Parents Pick Favorites

While the makeup of my readership for this "thing" consists of my mother and three of my sympathetic friends, I am still going to ignorantly trudge forward as if millions of adoring, attentive readers are waiting with bated breath.

In that light, I am going to begin a series of posts (alongside other longer essays I have been working on) that show what sort of person I am based off of a cross-section of my personal tastes. I am dubbing it the "Parents Pick Favorites" series, and everyday I will choose a topic/category/genre and explain why one item within that category is my absolute favorite: favorite books, movies, foods etc.

Yes, just presenting my #1 favorite things in life will not, in fact, do my multi-faceted, extremely diverse, highly-entertaining, complex personality justice, but neither will just saying that I love or hate everything. So in the spirit of decisiveness, boldness and streaking at the Super Bowl I present to you perhaps my most difficult "favorite" to decide: my absolute favorite song.

In our minds, music does not represent any form of exercise or effort. Hearing something is the same as existing--it just happens. When we hear the kick of a snare drum or the twanging of a guitar it affects us viscerally and naturally. Like all effective art, intangibles that cannot be intellectualized or described often dictate how we feel or react to it. Yet for every time we, as humans, consider hearing as just a given circumstance, there have been times when we were sitting in front of someone, or in a classroom and were literally not registering or understanding anything they were saying. The tone and the cadence of the voice existed and travelled into our ears, but ended up limply collapsing like Myotonic Goats, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxKUYhu4-Vw) never fully reaching any semblance of comprehension or acknowledgement. Listening, while primal and ubiquitous, actually takes effort and control. For this reason, my absolute favorite song to ever exist is LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends."



The everyday listener could easily let this song wash over them; the main piano riff and pitter-pat drumming sequence stay essentially unchanged throughout the entire track and the structure of the song is entirely unorthodox and unfriendly for radio play. These are the same qualities though, that make "All My Friends" a beautiful work of art.

Drake songs and Taio Cruz songs are sleekly designed to illicit that euphoric feeling of dancing and drinking at the club, of releasing all inhibitions and indulging in yourself. I would never want to go to an Usher concert, but when his songs come on at a party, the energy is heightened. I fill up my shot glass and am excited to do something completely unplanned and hedonistic. For me, "All My Friends" fulfills a much higher, loftier calling. Everyone knows what it means to be drunk and happy. You dont have to be an R&B star to know that you had a great time on Saturday night even though you don't remember anything about Saturday night. The ingredients are always the same too. Dancing, drinking, eating, sexing, sleeping in bushes--the gang is all there every time you and your friends all go out. But where do those experiences fit in to the larger timelines of our lives? Puking, in no other circumstance, is the sign of night well done. Flashing lights and pulsating rhythms don't act as a soundtrack to all of our hook-ups (unless your name starts with a S and ends in a nookie). Yes, "All My Friends" is in many ways a song about going out to bars and stumbling home and kissing women, but the genius lies in its ability to create monumental context for the pedestrian act of having a good time. What does it mean to have true friends? What is life like right after the party ends? Where do our lives travel after that point? What does it mean to grow up? These are all issues that are integral to knowing who you are in a modern society.

"All My Friends," both musically and lyrically, gives the listener a taste of that visceral feeling of going out with all your friends. Drinks or no drinks, the culmination of the thick piano chords and the whining synths represents that feeling of acceptance and belonging--of someone carrying you home after you pass out and making you eat crackers even though you are screaming inaccurate racial obscenities at them. When the song begins and the clinks of the piano keys are simply twinkling in the eye of the song, you can smell the cold night air, you can see the make-up and the done-up hair and that overly fresh smell. The land of fist-pumping and lude sexual acts still remains, but the song also recognizes the come down, the sobbing and the stumbling into your bed, the shattered relationships and the after-party pizza places. Lead singer of LCD Soundsystem, James Murphy, is 41 and I think his slightly older age (relative to the Jonas Brothers) really resonates in "All My Friends;" a real sense of perspective and emotional arc definitely has manifested life within this song for me. Going out drinking with your friends isn't just about being drunk and in the limelight, it is about getting lost on the way to the party and making in-jokes that no one remembers after it's all said and done. It is about the sweat and tears that causes all the make-up to run. And in a lot of ways life is the same way. Why do you think people get divorced? For millions of people, what is dear in their heart is not being in love, but what it meant and felt like to fall in love. The scene where Frodo drops the ring into the fire and ostensibly solve's an entire continent's problems pales in comparison to the complete scope of his journey from his small home in the countryside, to the world's grandest stage.

Whenever I remember laughing at a friends joke, I always remember what they said that made me crack-up, what words they used and how the punch-line operated. "All My Friends" reminds me of how much of what made the joke funny was an integral part of who that person was, not what they said. Life isn't about the nouns, it's about the adjectives. It will always be about the journey, and just like this song, if you don't pay attention closely, it may fleetingly pass you by.