This Friday, the awesome James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem and his DJ partner Pat Mahoney bring their party Special Disco Version to This Is Not London at new superclub matter [sic]. The DFA-heavy line up also includes Yacht, Morgan Geist, The Juan Maclean, and Planningtorock. I spoke to Murphy on the phone from his home in New York.
Dazed Digital: You said in this Village Voice interview that, as well as training to be an Ultimate Fighter, you wanted to write fiction one day. Any progress?
James Murphy: I did some editing for a friend of mine who was working on a novel. Not apart from that. I couldn’t just do it as a break from touring. I wouldn’t want to just dabble.
DD: Did you do much writing when you were younger?
JM: Yeah, that’s what I went to school for. That’s what I was gearing up to do with my life, when all this other crap got involved and I got really busy. But I was a terrible novelist because I didn’t have any discipline, which is such a childish flaw. Maybe I needed to get a little older.
DD: Did you see the New Yorker this week? There’s a good Malcolm Gladwell article about how genius shouldn’t be equated with precocity because a lot of real talents, like Cezanne, flower very late in life.
JM: Well, I was a hotshot when I was a kid, which did remarkably bad things for my work ethic. It can lead you easily to being a complete flop-stroke-egomaniac, which, for me, came to its logical conclusion in total failure. But now I can be more of an adult. I’m a different person.
DD: Sitting down to write is hard, but surely you must have learned some discipline doing music.
JM: I don’t know how my attention works. I know tricks with music now which can keep me working when I’m stuck. But they’re specific techniques, and they’re not necessarily going to be useful getting yourself out of a jam in a bank robbery or an Ultimate Fighting match or a novel. At least I do know that I can develop systems, but who knows if I’ll be any good at it? With writing, I did have a pretty good control of voice and tone and stuff like that.
DD: A song like “All My Friends” works like a little short story.
JM: I don’t know. Songs are a weird thing to me. Possibly the worst genre in writing, outside of greeting cards, is typically rock lyrics. In my case, they’re always written the same day they’re recorded, either in the studio or that morning. With something like “All My Friends”, it’s literally just about my life. It’s sort of cheap. It’s not hard to sustain emotional tone over five and a half minutes! Writing a song is less like writing a book and more like sitting down and just telling somebody that you have a great idea for a book about something.
DD: The only person I can think of who might have made it as both an Ultimate Fighting Champion and a novelist is Hemingway.
JM: There’s got to be someone out there. Or, otherwise, I’ll venture to be the first!
DD: What did you used to read, when you were studying creative writing?
JM: I like post-war American fiction. So I was reading a lot of Pynchon and William Gaddis. Donald Barthelme. Older stuff like Knut Hamsen and Flannery O’Conner. Philip Roth. My friend Sam Lipsyte.
DD: Have you read anything good recently?
JM: I reread Infinite Jest. When I first read it, when I was 20-something, I turned my nose up at it because just before that I’d read The Recognitions, which is the blueprint for all that shit. I got snobby with Pynchon for the same reason, which you shouldn’t do. And there is stuff in Infinite Jest that is just lifted straight from The Recognitions, so I really wanted to know if that was on purpose – was it a little easter egg? Then in the twelve years since I’d read it, a lot of younger guys I knew told me they really admired it, so I thought I’d read it again. And it was really amazing at making me laugh. I was almost done with it when he died. I was actually pretty devastasted. What’s really sad is I was literally just gearing up to try and do an interview. He looks exactly like I looked at the time he wrote the book – we have really similar faces, it’s really creepy. The photo backflap looks like a photo of me from 1993. Also, he has a similar type of frustration in trying to describe things, talking in cricles, overstating things, getting embarrassed by the words coming out of his mouth and then saying something flip as a way of getting out of it. So I really wanted to meet him.
DD: So what’s this night at matter going to be like?
JM: It’s going to be rad. It’s going to be a literary wake! No, no, it’s going to be a dance-off freak-out.
