Well, the LCD album’s eclecticism strikes me as eager to please.
Oh, that’s a strange one.

I don’t mean in a desperate way, but it has a something-for-everyone vibe.
I don’t think it’s that eclectic. I think people’s visions of albums have gotten really narrow. I mean, it’s not as eclectic as Dark Side Of The Moon, for crying out loud. That’s one of the records I kind of thought a lot about. I like different types of music to a certain degree. I wasn’t going to include a couple of songs on there, but Tim kind of threw it at me as a challenge: can you make an album that coheres that includes this song and that song? I think the most leftfield is “Never As Tired As When I’m Waking Up,” which I made wholly for myself years ago and kind of let people hear from time to time. They’d ask me if I’d put it on the album and I’d just say, “It’s not LCD Soundsystem. It’s not what that is.” And then I got kind of like, “Well, that’s really stupid.” If I make something, why wouldn’t it be me?

And then there’s “The Great Release,” which you’ve referred to as “The Last Song.”
Oh yeah, I’m obsessed with last songs.

Any in particular?
Well, I’d have to start pulling my records out. I mean even silly things like the Fixx’s Reach The Beach has a great last song. Last songs seemed to be a great art for a while. They were always a little bit longer and they were much gentler. I like it when they kind of leave you forgetting what the album sounds like. That’s where the piano song usually is in records.

I like that you aren’t afraid to call your stuff dance music, because that seems like such a dirty phrase.
No, I love dance music. I got back into making music because of dance music, because there finally seemed to be a music that had a reason to be made. You’re like, “I’m going to make people dance with this. If it doesn’t make people dance, it’s a failure. If it does, it’s a success.” It’s so much clearer than, “I’m going to stand up and play in front of people as an indie-rock band,” at which point you say, “If they like it it’s a success and if they don’t, it’s a failure.” But there’s so much that’s not musical that’s going into whether they like it or not: whether you’re cool, what label you’re on, what band you toured with last time out. Plus, people just stand there anyway and the only way you can tell if people liked your band is by how many shirts you sold. Dance music comes from a very isolated scene that was in need of a lot of positivity, you know? Gay, black and Latino men in New York in the mid-‘70s. People that needed someplace to go and be happy and let loose. And that’s a great tradition. I kind of ignore the horrible thing that has become megalopolis super DJ dance music. It’s there, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with my life, any more than Casiotone For The Painfully Alone has to do with Aerosmith [laughs].

Speaking of those roots, can you rate your music on the Kinsey scale with zero being exclusively homosexual and six being exclusively heterosexual?
It’s a dead three. No, I don’t like being in the middle, I kind of like being all of everything. Not three, but zero and six. Iggy Pop is zero and six. No one’s more straight male and no one is more bafflingly transgendered. That’s the thing to aspire to. That’s a good thing.

Are you aware of the rockism debate?
I’ve kind of become aware of this and, once again, an interesting debate will be reduced to a series of terms that kind of negate the conversation that could be going on. So instead of people talking about what’s good and bad about singles and the way music is now and talking about what you’re saying doesn’t hold up and therefore needs some more review, it’ll be, “All this new stuff is crap” versus “Oh no, you rockist white male curmudgeon.” [Sarcastically] That’s a much more interesting debate for everybody, so I’m really glad it’s turning into that. That’s really the way to push music forward. There are valid points in what would be considered a rockist stance and there are valid points in what would be considered an anti-rockist stance. Neither one is particularly interesting alone, is it? Would anyone want to be either of those things? Yet, from what I read, it seems like people love being one of them. I think there is something to be said for the world changing, and there are things that aren’t going to change. I think that percentage of big artists that take seriously their position both in pop music and in art was higher in the past. Take Paul McCartney, a hack who has made incredible music, both with the Beatles and separately. He’s made some popular music, obviously, and some very deeply strange and inspiring music. And it’s not because he’s a special person. It’s because the job he saw that he had to do was at a higher expectation of art diversity than the job that Chris Martin from Coldplay is expected to do. Now, I believe that Chris Martin is more talented than Paul McCartney, which I’m sure people will stone me for. I think he’s a really good singer, beautiful voice, amazing sense of melody and is of very little purpose. I don’t think it’s necessarily his fault, I think it’s more about what music is now. Don’t change, don’t change, don’t change. When people do something unusual, everyone just assumes they’re crazy, which is ridiculous. Andre 3000, he’s just a crazy individual, no one else can be like him. Everyone else has to continue putting out bragging, diamond-encrusted thug idiocy and just assume Andre’s an anomaly. Andre couldn’t be more of a normal dude. He’s just a normal, young kid who decided to wonder what he’s about. That’s the only difference. He’s just a kid from Atlanta who’s an egomaniac, has some skill and an unusual voice and decided to be something else. Just like Bowie decided to be Ziggy Stardust. Of course, very few people are as massively charismatic as Bowie, Andre 3000 or Hendrix. More importantly, it’s just the job that they’re taking seriously. Anyway, you don’t shortcut an interesting debate by quantifying it as something really flat. I think it’s a good question and I think we’re going to find that the bubble will pop a little bit. It won’t totally pop because people just aren’t that energetic and the means of getting music to people is just so horribly corrupt that we’re, to a certain degree, doomed. I mean, radio?

I agree, but there’s stuff like Timbaland, who was really inspiring. But I have a tendency to sort of accept things as they are, to take things and examine them for how they work within their genres. And that means that I forgive a lot that many people with their eyes on the bigger picture wouldn’t.
Totally. But I’m not a critic. I mean, I am, I’m a very, very opinionated critic. I think you’re doing the right thing. I’m in a position where I can do something about some of the shit I complain endlessly about. So I do. It’s my job. I feel like I have a couple of jobs and I’m pretty clear about them and they keep me getting up in the morning and they keep me feeling like I haven’t eaten and then just slept again. One of them is to protect the artists on DFA and to help DFA survive and to that means I’m now putting my record out through EMI, for a couple of reasons. One is so that the label can focus on other things. When we had the Rapture kind of blowing up in our face, it took all of our time and I think that was difficult for other artists on the label. By doing this, we vowed never to get in a position where we would develop an artist to the point where they’d have to leave us, because that was just too sad. It was really painful. If you look at the release schedule, for a year we released almost nothing because Tim and I were just destroyed when the Rapture left. We didn’t want to risk telling them what to do with their career, and if it backfired, be the ones who ruined their lives, though I now think that was what we should have done. At this point, I can risk my own career. EMI UK is Parlophone is Keith Wozencroft’s house. He’s the guy who developed Radiohead, he’s proven to be incredibly patient. He’s proven to be incredibly respectful of people’s methods and have enough vision to kind of allow them to do their things in different ways. I’ve never heard anything out of him that’s like, “I’ve been doing this for 35 years ...” He has no ego that is intrusive. He never brags, he never sits back in his chair. These are important things. It’s a big deal. He sits forward and listens. He might be fooling me, but what a great job. So if it works with EMI, great. I’ve paved the way for artists we develop to go and work within their structure at a place where we have a good relationship and they don’t have to feel held back. And if it doesn’t work, it’s just me. I know that sounds silly, but I have a bunch of jobs. I’m not a musician who’s like, “This is my shot, Johnny.” I’m a producer and I run a label and if it doesn’t work, that’s OK. At least we know. Now I don’t have to wonder at night when I’m an old man that I didn’t do what I needed to do to protect the people that I care about. My other job as an artist that keeps me making records is that maybe I have a chance to have some effect on people who are talented. I like being a producer because I like facilitating talented people to get outside of the thinking patterns that crushed them. Like, “All my friends are going to hate me if I use a drum machine” or “I won’t be able to play the Smell in L.A. if we make a video.” That’s on the small scale. On the larger scale, if LCD did even sort of well, it would be very easy to realize that anyone could do that themselves [laughs]. Sort of the way that punk rock made people feel that anyone could be in a band. If you knew about being in a band, you realized that you could be in Three Dog Night. It’s not that hard. But it seems like it. Whereas, everyone kind of saw the Sex Pistols and thought, “Jesus, I could play better than that.” Hopefully, I will find myself in that role.