Don't It Make You Feel Alive?

LCD Soundsystem: 'Get Innocuous!' + Dancing all night + Sparks + Rail whiskey + Sunrise and regret

Cat Jones

Aug 28, 2024

‘Am I using the song to inoculate myself against the boring normie life, or have I become innocuous?’ Cat Jones on swapping out the constant party for steadiness and quiet.

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Don’t It Make You Feel Alive?

When I listen to this song, I feel myself at 18 again. I taste Sparks and PBR and rail whiskey. It sounds like the best nights out with my friends. It sounds like losing myself in a crush of strangers at a house party in Logan Square, like chain smoking and sloppy makeouts and pushing my body beyond its limits because it hadn’t yet failed me. It sounds like riding my bike through Chicago at night and dancing until I was dripping in sweat. It’s impossible not to dance to this song. There are so many loops and layers. There’s a beat for everyone to catch, even the most rhythmically challenged among us.1

The fluttery resonance of the filtered baseline always reminds me of heart palpitations, and as it gets going my own heart responds in kind. I feel the mounting euphoria and propulsive anxiety of the old days. To some extent this is just what it feels like to be young, in any era. But so much indie music from back then was carried on an extra current of desperation. The future on the other side felt dim, but the party wasn’t over yet.

What starts as an invitation to dance tips, at some point, toward mandate. As the song reaches its peak, you get the sense that you can’t stop now. To stop is to be left behind and let the moment slip by. To stop is to willingly be crushed by the boring. To stop is to self-exile from Eden. So you don’t. You’re asked over and over: Don’t it make you feel alive? And the only answer is yes.

For the majority of its 7 minutes and 11 seconds, the song layers repetitive beats and lyrics. It’s a big part of what makes it so affecting. When we talk about repetition it’s often in reference to insanity. It’s refusing to change and digging the ditch deeper, despite knowing in your bones it’s a mistake. But repetition also leads to breakthrough and mastery and greatness. In some devotional practices, it’s a tool on the path to transcendence. When we turn the same work of art over hundreds of times and still find new meaning and new questions, repetition is revelation, and that’s what “Get Innocuous!” is constantly teasing.

Then, at the very end, the strings come creeping in, like sunrise and regret. They’re the hangover you can’t sleep through, the dread and the cold sweats, the pleading and the broken promises. After you’ve heard them the first time, they’re waiting for you on every subsequent listen. For me, the strings are the sound of waking up one morning, worn down and worn out and heartbroken, knowing I had to leave Chicago. I hear those strings and I remember feeling adrift. I remember driving out of the city for what I knew was the last time, knowing that whenever I came back it would be as a visitor. I cried from the loss. I cried from the relief.

Even after hundreds of listens, I still don’t know how to interpret the song’s central command. Get innocuous! Is it an invitation or a warning? When I listen to it now — headphones on while I exercise or cook or run errands — I wonder: Am I using the song to inoculate myself against the boring normie life, or have I become innocuous? Did I take the invitation to dull my edges and desires at face value? Did I forget how it feels to be alive as I trundled my way into safety and stability, my wild days and wild friends a memory?

Maybe. I think a night of hard partying and dancing until sunrise might actually kill me now. You will stay until the morning comes sounds like both a tantalizing prospect and a menacing threat. I’ve worked to achieve this quiet life, it’s deeper and richer than I could have imagined back then, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

But as the wall of sound washes over me, I still feel the pull of the past. The boundary between who I used to be and who I am now blurs. I dance gleefully and with just a tinge of despair, knowing it will all one day end, likely sooner than I want. What else can we do? ✹

Cat Jones is a writer and designer living in Bellingham, WA. You can find her at SARDINES.

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