Weekend Watch (with special guest Chris DeVille)

We occasionally like to close out the week by giving some space to friends of The Reveal to share their recommendation for movies that might not be on your radar. This week we’re joined by Chris DeVille. Chris is the managing editor of the online music magazine Stereogum, where he's written about indie music for 12 years, and he's been a contributing writer for other outlets like The Atlantic, Rolling Stone and The Ringer. Now he has parlayed that expertise into a new book, Such Great Heights: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion, which explores the influx of vital music in the 21st century, as the industry underwent a massive upheaval that affected how people listened to music and altered the trajectory of many essential acts.

To that end, Chris has chosen the 2012 documentary Shut Up and Play the Hits, which is built around what was intended to be LCD Soundsystem's final show at Madison Square Garden in 2011. (The film is not streaming currently, but it's still available in physical form, including a three-disc Blu-ray that includes the entire three-and-a-half hour concert.) For more context on LCD and other essential millennial acts, Chris' book comes out on Tuesday. You can go here for more information on it.

It feels silly in retrospect. It was maybe a bit pompous in the moment—the arch-hipster electronic rock band LCD Soundsystem throwing a lavish farewell concert at Madison Square Garden and making a contemplative documentary about it—but the semi-tragic endeavor started to seem more like a farce when, less than five years later, LCD were back onstage at their first reunion show. That reunion has now gone on longer than the band’s original run, a fact for which I remain grateful. Just last weekend I saw LCD perform outdoors on a breezy late-summer night, and they were as electric as ever. But man, does that arc change the context around Shut Up and Play the Hits.

Band mastermind James Murphy, who’d parodied his own pursuit of music-nerd clout on the 2002 debut single “Losing My Edge,” made it a point to go out on top for legacy-preservation reasons, breaking up LCD after three brilliant albums and a decade of exhilarating live shows rather than risk going stale. “It’s ending in a strangely controlled manner,” journalist and author Chuck Klosterman tells Murphy in one of the interview segments woven throughout the film. Yet even in 2011, when the movie was filmed, the maestro was clearly conflicted. You can see it in the interview, as Murphy speculates that LCD’s biggest mistake might be “stopping” and wonders aloud whether fear is his real motivation for pulling the plug. The ambivalence hangs just as thick in the scenes of Murphy ambling about on the morning after the big gig, still wearing his tuxedo, seeming lost and listless. When he tells Klosterman he’s matured past the point of "panicking about image-maintenance,” all you can do is roll your eyes.

The concert footage — captured vividly by directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace, channeling classics of the form like The Last Waltz and Stop Making Sense — underlines what a dynamo Murphy was needlessly giving up. That's the primary reason to watch Shut Up and Play the Hits and to pick up the three-disc physical edition that includes the full concert: Seeing this band burn through disco-punk heaters like “Yeah” and new wave anthems like “Dance Yrself Clean” never ceases to be a thrill. But it’s the non-performance scenes that make the movie a perfect bookend to go along with “Losing My Edge”: a portrait of a guy whose adherence to his arbitrary doctrines of cool subverted one of his greatest sources of joy.