#2
All My Friends – LCD Soundsystem
Album: Sound of Silver
Year: 2007
I asked my mother once, shortly after George Harrison passed away, if it made her feel old that the her adolescent icons were starting to die off. She answered, somewhat circuitously, that to her, getting old wasn’t as simple as just being in one’s fifties, watching former teen heartthrobs kick the bucket. Rather she explained that getting older felt more like adding a layer, but retaining the capability to access any other layer just as easily. So age exists less as a continuum of wisdom or accumulated experience than as a series of discreet quantities, whose value can be snapshot or aggregate, depending on context. Is this how James Murphy feels about aging? Seems unlikely. And if you ask my mom how she feels about this song, she will whine for half its playing time (then she leaves the room) that the insistence of the piano part, its refusal to break the tension it lays down, is giving her a headache. But I can’t think of one without the other anymore. I suppose because I have no idea what it’s like to look back on much. I’m starting to form my own ideas about aging; starting to be able to pull some lessons from the mess and see how the snowball’s pace will become so breakneck and scary that all you can do is laugh about it. But let’s face it, I’m only just starting to move through the air like a fully realized human and my angst about “getting old” (my friends will testify, this is a thing I complain about) is comical even to me.
So how did a bittersweet, terse and funny song about youth slipping away capture the hearts and minds of so many young whippersnappers this decade? We do fancy ourselves a rather jaded generation, reaching for old-before-our-time in the same motion we make towards the sex, the drugs, the hedonistic pleasures that are meant to be our rightful, bright, youthful province. We even get name-dropped – “When you’re drunk and the kids look impossibly tan, you think over and over, ‘Hey I’m finally dead.’” – as the song spirals towards its ragged conclusion. “All My Friends” was on its heaviest rotation the year I was living in London, most specifically my last two months there. I used to love that line about the über-tan club denizens Murphy references because, as you may know, the UK is populated entirely by very pasty young men, and the orange, orange, orange-in-December women who love them. I – the lone, ghostly face in many a clubbing picture from that winter – used to feel extra in on the joke listening to that line. As to why we love it, perhaps we feel a sense of inherited possibility? For a song so ostensibly about something drawing to a perceived close, it sure sounds like a beginning. You can hear it the way the piano stumbles, but always moves forward: it sounds like wheels turning and carrying us somewhere. I for one, can’t wait to grow old (whatever that turns out to be like) listening to it.
And because you read this far, a gift for you. [via] I almost chose this version, for the asshole factor, but you can’t be a jerk all the time, sometimes you have to just be a music fan.
