Rob Sheffield Answers Your Questions

If you had to choose one song to sum you up — one song as your kind of anthem of the moment — what would it be?

LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends." I first heard this at their Bowery Ballroom show in March — also the first time I ever heard "North American Scum" or "Someone Great" or "No Love Lost." (That was quite a night.) He's just trying to rewrite David Bowie's "Heroes," an impossible feat nobody else would be daft enough to try, yet the way it builds and builds, going nowhere, with all these stupid sentimental howls and disco keyboards and only one chord if I'm counting right — well, it just kills me. Franz Ferdinand's version is almost as great.

I've seen LCD Soundsystem do this song in different settings, from Coachella to Greenpoint's Studio B, but it always tells me something good. The words don't make much linear sense but they're not supposed to. One thing about Irish guys — they sure do like to get drunk and miss their friends and say dumb things like "We set controls for the heart of the sun, it's one of the ways we show our age" or "if they ask about Charlemagne, be polite and say something vague" or "I wish I could escape from the old main drag" or "my aim is true" or "if I venture in the slipstream, between the viaducts of your dream." I guess it's in our DNA. Anyway, I never get sick of this song and I'll play it the rest of my life whenever I want to remember 2007, which I will.