"Life, Even Hipster Life, Goes On after 40"

"Murphy emerged at the turn of the last decade as the production mastermind behind DFA Records, the fearsomely fashionable Brooklyn-based label that he co-owns. He quickly established himself as a leading indie auteur, marrying the buzzy, busy sound of late-'70s/early-'80s disco-punk to 21st-century digital crispness. With a single brilliant record, the Rapture's sonata-for-cowbell 'House of Jealous Lovers,' Murphy sent hipster wallflowers stampeding to the dancefloor, transforming the tastes, and untightening the backsides, of white urban bohemia. DFA's music felt new, but it sounded old. Murphy is a revivalist and, like all revivalists, a softie; his records gazed back at the Manhattan downtown scene of a quarter-century earlier—to Talking Heads and Liquid Liquid and ESG—longing for a lost musical utopia that graded into longing for a lost city: the raggedy, arty New York that vanished in the boom-bust-boom cycles of a new gilded age. "When Murphy stepped out from behind the mixing desk, the elegiac quality you could detect in his music moved from subtext to subject. Murphy seemed a comically ill-suited to the job of frontman. For one thing, he didn't look the part. What's more, he was old. A chubby, schlubby studio rat on the wrong side of 30—could this guy be a star?"

Jody Rosen in Slate says farewell to LCD Soundsystem.