Column:
DFA still guiding American dance music
James Murphy's cuisine still reigns supreme.
Published June 11, 2008
Sometime in 2003, The Rapture’s “House of Jealous Lovers” became the type of song that anyone who cared about pop music anywhere - from club kids to high schoolers to radio programmers to whoever picks the music for “The Real World” — could no longer, in good conscience, ignore. Two years prior, the song slowly moved from a New York City cult-hit and club staple to the song held up as the flag of dance-punk, the often great micro-genre that ended up becoming indie music’s four letter word in the early part of this decade.
As tends to happen with this type of phenomenon (see: The Strokes, “Hey Ya”), “House of Jealous Lovers” was either the single of the decade or epically annoying trash made by a band of untalented hipster scum fronted by what sounded like a weasel being electrocuted. The haters could, it seem, take solace in a truth that seemed to be both universally accepted and widely self-evident: The Rapture, dance-punk and the label (DFA) responsible for it would be out of everyone’s clubs and off everyone’s internet around, say, 2004.
Four years later, though The Rapture might likely be dying a slow death, DFA, the New York City-based label headed by LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy and his friend and sometimes producing partner Tim Goldsworthy, is still the invisible hand guiding American dance music, buoyed by a strong new generation of artists, some of whom have put out a few of 2008’s best albums and singles.
The DFA artist who has received the most hype and acclaim this year is Andy Butler, the Denver-native behind Hercules and Love Affair, the band that encapsulates exactly why Murphy and Goldsworthy have been able to maintain DFA’s status as this country’s preeminent dance label. For one, DFA didn’t acquire Butler after a bidding war with another label or after Butler had broken himself on MySpace. Goldsworthy, the less publicly visible face of the two, heard a demo of “Blind,” Hercules and Love Affair’s glistening lead single, and brought Butler into a studio to re-record the song using live instruments, a decision that allowed the label to eventually release the record while allowing “Blind” to blossom into the starry-eyed near-classic that it is.
Between “Blind” and H&LA’s perfect, full-length debut, DFA has put out arguably the best single and album by a new disco artist, a genre that has been making a slow, burbling (and welcome) comeback over the past two years. If anything, Hercules and Love Affair and “Blind” are the most talked about and successful disco works of, if not the decade, at least this year, showing that even when DFA isn’t exactly on the cutting edge, their blade is still the sharpest.
Earlier this year, DFA also released Hot Chip’s Made in the Dark, not only the best album the band hass ever made, but easily its most mature and accomplished. The album’s first single, the fantastic “Ready For the Floor,” was a Top 10 hit in the UK. The album itself landed at the top of Billboard’s Heatseekers Chart - the chart highlighting sales by new or developing artists in the United States.
Goldsworthy also produced the lauded new album In Ghost Colours by the Australian band Cut Copy, and even though it wasn’t released by DFA, it’s further extending the label’s brand both in the US, where it’s slowly gaining fame, and in Australia, where it debuted at No. 1.
Still, it’s possible that none of those are the best thing put out by DFA this year. That honor could go to The Juan Maclean’s newest single “Happy House,” a starry-eyed, joyous piano house song whose utopian refrain, “I wanna thank you for just being so damn excellent,” says all we need to.
