The Music of the Decade #9: LCD Soundsystem, "Someone Great"

Well yeah, of course, everyone loved "Losing My Edge" It's still ludicrously fresh and hilarious and just a bit painful. While I would like to be able say that this ode to hipsterism and its discontents was awfully close to home, that would be an almighty fib: when this song came out the last thing I was doing was hanging out with the Sydney-side cool kids. In fact, mostly I was just hanging out with Cordy, one of my very favourite girls in the world, taking in the sun and harbour air.

When the fuss had died down, we were left with "Someone Great". How to write a wrenching but glowing song about grief without so much as a minor chord? Like this.

The lyrics are wrenchingly uneuphemistic and desperately moving. The only hint of self-pity allowed is when the singer bitterly notes that the weather hasn't had the good grace to be sympathetically gloomy:

The worst is all the lovely weather,
I'm sad, it's not raining.
The coffee isn't even bitter,
Because, what's the difference?

Buy LCD Soundsytem's Sound of Silver [UK/US]

"Someone Great":