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Submit Response is a weblog by Jack Mottram, a journalist who lives in Glasgow, Scotland. There are 1308 posts in the archives. You can subscribe to a feed. This post was made on and belongs in the music category. The previous post was , and the next post is .

Losing My Canon

In the past couple of days, I’ve read a post by Jeremy over at Antipixel on Musical Literacy, the recent I Love Music thread on imaginary Rough Guides To…, and participated in a faintly ludicrous discussion of the lyrics to LCD Soundsystem’s I’m Losing My Edge. All these things, in one way or anther, are about establishing a musical canon.

Just in case you’ve already lost your edge, I should explain that the LCD Soundsystem song, which you can listen to here, is a wonderful deadpan mockery of a certain type of music fan. The sort who makes lists, who insists on their long familiarity with the most obscure artist the moment they rise to prominence, and who makes suspicous claims to being present at key events in music history. As the title suggests it also mourns the inevitable passage from cool to over-the-hill, while, of course, mocking the notion of cool itself, best expressed by this little line:

I’m losing my edge to the art-school Brooklynites, in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties

It is, without doubt, the best comic song of the century so far, if only because of the neat trick it plays on the listener: you have to be the subject of the satire in order to understand it, the joke is truly on you, me and us. And it makes you dance like a bastard.

Anyway, here are the groups and artists mentioned in the song, in the order which they appear, stripped of the wit.

Posted at 4pm on 22/01/04 by Jack Mottram to the music category.
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