‘Drunk Girls’: The LCD Soundsystem song James Murphy reflects on as “dumb”
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(Credit: Raph PH)
Exploding into the mainstream with ‘Daft Punk Is Playing At My House’, James Murphy and LCD Soundsystem spent the majority of their career confirming that they weren’t quite as simple as their breakthrough song might suggest. The track, an indie dancefloor filler for decades, is far removed from the output the band would largely create.
Though they landed squarely in the realm of nu-rave, LCD Soundsystem would set themselves apart from the indie boom and employ deeply emotional sentiments in their electronic-led tracks. Songs like ‘Losing My Edge’ and ‘All My Friends’ may be set to the kind of muted house and techno beats that so many bands were employing to fill the dancefloors of the nation, but Murphy and his band were using a far dark set of images to colour their creations.
It’s a unique ability that The Cure also employed as songs like ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ and ‘Love Cats’ topped charts without the realisation of their sad lyrical content. Like Robert Smith, Murphy considers himself a student of pop music, recognising the value it brings to artistic endeavours and how the notion of populist music can offer a sincere counterpoint to more advantageous ideas.
However, like Smith, Murphy also knows when a band’s audience simply needs a good old-fashioned dance-a-long. For LCD Soundsystem, that song arrives in ‘Drunk Girls’, one of their most lighthearted moments. An upbeat, up-ticking indie track with an infectiously catchy chorus, Murphy explained that he wanted the tune to be as simple as possible, telling Billboard: “I just wanted something dumb. I like dumb, short stuff.”
While the latter may not be exactly true in all of Murphy’s work, there’s some joy in hearing a simplistic ‘banger’ about drinking with friends and letting loose from a band so usually intent on evoking more intricate emotions.
Explaining the song back in 2010, Murphy told NME: “When we were in Los Angeles, we had this amazing chef. This girl was a fan of the label and a DJ. She called us her ‘girls.’ So it’s a song about funny genders and people who are drunk trying to relate, which I always find hilarious. Nothing is more fun to me than two drunk people trying to negotiate.”
We’ve all been there, watching our friends try to reconcile at the end of the night in a takeaway as the cider-soaked spittle adds an extra flavour to the cheesy chips in front of them. Murphy confirmed the story to Pitchfork, explaining the tune “is about drunk people and fun things and the fact that all of the boys of the LA mansion we recorded at were called ‘the girls’ by our chef. We were the ladies of the mansion.”
While it might be fun to ponder LCD Soundsystem’s changing their name to Ladies of the Mansion, it will never quite match the undeniably joyous energy of ‘Drunk Girls’. Having recently seen the group reduce a whole swathe of almost-middle-aged people to a swirling mess of tears with their uniquely textured alt-techno sounds, tracks like ‘Drunk Girls’ remind us that they love a bit of dumb pop just like the rest of us.
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