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I still can’t believe Roisin Murphy’s 2007 LP, Overpowered didn’t have the impact of other dance acts like Lilly Allen or M.I.A., but I suspect that’s due largely in part to the slow rehabilitation of disco as an genre of influence. For some, the image of thousands of people destroying disco LPs at radio personality, Steve Dahl’s, disco demolition still holds enough cultural power to keep disco in its place as some sort of decadent symbol of “establishment” pop. I hold out hope that artists like Murphy will erode the critical blindness involved in that kind of blanket gesture. Besides, old categories of the countercultural simply don’t map that easily onto what’s being done in the world of music today.
Murphy’s image has a certain retro-futurism, like a classic Hollywood starlet stumbling out of Bjork’s closet. Part of my fascination with this video stems from its naked self-deprecation. While many videos involve the realization of explosively egotistical fantasies of the artist as a supernatural being, Murphy sings the song to herself in a dingy diner. Sure, it’s a diner that happens to convert into a low rent mock-up of a Saturday Night Fever club, but does so only in her head. The patrons ignore her coquettish posturing on the furniture and continue on about their business. The video is a tongue-in-cheek contrast between reality and fantasy: eating alone versus starring in your own crisply choreographed “fuck off” song. Murphy excels in strangely compatible moods, like the four-to-floor dance single that’s full of melancholic loss and solitude. “Know Me Better” is essentially a daydream of how we all wish we handled painful break-ups: with unflappable independence, style, stride and humor. Walter Mitty meet Giorgio Moroder.
