“All My Friends”—LCD Soundsystem
A song I know will be playing late at night in bars and at apartment parties until I’m old enough to annoy kids knee-deep in neo-dubstep with stories about how I saw him play it, twenty years ago, but was mostly concerned at the time with trying to determine whether there really was an abandoned briefcase behind me or if the weed that strange French girl had given me was actually PCP and I was hallucinating the briefcase. A song that sounds just as good when you’re 3,000 miles away from your buddies (“if I could see all my friends tonight…”) as when you’re in the same room as them (you can!), and for completely different reasons. Last week at a party I approached a girl I sort of knew once and asked her how a mutual friend of ours was doing. She said she’d had a baby and dropped out of school and doesn’t really talk to her anymore and then she told me never to graduate because after two years in a world resistant to idealistic dream-fulfillment she’d had a pretty hard time, and then she started crying. Writing about music allows me to articulate feelings that, in casual conversation and especially in loud crowded basements, otherwise come out as “oh my god I love this song like you have no idea, it means so much to me!” Which is basically what I said to her when it came on, which is maybe why she through tears asked me to sing it to her, which is unfortunate, because a song about growing older and losing friends probably wasn’t what she wanted to hear right then and there, but I did it anyway, and it seemed to cheer her up.
