Crushed By The Boring

LCD Soundsystem “Get Innocuous!” (Electric Lady Version)

Is it actually awful to be normal? Is having money inherently bad? Is being boring the worst thing you can be? Is comfort a trap? Are nice, shiny, new things devoid of soul? Is friendliness just a way of being fake and insincere? If you’re happy and content, are you really just dumb and oblivious? “Get Innocuous!” is built on the assumption that all of this is true, but that the real question is how much any of it really matters. James Murphy sounds exhausted by fighting it all, and even more tired by living the life of an artist, where everything that used to be fun is now just work.

Murphy’s arrangement starts out tight but just keeps getting tighter and more dense as it progresses. It’s a very mechanical feeling, like a complex system moving in perfect unison towards some clearly defined goal. It’s a very seductive groove, and even though Nancy Whang is chanting “you can normalize / don’t it make you feel alive?” in a sarcastic tone, it still comes across like an enticing invitation in the context of the beat. They pull you into the machine, and then you think “oh, this is not so bad.” And the rub of the song is there is no ironic twist or reveal. It’s not any more of a trap than anything else in life. It’s just another thing to do, another perspective on being alive. The hollow feeling in the song isn’t about what happens to you when you “normalize,” but rather what it feels like to have your old convictions fade away and be replaced by nothing in particular.

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