austinkleon:

LCD Soundsystem, “All I Want,” off This Is Happening (2010)

Pitchfork:

“Usually I’m pretty purposeful about my grand theft, like stealing the guitar sound from [Robert] Fripp for ‘All I Want’ and stuff like that,” James Murphy told the A.V. Club last June. This comment is the perfect summation of Murphy’s referential aesthetic. It’s the important thing to remember with LCD: Murphy is not writing and recording this stuff hoping that no one notices where he is borrowing from. He’s not living in fear of being discovered. The borrowing, in cases like “All I Want”, is a large part of the point. “There’s all this anxiety that people are going to ‘catch’ you,” he told Joe Colly in a Pitchfork interview. “No one wants to get called out for being derivative or something. It’s like, we’re all making rock. No one’s reinventing the wheel over here. If anything, the balance is struck by not worrying too much about it. So I’m spending my energy trying to make a good song rather than spending my energy trying to cover my tracks.

I love this album. Compare:

“All I Want” vs. “Heroes”

“Drunk Girls” vs. “White Light, White Heat”

“Somebody’s Calling Me” vs. “Nightclubbing”

another instance of me being all for re-appropriation despite my inability to tolerate thomas edison

(Source: kindlesong-archive)