That's how it starts...

Slate's Hua Hsu has written lots of good stuff; here's his latest, a brief exegesis on the song of the moment, LCD Soundystem's "All My Friends." The number of high-profile covers in recent months (Franz Ferdinand and John Cale [!]) suggests that anyone over thirty understands the song's tremendous tug on memory and desire. By itself "All My Friends" is marvelously affecting; on the album, it forms a devastating diptych, following as it does another tune whose punch is also cumulative, "Someone Great." Being over thirty sensitizes you to what Wallace Stevens once called "the malady of the quotidian" -- the day begins, you eat breakfast, go to work, come home, read or watch TV, go to bed, to begin the cycle anew. Intimations of mortality slip in through the chinks. It can strike you suddenly, and not at all like the kerpow described in bad novels. You think, I'm thirty-three, I was twenty-three ten years ago. What else has changed? What's changed is the pace; the devotion to pleasure from the age of eighteen till your late twenties is as unwavering as the piano line that anchors "All My Friends." This trick, along with LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy's youthful bark, honors the track's insistence on keeping the bloom on this remembrance of things past -- drugs taken, lovers laid, friends enjoyed -- intact even when Murphy's words undercut the swirl of instruments.

These revelations -- one can hardly call them epiphanies, the existence of which is Joycean bullshit anyway -- may trigger a review, involuntarily, of a moment of pleasure. The discrepancy between how you interpreted it at the time and how you regard it now will cause a silence as blinkered as the one Murphy uses as a Maginot line dividing the verses "That's how it starts" from "The way it does in bad films." The silence makes the last line inevitable. The impact of "All My Friends" is a corrective to the ageist snark of 2002's "Losing My Edge," which I always thought was overrated anyway. "All My Friends" uses irony in the most sophisticated manner; it suggests that the absorption of all the influences he lists in "Losing My Edge" required the weight of Murphy's own experiences to reach critical mass.

The video, by the way, is quite effective in its own right: Murphy, dressed like a doleful David Lynch wearing Peter Gabriel's "Shock the Monkey" face paint, struggling mightily to keep his composure as his band raises a helluva din behind him. The way it does in bad films.