James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem was just on Terry Gross. He sounded intelligent, but his music did not. I replaced it with the steely wonder of Kenny Loggins' Celebrate Me Home, which I bought yesterday from the 25¢ bin at Strange Maine. It is a masterpiece of human disco: soulful, musically literate, and perfectly matched to the embodied imagination. Do we dare to ask: what happened to popular music (& its audience & its press) between 1977 and today? And what happened to our bodies, such that LCD Soundsystem can be felt as dance music?

I began this post with the intention to compare James Murphy with Ryan Power of Burlington, VT, who makes dance pop the way Murphy does—alone when recording at home, then on stage with his friends—but who (like Loggins and unlike Murphy) seems to know everything Stevie Wonder knows, and who is in general a really important piece of evidence that the human being has not died and that the human being has not ceased to make music; this comparison seems extremely necessary now that I see that LCD Soundsystem's new album is called This Is Happening, a timely and frighteningly apocalyptic answer to the question posed by Ryan's last album, Is It Happening? Please watch Ryan's band play the title track.