FRESH AIR
When LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy attended live concerts, he says he always felt like there was something missing. “I’d start to see bands prioritize things wrong in my mind,” he tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “[They weren’t] prioritizing the momentness of a show or the physical experience of a show. Instead, they [were] prioritizing making sure they didn’t make mistakes or prioritiz[ing] trying to faithfully represent a prerecorded piece of material.” When Murphy hit his early 30s, he says he decided that he would stop complaining and instead make his argument for better live music by composing and performing his own compositions. The result, LCD Soundsystem, combines a funky mix of dance music, pop, electronic tracks, indie rock and disco, along with other experimental styles. Murphy, who had worked as a DJ and party promoter, began the group in 2002 with the humorous eight-minute single “Losing My Edge.” It is an anthem, he says, to growing older and realizing that musical styles change with generations.
RADIO TIMES
JESSICA STERN directs Harvard Law School’s terrorism program; she’s one of the world’s foremost experts on religious terrorism, militant jihadism and post-traumatic stress disorder, and last appeared on Radio Times in January to discuss efforts to “deradicalize” terrorists. Jessica Stern is also a survivor of a brutal rape, as she reveals for the first time in her new book, Denial: A Personal Memoir of Terror. Jessica was 15, her sister 14, in 1973 when a stranger broke into their home and raped them for over an hour. He left, and was never caught. Three decades later, after a career that has taken her into some of the world’s most dangerous places, a devoted police detective reopened her case, and she opened her own investigation. Along the way, she confronted her own post-traumatic stress disorder, and much, much more.