Praias e Desfiladeiros | A Short Eulogy for a Band of Substitute Teachers

A Short Eulogy for a Band of Substitute Teachers

“There’s this amazing photo of us taken backstage on this tour, and it looks like a teachers’ lounge; a bunch of middle-age misfits. And for this band of substitute teachers to go out like this, kicking the asses of bands that actually look like bands… that makes me very excited.”

— James Murphy, Spin Magazine (January / February 2011)

I know a thing or two about being a late bloomer. I had my first kiss in the eighth grade. I lost my virginity at 18. I received my first guitar at 20. At around nine months or so (and even shorter if you only count “being official”), I’m currently in the longest tenured romantic partnership I’ve ever had by a margin of five months. Though I’ve had a great deal of shitty life experience that has opened my eyes to the world, I’ve only recently felt as though I’m as accomplished as a 27-year-old with my sense of ambition should be.

James Murphy was 32 when he released “Losing My Edge”. Though he had been in bands throughout his twenties, that brilliant single was the world’s introduction to him. There’s a fitting irony that LCD Soundsystem’s debut single was written from the point of view of an aging hipster desperately trying to grasp onto some sort of cred, some semblance of shallow “coolness,” because the song turned this schlubby white dude quickly approaching middle-age into a musician ahead of the curve, a bona fide trendsetter, one of the coolest people in the genre of music just as obsessed with “cool” as any other. James Murphy was the regular guy who snuck into the back door of the party and ended up being the life of it.

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