At their best, LCD Soundsystem are hypnotic and the idea of simple as applied to their music comes not from a lack of technicality or multi-layered compositional complexity, but from an aural ethos and creative pattern that exists across their catalog. This is sound, built on a singular foundation, that is allowed to grow, and an LCD Soundsystem song is an organic experience that grows in a way that few songs do.
While not simple at all, the music often stems from the simplicity of construction: Electronic keyboards, sounds and beats mix with traditional instrumentation and tones, organic guitars, spoken mantras delivered prayer-like, noises and pulses, not so much mixed, but stacked upon one another to achieve a great big sound from what was simple to start. How to best describe LCD Soundsystem, as filtered through my own listening experience: One instrument, one beat, repeated over and over, built upon, layered and rising into a complex, multi-faceted composition. LCD Soundsystem's songs are meant to be felt, and the layers of aural texture, while analog and seemingly made of brick and mortar rather than digital and electronic signal, are tangible and blocky, like an old video game blipping and bleeping on a small screen. But, that is to deny the complexity, and the often beautiful and addictive songscapes the band makes. The sound is rudimentary and unvarnished, old school console tech, beamed in from a spaceship from a 1960s sci-fi movie, blinking and pulsing, but still real and perceptible by touch. I know the music is not low-fi; it's probably more high tech than I could conceivably understand. But LCD's sound maintains the beautiful simplicity and masterly complexity of a basement Mozart sending new world symphonies into far outer space via a Radio Shack satellite dish.
Of their extensive catalog--the songs are long, the albums true long players--"Someone Great" from 2007's Sound of Silver, resonates with me. The song is classic LCD--a simple build, that winds itself up into a full blown celebration of sound that lies somewhere within the realm of New Order at their brightest, Joy Division risen from the dead, Kerouac talking though an old time radio, and a trip to someplace stellar and aglow, that requires a open-windowed roaring drive on the open, empty highway, and the kind of freeing abandon that comes from dancing in a sea of flashing neon and star light. The thing that makes LCD's music hard to describe is the evocations of sensation their soundscape creates. There is a reckless, yet tightly crafted abandon in their music, and it can feel like flying. No song has this kind of effect more so than "Someone Great" which is a deceptively sad song and a meditation on the process of grief. The sentiment might get lost in the throbbing grooves and ever-building beat if you’re only dancing to it. But that’s the beauty of LCD Soundsystem—you gotta listen to everything. It’s a demand, and Murphy’s music isn’t made for a mindless twirling listen. The kind of rockers who disdain dance music, or techno, want to get on the dance floor and move, but they can't miss the melancholy elegy of the song. The entirety of Sound of Silver is enigmatic in its refusal to fit into one mode, or to be classified as any one type of music. Like Murphy's poetic imagery and his pulsing rhythms and otherworld melodies, there are layers here which grow expansive with every listen. Rolling Stone said of Sound of Silver, "It was an album as raw and honest in emotion as it was clever and slick in execution, and the results appealed to fans from all over the musical map."* The lyrics of "Someone Great" are the most striking part of this brilliant composition, as they capture a concept familiar yet all together baffling: how the world can keep moving and continue on, even when we are wasted and laid prone by our grief. There is a moment in the song that resonates where the speaker marvels at the weather: it's beautiful outside, shouldn't the weather meet me in my pain? Murphy sings, :The worst is all the lovely weather/ I'm stunned, it's not raining." And indeed the rise and emotional crest of the song itself resembles the strange ride through the ebb and flow of grief--lows and the bright highs that come as we grapple with acceptance and learn to navigate a new landscape. But even in that navigation, there is the endless sense that this sadness will never end. The most powerful moment in the song comes when Murphy repeats, over and over, "And it keeps coming", ending the refrain with a simple answer to his unasked question, "Till the day it stops."
A sad song set to a joyful, upbeat and danceable melody sometimes hits the hardest--but why shouldn't life's worst moments be set to something beautiful? Isn't life meant to be a celebration, most so at the end, as we go home? A mediation on grief that doesn't shy away from the pain it is trying to convey, but still has the nerve to approach it through joyful, prayerful celebratory sound--that's an act of healing in itself.
"Someone Great" strikes me as a particularly important song right now, in the strange, terrifying, awful year we are experiencing. I know that despite the terrible lows that keep coming at us--division, anger, fear, loss, separation and isolation--music has been a constant. A comfort and meaning maker when I have trouble making sense of much of what I hear and see, and worse, what I feel in my interior. And being isolated in the way we have been since March, the interior is more important than ever, as we seem compelled to spend a lot more time in our heads, with our anxieties and repetitive thoughts than seems fair. When I am at a loss with what to do with the turmoil this pandemic, social unrest and separation from family and the connections that make life meaningful has allowed, when the world ceases to work they way we've known it to work for so long, music helps me make sense. A beat, a lyric, a rising crescendo and an orchestral explosion of noise and melody is a healing force. Music makes sense when nothing else does.
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| Space Voyage Rock 'n Roll |
* Harris, Sophie. “LCD Soundsystem's 'Sound of Silver': 10 Things You Didn't Know.” Rolling Stone, Rolling Stone, 22 Sept. 2019, www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/lcd-soundsystems-sound-of-silver-10-things-you-didnt-know-110495/.