Every Song I Love- 1. LCD Soundsystem : Losing My Edge
Note — This series was originally called Every Good Song, but I changed it to Every Song I Love to reflect the fact that music taste is very much subjective. Unfortunately that means that some of the following doesn’t make much sense
Where to start with a series called “Every Good Song”? Should I start with my favourite song of all time? The first song I ever loved? A song that changed my life? Well, how about I start with the song which gave this newsletter its title?
Losing My Edge was, in fact, one of two main inspirations for this newsletter. The first, less obvious, inspiration was an obscure character in the classic comedy science-fiction book The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, named Wowbagger The Infinitely Prolonged. As the name suggests, Wowbagger is an immortal being, and decides to cope with the concept of immortality by insulting everyone in the universe, one at a time, in alphabetical order. When it was pointed out that this is not merely misguided, but impossible due to the number of people being born and dying all the time, Wowbagger merely responds “A man can dream, can’t he”.
I am not, as far as I am aware, immortal. If I keep to my intended schedule of writing about a song a week, I’ll write about two to three thousand different songs if I am lucky (two to three songs if I’m really not). As you may have noticed, there are more than three thousand good songs already. In fact I have a playlist called Every Good Song which already has well more than that many songs on it. I am clearly never actually going to manage to write about every good song, but a man can dream, can’t he?
The second inspiration, LCD Soundsystem’s Losing My Edge, is simultaneously a song celebrating a love of music, and a satire of music snobbery. Appropriately enough, I first read about the song in the NME (also celebrating music and housing music snobbery), which I read religiously at that time. From the description I sort of knew I would love it, and, when I finally heard it (some time later, as this was before I could just hop on Spotify or Youtube and listen) I absolutely did. It melded various types of music I already loved in a new and exciting way, combining elements of the techno and house music I had spent recent years raving to with the slow-building Krautrock of bands like Neu, and a smidgen of the indie-rock I had loved since my teenage years.
Almost more important than how it sounded, was what it said. The narrator of the song, worried about losing his edge, makes ever more ridiculous claims about being present at seminal moments in music history (“I was there, in the Paradise Garage DJ room with Larry Levan”) to preserve his aging cool. The song culminates with a shouted list of the all the great records he owns (“The Slits, Faust, Mantronix”), somehow simultaneously a celebration of those bands, a gentle mocking of cooler than thou record collectors, and a recognition of their influences on LCD Soundsystem themselves.
Like James Murphy, the man behind LCD Soundsystem, I related to this narrator despite his ridiculousness. As a younger man, I used my love for music as a substitute for a personality. My discovery of new songs and bands was genuine, but also a way to try and impress people. I was, I hope, never quite so ridiculous as the narrator, but there was a sliver of recognition. Plus, it genuinely introduced me to some great new (to me) bands, which, behind the irony, was one of the aims of the song.
The song also has a great line “I heard you have a compilation of every good song ever done by anybody” which has always made me smile, and has inspired this series. There is a part of me that wants to hear, and list, every good song, that worries about all the great songs out there I haven’t yet heard, although this bothers me much less than it used to.
As a middle aged man, I’m also no longer worried about losing my edge, if indeed I ever had one (spoiler: I didn’t). I am under no illusions that anyone is impressed by, or even cares in the slightest about my taste in music, about what new or old bands I might have discovered. If any of my peers still care about discovering new music, there are a million other ways (blogs, podcasts, or most likely algorithms). I have small children, a proper job and many of the other signifiers of being a grown up, and consequently have nowhere near as much time to devote to discovering music as I did back in 2002 when ‘Losing My Edge’ came out.
The thing is though, I love music as much or maybe even more than I ever did. Discovering a great new song or band I haven’t heard before is still one of my greatest pleasures, and writing about music is one of my others. So here I am, starting this series, writing these articles. I certainly hope you enjoy them, that you maybe even love some of the songs featured as much as I do, but whether you do or don’t, I’ll be here writing anyway.
Originally published at http://markjwray.com on January 30, 2024.
