I recently watched Noah Baumbach's film White Noise , which is described as an absurdist comedy-drama, based on the book by Don DeLillo. For me it was a David Lynch-like obscurantist meh-fest, yet with some delightful fluffy retro feels. Every time Adam Driver opened his mouth though, my inner Ewok kept screaming “You killed Han Solo” to the extent that it over-rode any critical appreciation of the film. The whole gig was rescued at the end by the minutely choreographed supermarket dance scene set to the track New Body Rhumba by LCD Soundsystem.
New Body Rhumba , the first single LCD have created in four years, has already been nominated by Critics' Choice Movie Awards (Best Song), North Dakota Film Society, Music City Film Critics Association, North Carolina Film Critics Association, Pandora International Film Critics , Chicago Indie Critics (all for Best Original Song) and Hollywood Music in Media Awards (Best Original Song in a Feature Film). No doubt it will be nominated for more film music awards, and might even win one of them at some point unless it dies of nomination-suffocation syndrome.
Whilst others have referred to its post-modern punky anti-capitalist lyrics, I was more flabbergasted by the great similarity of New Body Rhumba to the music of the B52s. And weirdly enough, whilst it is generally agreed that the B52s don't get enough credit for their services to punk-kind, it transpires that James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem founder) voiced this very opinion during a 2013 Red Bull Music Academy Lecture. So, tell me if he didn't at least once think to himself 'hey am I writing an 80's style B52s tribute song here?'. I would have no complaints if he did.
