126 bpm 1: … Gonna Drown Out The World
Posted in I’m writing this on a Monday, and yesterday read an interesting article about LCD Soundsystem/DFA mainman James Murphy. I like Murphy’s style. I like his forthright anger and confusion. I like his aesthetic, his refusal to recognize the boundaries between rock and dance music. I like that a self-described “fat guy in a T-shirt” is determined to work his way back to fighting weight. I may not be a musical genius, but we’ve got that much in common, at least.
126 BPM: Looking For A Sound That’s Gonna Drown Out The World Mofo (Popmart remix) – U2 Come Out (Come Down, Fade Out, Be Gone) – 120 Days Twins – Linda Lamb Talk – Coldplay There’s A Drink in My Bedroom And I Need A Hot Lady – Lindstrøm Hustler – Simian Mobile Disco Electric Avenue – Eddy Grant Orange Alert (DFA remix) – Metro Area
What’s best about compiling music for sessions on the StairMaster is that the tempos—the high 120s—are a breeding ground for funk. Where most of my faster mixes veer towards the dance-y side of rock, the StairMaster stuff tends to the rockin’ side of dance. Not that there’s a bright dividing line; but it’s a way for me to hear a lot of great music that I’d somehow missed before.
The U2 track is something I cobbled together myself; the band used a recording of their cover of “Pop Muzik” as entrance music for their 1997 Popmart tour, the segued into “Mofo” as their opening number. Eventually they released “Pop Muzik” as a B-side: that version had a long fade of an ending, dissolving into a wash of crowd noise, electronic swoops and rumbles, and occasional dubby fragments of melody. The edit wasn’t difficult: it took a couple of careful listens to find the entrance point, and a minor tweak to put the two tracks in the same tempo.
Pop isn’t my favorite U2 record by any stretch, but it’s for my money it’s their last album to succeed more than it fails; lyrically, it’s the last time Bono really put himself on the line (“Mofo” is as nakedly personal a lyric as he’s ever written), and musically it’s the last time the group were looking forward to find new ways to be a rock band, instead of running through a catalog of the tried and true. The record makes more sense now, ten years on, than it did at the time: it’s really not a million miles away from what James Murphy et al. are doing now. And if nothing else, it finally does something worthwhile with Bono’s fucking hamronica.
I got 120 Days from an mp3blog (the name of which escapes me now), knowing nothing about them. I still don’t, really, except that they’re associated with Lindstrøm; the kind of electronica that I dig is, I’m discovering, not so much a small scene as a highly cross-pollinated one, with favorite artists forever collaborating, influencing, responding to one another. I like that.
The last time I heard Linda Lamb, she was collaborating with Vitalic under the name Silures; that jaunt yielded the squawky, juddering “21 Ghosts.” This one, even sans Vitalic, is similarly mighty. The riff takes the quintessential boogie riff—that slinky, John Lee Hooker-derived sequence that powers songs as diverse as ZZ Top’s “La Grange,” Goldfrapp’s “Ooh La La,” and (yeah) LCD Soundsystem’s “Daft Punk Is Playing At My House”—and turns it inside-out, making it fearsome instead of insinuating.
This is the Coldplay track primarily notable for its wholesale rip-off of a Kraftwerk song, by the way. (U2 must have finally sent a case-and-desist.) Neither Kraftwerk nor U2, though, would have allowed the rhythm section to be buried by such a murky mix. For that we have to thank Radiohead—or, more properly, Coldplay’s incomplete understanding of Radiohead, and their mistaken application of murk to what should be a crisp, forthright rock song, in the mistaken belief that it will lend the song some gravitas.
