The Scissor Sisters’ cover of “Comfortably Numb,” released in 2002, plays like both the band’s own thesis statement as well as a proposal for the aughts - but one that didn’t quite pan out. Covering Pink Floyd as insouciant disco was a reconfiguration of the 70s as they happened - what if disco wasn’t seen by the rock audience as a commercial cash-in, but as an artistic revolution to be embraced? - but also as they were understood at the time. In the 90s, the 70s were (happily! productively!) reinterpreted as a wellspring of innovative guitar music, with many of the alt/indie bands of the period taking their inspiration from formerly uncool classic rock bands. With “Comfortably Numb,” the Scissor Sisters proposed taking this one step further, embracing the ridiculous excesses of the period not as secretly respectable but as ridiculous and respectable, asking us to take a certain portion of “the 70s” as it was delivered at the time.
Instead, we got LCD Soundsystem. James Murphy’s reconstruction of many of those same 70s acts passed the period and the sound the same “secretly respectable” filter that inflected classic rock bands in the 90s. By isolating the most tasteful dance-inflected acts working around the turn of the decade (and then shouting their names), he found a way to make guitar music dancy without losing the tasteful, deliberate seriousness that always characterized the genre. I don’t think this is Murphy’s fault! I can’t imagine him disliking the Scissor Sisters, and he’s such an appealing figure in large part because he was clearly just following his nose with all this. (“Losing My Edge” is a really funny song, after all.) But around about the time people started to say the mawkish, cloying (but great!) “All My Friends” was the best song on Sound of Silver, I began to realize that my understanding of the band was, perhaps, not the same as the way most of their fans understood them.
And so the Scissor Sisters never really made it in America - though they do just fine for themselves - probably because they refused to take themselves too seriously, and America isn’t very good with humor in music. (They did great in the UK, a country so good with humor in music that they are subjected to things like Jedward.) The move they failed to kickstart in the early aughts happened instead in the latter half of the decade when the mainstream discovered Europop - I’ve always traced it to Timbaland’s 2007 hit “The Way I Are,” but I’m not claiming that as gospel or anything - but filtered through the more familiar influence of 90s dance rather than 70s disco. When Lady Gaga’s hyper-serious camp hit, it felt like a shoe we’d long forgotten about finally dropping. It’s hard to lament the failure of the aughts to follow up on “Comfortably Numb” too much given the way the early half of the decade blossomed into a dancy, poppy utopia. But it’s strange to hear now, ten years on. At the time it felt like such an inevitability, such a sure prediction. Now it just sounds like an anomaly.
(Above: the Scissor Sisters’ cover over the “Comfortably Numb” sequence from The Wall.)
