Moments before LCD Soundsystem opened their final show with a cover of 10cc’s “I’m Not In Love” (we’re huge 10cc fans over here, as are Daft Punk, whose “Da Funk” LCD would also go on to briefly cover that evening), the blacked-out Madison Square Garden looked like a constellation of cell phone screens, some galaxy of creatures filtering their existence through disembodying machines of anti-self. Everyone holding their respective phones in the air to document and broadcast their having been there, which is valued by many beyond the actual experience of existing. Especially on a night when overlords of cool hang up their holsters and twitter is a thing that’s happened to everyone. It took perhaps a grand total of ten minutes of James Murphy et. al. engorging everyone’s pituitary glands through sheer the-fuck-out rocking to get people to forget about their phones, their bodies, themselves, and become all of us a giant, biological hydraulic unified hoard, throbbing as one, sweating like it hasn’t just been six months of Winter, howling and headbanging and swarming in a rare ritual unison like aboriginals of a New York we love and pretend we invented. A stadium of humans collectively lost their shit, and the Garden suddenly seemed very small and intimate, because the entire world was temporarily reduced to only what was going on within that stadium, which was a fuck ton of jumping up and down. I’d be interested in seeing an average of how much time everyone spent in the air, and if that qualifies as human flight. People cried. People frenched. For nearly four hours, everyone was very much so in the moment. It was the opposite of the internet. Especially for the band, who, after five nights of send-off shows, showed no lack of energy, enthusiasm, or this-is-it-ness. The last hour of the show nearly killed everyone. At some point I expected the stage to explode, or everyone’s hearts, which you could almost hear the communal pulse of, going: yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. When Murphy said, “this is our last song,” and everyone booed then cheered, the fact that he was biding farewell over the Twin Peaks theme song was perfectly apropos, as the love, appreciation, and devotion screamed from the crowd’s mouth was the antithesis of evil. Then, to no one’s surprise, they played, “New York I Love You,” and LCD Soundsystem ceased to be. Or at least that’s what they say. And we hope they stick to it. Fuck the industry. Save the legacy.

Photography Olivia Harris