How James Murphy kept his claim to cool with ‘Losing My Edge’
The year is 2002, and James Murphy is losing his edge. Years spent crate-digging and mixing obscurities and rarities around the East Village just won’t cut it anymore. The kids are coming up from behind, somehow discovering and downloading ESG and Liquid Liquid cuts without his help – or maybe with it, but it doesn’t matter either way. Murphy is losing his monopoly on cool.
How do you preserve a tastemaker reputation that was decades in the making when it suddenly starts to slip away? How do you curb your imminent uncoolness? If you’re James Murphy, you double down on the pretension, on the unknown outer reaches of your vinyl collection, on your claim to cool, even as it’s slipping away to art-school Brooklynites, and you put out one of the best debut singles of all time.
‘Losing My Edge’ is seven minutes and 53 seconds of pure sonic self-righteousness. It’s the kind of arrogant rambling you might encounter if you make friendly conversation with the wrong tote bag-wearing man before asking for a filter in the smoking area, prompting him to reel off his entire record collection to you in excruciating detail. But it revels in the pretension, in the self-importance, and the futile claims Murphy makes to music, which he didn’t even have a hand in creating.
As synths whirr and percussion pulses beneath his words, Murphy litters the song with references to artists who are almost guaranteed to crop up on any good RYM list. This Heat, Section 25, Gil Scott Heron, the Sonics, the Sonics, the Sonics, the Sonics. As he reels off names and claims, ‘Losing My Edge’ has the potential to become insufferable, but it’s such a danceable distillation of the absurdity of cool that it escapes it.
There’s an irony to the track, a commentary on the contradictions of indie, the constant flitting between guitars and turntables, but there’s also a real sense of desperation from Murphy. “I’d really wasted thirty years of my life,” Murphy suggested in Meet Me In The Bathroom, “And I would lock the studio… sing a song about losing my edge. How humiliating it is to be me.”
The humiliation was so intense that Murphy’s DFA Records co-founder Tim Goldsworthy told him not to put the song out, but the LCD Soundsystem believed he had nothing left to lose…except his edge. Funnily enough, he managed to regain it with the single. It was a bold move, putting out a single verging on eight minutes of wallowing and bitterness, but it paid off.
‘Losing My Edge’ still encapsulates the energy of that whole sleazy, indie era, the pressures to have the most obscure tastes, the pressure to be cool, to keep up. It’s at once intolerable, ironic and iconic. A dance-punk staple and a debut for the ages.
Revisit ‘Losing My Edge’, the debut single from LCD Soundsystem, below.
