You may have heard about this already, but the video just went up on Youtube, so: LCD Soundsystem closed their concerts at Manhattan’s Terminal 5 Thursday, Friday, Saturday and last night by incorporating the chorus of Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ triumphant anthem “Empire State of Mind” into the beautiful but normally less entirely triumphant anthem “New York I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down.” I was at Thursday night’s show, and it left me relying on the doofy word “magical” to describe it.
The show was killer all the way through-the full-band arrangements of leader James Murphy’s studio creations, which always sound so solipsistic on records, were much more powerful than I would have guessed they would be. And Murphy sang great-full-voiced, full-hearted, operatically, even, like Morrissey. But the end, this song, was the best. It was one of those moments that reminds you why you live in the city. (To lapse into more doofiness.) Why you put up with the stress and the vermin and the annoyance and the loneliness. Why you’re still glad, even though it brings you down so often, that you live here. Why you wouldn’t choose to live anywhere else. It’s because you haven’t found another place where so many different sorts people are doing so many different sorts of things and you like watching and listening and tasting (smelling, not always so much, especially not on East Broadway now that we’re getting towards summer) the wonderful variety of results. And balloons.