You talked about the irony of “Losing My Edge” in a recent interview. (The song’s lyrics concern a bitter, hipster DJ: “I was the first guy playing Daft Punk to the rock kids/I played it at CBGBs ... But I'm losing my edge to better-looking people with better ideas and more talent/And they're actually really, really nice.”) The writer assumed that it wasn’t ironic and you said that it was “ironic in the actual meaning of ‘ironic.’ Not the pose, not the cartoon televised version of irony.”
[Laughs] Well, irony to me is kind of a complicated thing. It’s not, “Haaaaha, I’m wearing a Bon Jovi T-shirt. I don’t like Bon Jovi, get it?” That’s a really flattened-out version of irony. In “Losing My Edge,” there are ironies within it. It’s filled with lies to a certain degree. But I feel that it’s a really truthful song. When I started DJing and I suddenly had some cachet as a DJ, it was absolutely hilarious. It was before any records, before [the Rapture’s] “House Of Jealous Lovers” had come out, before anything. We were known as people who threw parties. I was the guy playing rock and it was kind of a big deal at that moment, because I was playing rock at parties with lots of house DJs and house people. It was like, “Look at this, I just kind of stumbled into something and I have a job.” I mean, I was getting paid $50 or whatever, but it felt really exciting. And then not long after that, I’d be at a [rock club] and between bands, there’d be a DJ playing ESG or Liquid Liquid. Things that I would play. And I suddenly found myself getting slightly paranoid and slightly bitter, like, “I was playing that stuff a year ago.” You know, horribly embarrassing things for a human being to say. I realized it was a very real existential bummer that was going on with me [laughs]. The other ironies were that the people that I was attacking were my friends. I kept getting, “You really got ‘em, ha ha ha,” and I was like, “What are you talking about? I’m totally humiliating myself and very bitchily attacking my friends.” There are lines in there that are very specific to the people I work with, even. I remember they all kind of didn’t say anything about it for a month until one day: “Is this me?” “Yeah, it’s you.” [Laughs] It’s all entirely pathetic. And then the irony on top of it is that it somehow made LCD or even me cool, which is even funnier. I can’t understand how many people have asked me about the song, presuming. I mean, you only get to the fifth or sixth question before you realize they’re presuming that the song is about being who they perceive me to be now. They presume that the song is about being some sort of cool New York LCD guy. They presume that it’s about the person that they now perceive me to be based on what happened after the song was released, making a chronological impossibility. Presumably, I’m my own father.

Speaking of cool, how much do you care about the hip cachet that surrounds you and DFA?
Well, I’d be a liar to say that I didn’t care at all. I’m a person. The other side of it is, I have to be aware of it because if I’m not aware of it, I won’t wake up to the fact that it is the tip of a rocket whose engine is a backlash. In time it always, inevitably and inexorably turns negative. Also, people like music and do things for lots of dumb reasons, including myself. And lots of good people like music for dumb reasons, and one of those reasons is that they think it makes them look cool. It’s embarrassing and kind of horrible, but it’s what people do. It’s what I did as a kid half the time and I loved music more than adults love music. It was my whole life, but I sure as heck bought some records because they seemed cool. That’s part of how music gets translated to people, for good or for bad. So, us being somehow cool, fine. It’s stupid. But even when I say it’s stupid, it just sounds so lame coming out of my mouth. The only people who say that are so desperately trying not to look like they care. I once asked my father toward the end of his life, if he cared what people thought of him. He got really quiet and then went, “Well, yeah. I’d prefer it if people thought I was a good person,” at which point I got deeply and existentially terrified because I realized that I was talking to someone who, unlike anyone my own age, actually didn’t care what people thought. You ask any young person if they care what people think of them and they spend about a half an hour explaining to you, like I’m doing, that they don’t, which is just gruesome, a pose. I don’t know. It’s a funny thing to be cool. I can’t be too blasé about it because it’s given me opportunities and it’s given people on DFA opportunities.

You’ve also talked about how your days in Pony and Speedking soured your attitude toward the ‘90s indie scene. Do you still resent the indie scene?
I’ve always explained it as a lovers’ quarrel or the way you hate your family but would punch anyone in the face if someone said something bad about your mother. It’s my world to a certain degree. It was formative, all of my twenties, you can argue my childhood and teens, too. When I got in a band and we got to go out on tour, I found all this kind of in-crowd/out-crowd lunch-table nonsense that had nothing to do with music and that just seemed really lame. I don’t like scenes. I don’t like the dance scene, I don’t like the indie scene. As much as I love the freedoms of the indie world, when it becomes a real scene, it stops being freedom and starts being a different set of constricting rules. Like when you go on tour and you play with the same fucking band every night except they have a different name and different members. And this is supposed to be independent, where everyone can play whatever they want, but whether it’s the era of math rock or Tortoise or emo, it’s like, everyone’s the fucking same in waves. That always drove me insane because I always liked independent music as a kid because it could be anything, like, “Today, I bought the new Black Flag record and the new Violent Femmes.” And also during that era, wildly independent music was put out on major labels, like Public Image Limited and Gang Of Four were on major labels in the United States. I believe in many of indie’s goals, everyone’s goals: You support the music that you care about. But if you believe that one thing is so shiny and nice, and something else is so big and bad, like dance music is so crass and indie music is so real, I think you miss a lot. Because there’s a lot of really horrible dance music, but there’s a great history of dedicated people making things with more heart than most indie-rock bands.

As a scene-hater, is being implicated in the “dance-punk” genre something you resist?
It’s something that I complicate. Resistance is futile [laughs]. I like to complicate things. That’s why I made a rock band, because we had dance 12-inches and we were these hip dance 12-inch people, reading about how we were electroclash. That was fine, too, but I thought it was good to go out and be a proper band for two reasons. One, because I thought it would be a surprise. And two, because I thought bands were so horrible at that moment that it was easy pickings. It was easy to be a good band, and it still is. It’s sort of like, it was easy to make a good dance record because dance music was so abysmal. But it was also just as easy to be a good band because everyone had forgotten how to be a good band somehow. I was in bands when you’d go out and you’d pay $6 to see the Jesus Lizard and you’d go home and realize you couldn’t play any of the instruments you thought you could play. I loved that period, but that was all wiped away by the waves of morose, amateurish mediocrity and the overly thoughtful glitchy laptop music that dropped an atomic bomb on the indie scene. I think everyone’s still shaking the dust off.

I think that the two have merged and are stronger than ever.
What do you mean?

Half of the new releases I hear are electronic-rock hybrids.
It’s the worst thing in the world [laughs]. OK, yeah, I will say I resent that, when people are like, “You guys make dance rock, it’s the new thing!” I’m like, it is a knife edge in which almost everything you do is going to be horrible. Think of the history of dance rock. It’s not good. EMF? Jesus Jones? This is what we’re talking about here. It’s a bad idea, which is why I like doing it. A lot of the shit I hear that’s like rock and dance, all the sounds are out of the box, like really fuckin’ tepid drum machine sounds and it’s just so terrible-sounding. It doesn’t make you dance, it doesn’t rock. It’s meaningless. What purpose does it serve? Why are you making this? That’s the same reason I quit making indie rock. I was like, “Why am I making this? Does the world need this for anything? Or is it just a way of me expressing something that isn’t myself as a way of displaying myself like some sort of weird, idiotic, morose peacock?” I just don’t see the point of it.

So would you call yourself reactionary?
Yeah, kind of perpetually. I make music alone for myself all the time, but that’s not what I make on records. I release music because of what’s needed. I don’t have the kind of ego that’s like “What I’m saying needs to be heard.” Who cares about my personal feelings? But I do look at music and I get frustrated and rather than just bitch and moan with my friends, I like to make things and be like, “This is what I’m talking about. This is what I mean.” Like, I hate recording studios. I hate looking at the clock. I hate the way you get bullied. So I made a recording studio. I hate labels, I hate the fact that you have to decide to either deal with a complete lack of ambition, fear and a complete lack of vision and interest in popular culture, or you have to deal with horribly crass, money-making, high-pressure nonsense. I hate that, so I made a label. The goal was always to foster what we thought was important in terms of art, in terms of pop culture, everything. When I make records and when I have the band, it’s because I feel like there’s something missing, and this is the best I can do to kind of point that out and explain that.

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