[Writer's note: I look blearily at my list of questions.] Shit, this is getting harder.
Not only are my answers going to get blurrier, but the questions are going to get blurrier! [
Laughs.] I’m really enjoying watching it.
The “Irish Cunt” plays a prominent role in LCD lore. What is an Irish Cunt?
It’s a glass of champagne with a shot of Jameson poured into it. Sometimes it’s not a glass. Or a shot. It works though. It’s better than you think.
When was the last time you drank an Irish cunt?
A long time ago. I’m gonna say it was 2008. I don’t drink whiskey anymore.
Have they been phased out?
Yes. We can’t take it anymore. It’s just too much…or we’re not enough.
What’s your drunk tell?
My drunk tell is I tell really really long winded stories.
[
Mrs. Whang is fiddling with her straw and some of the drink spills.]
What just happened there?
I wanted to change the shape [of the straw], but the liquid that I trapped came out. [
Laughs.]
[
Nancy turns to the photographer and says, "
You wanna get in on some of this?" The photographer responds, "Yeah, we have enough pictures."]
Meet your heroes or don’t meet your heroes?
No way, never. Aside from Grace Jones, who I think is just Grace Jones all the fucking time, people are just people, and you kinda don’t want your heroes to be real people—you want them to be your heroes. The only time that I’ve ever met anybody who I’ve been starstruck with—and I honestly continue to be starstruck—are the Beastie Boys. They contributed to why I moved to New York, which sounds absurd, but not really.
Didn’t they have something to do with the formation of LCD?
James played basketball with Adam Horowitz, and Adam gave James this boombox that had a little built-in drum machine. One of the beats from that drum machine is the beat from “Losing My Edge.”
Are you afraid of losing your edge?
I never really had an edge to lose. I’ve been having a lot of conversations lately about what it means to be cool, and I don’t really know how to define it. It’s like porn—I know it when I see it. I like the idea of being cool. I would like to be cool, but I also don’t think I’m cool. And our band isn’t cool. Really we’re not. We’re just a bunch of fucking nerds. We’re like substitute teachers hanging out in the teacher’s lounge.
In Meet Me in the Bathroom, the new book by Lizzie Goodman about the early 2000s music scene in New York, James says, "We wish we’d been around at the Factory, but if we were at the Factory we’d be like, 'Oh, this is so boring and these people are so rude and what is that band the Under-somethings?'" What do you make of that?
I don’t think that’s true. When we were doing what we were doing at the time, we all looked at each other and we’re like, “This is AWESOME. What we’re doing is FUCKING AMAZING. This is so much better than what ANYONE was doing before. This is THE SHIT. This is THE NEW shit. We’re fucking making it happen.”
Does your family understand what you do? [Writer’s note: The following story has been edited for length.] My parents have no fucking idea what I do, what it means, none of that. My brothers know what I do, they know what it means, but they have an inflated view of what it all is.
A week and a half ago, I was in Portland visiting my family. My brothers and my dad still live in Portland. so I was over at my brother’s house. My brothers were like, “Dad, did you know Nancy was on national television?” My brother had it on-demand, so they played it for him on TV. And he sat there in the living room watching this thing. And like, he doesn’t know what the fuck
SNL is. He sees just that there’s a TV and I’m on it. And he’s like, “Oh yeah, there she is.”
I remember being in a cab going to one of our last shows, and everyone in the band had invited their families, and I invited
no one from my family. It occurred to me that I should probably let my dad know what’s going on, so I called him, like, “Hey dad, I’m headed to one of our last shows. We’re gonna play at Madison Square Garden, and then we’re retiring.” And he goes, “Oh ok, hope you’re good, talk to you later.” He doesn’t give a shit and it’s fine, it’s totally fine! I know what I’m doing. He has no idea, but it doesn’t matter…
Back to Portland last week: we went out to dinner. He wanted to go to Red Lobster. I said, “No. There’s gotta be something better.” So I took him to this other place in Portland—really good, he loved it, he loved all the food.
But
really the thing that stuck with him the most—that really impressed him—was I paid for dinner. I did it on the sly, like I gave my credit card to the server, and he tried to pay for dinner, and the server was like, “No, you’re daughter took care of it.” He was
beside himself. He
couldn’t believe that
not only could I afford to pay for dinner for
myself, but I bought
him dinner. I don’t think my dad has ever been more proud of me in my whole fucking life than when I paid for dinner—and it wasn’t even really that expensive! [Cracking up] In fact, I think it would have been less than Red Lobster!
And
then, we’re trying to leave, and he was
over the moon. He goes to the servers, and he was like, “My daughter just paid for my dinner! She plays in this band called LCD Soundsystem!”