“Losing my Edge”
LCD SOUNDSYSTEM

This is a complex, bruising, only-half-serious, very serious, almost indigestibly acid attack song, based in a hipster cosmology so all-encompassing as to make the Jack Black character in “High Fidelity” seem a little out of it. I think I read somewhere the backing track is borrowed; it’s a merciless icky-thump of a backbeat, pulsating with programing flourishes, bursts of guitar, and doubled, halting, insecure vocals. The speaker (the song is spoken, not sung) is an aging turntabler, matter-of-factly surveying his prospects:

I’m losing my edge
The kids are coming up from behind.
I’m losing my edge to the kids from France and from London

As the song goes on, that beat becoming more urgent with each passing verse, the singer becomes more defensive, the inside echo becomes deafening, the insularity positively scary:

I was there, I was there in 1974 at the first Suicide practices in a loft in New York City.
I was working on the organ sounds …
I was there when Captain Beefheart started up his first band.
I told him, “Don’t do it that way, you’ll never make a dime.”
I was there. I was the first guy playing Daft Punk to the rock kids.
I played it at CBGBs.

LCD Soundsystem is James Murphy, who in this song and elsewhere has it not just both ways but every which way. As the song goes on, the perspective changes, subtly, and suddenly the speaker is either supplicating himself before an even older artist or, bizarrely, channeling us talking to him. Derangement, inevitably, follows:

I heard you have a compilation of every good song ever done by anybody.
Every great song by the Beach Boys. All the underground hits. All the Modern Lovers tracks.
I heard you have a vinyl of every Niagra record on German import.
I heard that you have a white label of every seminal Detroit techno hit: 1985, 86, 87.
I heard that you have a CD compilation of every good ’60s cut and another boxed set from the ’70s.

By the time the song ends, in a hail of namechecking (”Swans, the Soft Cell, the Sonics. The Sonics! The Sonics!…”), Murphy has mocked the speaker, the bands, the kids coming up, the history of music, anyone who cared about any music any time or anywhere, and, by extension, the music itself. It’s the last song about rock you’ll ever need to hear.

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The complete “Songs about rock.”