guhh, i’ve been thinking all damn morning about lcd soundsystem’s vaguely “dear prudence”/floyd homage “never as tired as when i’m waking up.” when i first heard the record it provoked the Sigh/Puff of Discontent i usually have for those musical instances wherein the roots of a moment are so blindingly obvious that some might call it, ahem, stealing. despite the song’s lack of inspiration (conversely, its overreliance on it), i am finding myself mildly addicted to it, walking the streets and whistling its lilting, starry melody.

now, this filters into a huge debate i’ve been having in my head for quite some time: how much of my assessment of music’s quality should lay in its originality or invention? certainly, i prefer music that i can confidently call “original” or “creative,” but then again, there’s something to be said for good music as “an enhanced version of the preferred past,” to whatever degree (because on one hand, prince isn’t just funk, and dizzee isn’t just r&b/hip hop- but then again, interpol isn’t that much more than the chameleons or echo and the bunnymen, and all three are pretty good). so in that case, “never as tired…” can be praised for its craftsmanship, its distillation of a certain sound (i won’t say its perfection, because it’s not), a barely-enhanced version of the preferred past.

so what we get here is something like craft v. creativity. certainly, the best things merge both, but can we take “never as tired…” to be great simply for its pleasant replication of a sound most people have already heard? i’m not really sure. it’s just been bugging me, because for as much as i want to dismiss it as a happy genre-exercise (ultimately kind of mediocre), i have been listening and whistling all day (***weirdly tangentially, i’ve been thinking a lot about how chinese society has never had a concept of intellectual property that we do, and the standards of quality, aesthetically speaking, are in general, scaled much more in favor of imitation + craft. in turn, we’re having some economic, uhh, “problems,” because piracy is basically culturally + spiritually sanctioned to some degree***).

on the other side of the spectrum is stuff like mu’s “out of breach” (which i’ll be getting back to you all on in about 2 weeks), which is shocking to the point of almost occluding my ability to make up my mind on its quality- these are sounds i’ve heard traces of before, but shit, it’s a really arresting piece of work.

anyway, this is just to get your brains going and hopefully elicit some critical opinions about the way we listen to and process music. right? also, somewhat related-ly (in its total soullessness), i’d like to give jeff lynne and the electric light orchestra a big shout out for writing and recording “telephone line,” the other song that has been making me a huge, goofy sucker the last several days.

laters.