Too bad you weren't there!

On James Murphy's "Losing My Edge", Claude Lévi-Strauss and the necessity of mourning one's being-too-late

Popular music is full of seminal moments and places that made history. But you know what's too bad? You probably weren't there for any of them! And even the lucky weren't lucky enough to be there for all of them. With one famous exception, of course: James Murphy in Losing My Edge. He was there, he says, while cycling through increasingly hyper-specific music-historical events. Murphy has said that the song was his satirical take on the experience of coming across much younger DJs playing older records he felt were "his". How do you know about that? But, perhaps it could also be read as a song of mourning desire; an expression of all the seminal times and places he couldn't have been there for. When one gets into popular music, one always finds oneself already being born too late. Everything cool has already happened. The present seems dull in comparison. In fact, all of popular music history is one great chain of being-too-late. Today, we may wish we had been there for The Real Deal Punk, but those Punks themselves were wishing they had been there for The Real Deal Rock n' Roll, and those Rockers were wishing they had been there for The Real Deal Blues, and those Blues players probably were wishing they had been there, at the dawn of time, for The Real-Real Deal, when the folk was still primal and came from the people.

There is an unlikely figure that has written on this phenomenon of always-being-too-late: The great anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. His epochal Tristes Tropiques ("sad tropics") from 1955 is well-known for being a major work of 20th century anthropology and structuralism. But it is also one of the greatest travelogues ever written; one that centers around the sadness of never arriving anywhere at the right time, always already being too late. It is a perennial story every tourist knows. I bet so-and-so many years ago, this place was still authentic and not overrun with all those damn tourists! But Strauss is stubborn. He still heads into the thicket of the Amazonas with the anthropologist's dream of coming across The Real Deal: A not yet known, uncontacted native tribe. He does so despite really knowing - and mourning - that he is already arriving too late. Modern civilization has progressed even into the furthest wilderness, leaving nothing primal behind. He starts reflecting and concludes that he is just barely too late, that merely a generation before him, one could have still come across The Real Deal. Being too late is tragic, but being just barely too late is unfathomably worse. This is what the new ravers of '93 must have felt like, hearing that they had just barely missed The Real Deal of '91, when the E's were still magic and all the parties were nothing but one big family. But weren't those in '91 themselves already too late, had missed The Real Deal of the summer of '88, and so on? Lévi-Strauss reflects further and realizes that the generation before him must have also felt like they were already too late for The Real Deal, and so the generation before them, and the one before that ... In anthropology as in music, again, a great chain of always-being-too-late.

However, in Lévi-Strauss' case - through an act of sheer divine chance - there is an ironic climax. After months of searching, he does find The Real Deal he was looking for. He locates a new, uncontacted tribe. But by this time, he is exhausted and traveling all by himself. The tribe is friendly and lets him live among them for a while, but he does not know their language and does not have a translator. He has no access to the secrets of their cosmology and social structure that he was really after. He is there, but the there is mute, has nothing to say to him. There is nothing left for him to do but to head back home. Maybe, perhaps if he had reached them earlier, not so exhausted, not all by himself, he could have located a translator? Even actually being there, one ends up being-too-late and missing out. Nobody ever is on time. Is there not a similar irony in music? If you've ever tracked the first person accounts of people who were lucky enough to have been there in seminal moments of popular music history, you will have noticed something curious: Over time, as stories are told and retold, they become almost identical to the accounts of those that weren't there. For example, I doubt that at this point Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson really know what it was like to have been there, at the birth of Detroit techno. After almost forty years, what actually-happened is nothing but a small blip in the face of the myth constructed for all those who were too late.

Again, being late is all there is. The owl of Minerva only flies at dusk. The only proper response is to mourn one's lateness. But this process can also lead to other, new emotions. The most historically prominent being adolescent rage. Fuck you, mom and dad, for bringing me into such a lame present! I wish I had been there for The Real Deal. Well, since there's nothing else to do, I might as well make my own past, in the present. This is the birth of the Mods and just about every musical youth subculture ever since. Only out of mourning the intolerability of the present can something new emerge. The tragedy of being-too-late has always been the motor of popular music.

But it seems like something about this process has changed today. It is not the present. It is still intolerable. What's changed is the past. It used to be that the thing you mourned not-being-there-for was something already forgotten and discarded by your contemporaries. Like racoons, musical subcultures used to scavenge in the great Trashcan Of History. It is this this non-presence, this untimeliness or ungleichzeitigkeit that provided the past with a resistance to the present. When everyone is in the there-and-now, being in the too-late is an act of rebellion. It is precisely this that has been flattened today. Thanks to the internet, even things that used to be chronically forgotten or uncool are all there, probably venerated by their own little niche fan club. Nothing is forgotten, hidden-away, discarded or banished from the here and now. Imagine being a teenager today, really getting into music for the first time, opening up Spotify and YouTube. What are you presented with? A comprehensive, complete archive of everything that ever happened that you missed out on, that you weren't there for, no matter how unsubstantial or marginal. "I heard you have a compilation of every good song ever done by anybody...". Those in the past only had to mourn not-being-there for a few select things. They hadn't had the responsibility of having to mourn the entirety of recorded music's past. What an immense weight to suffer under! Perhaps, the only productive response is to engage in selective amnesia. There's no way to get around mourning. It is the condition of always being born-too-late. But perhaps one can excuse oneself out of this impossible task of mourning it all. Find the one thing you really wish you had been there for. Fuck all the rest. How do they relate to the present, how does this being-too-late make you feel, aside from being mournful? The task today is not to stop mourning our lateness. That is impossible. It is to take this mourning and to turn into something else.