NY Excuse

The device

Opening single from Any Minute Now (PIAS, 2004). Production: Flood (U2, Depeche Mode, PJ Harvey). The track is composed after a series of Stephen Dewaele ↔ Nancy Whang back-and-forths — Whang being keyboardist and vocalist of LCD Soundsystem and The Juan MacLean, based in New York. The title is not a metaphor. It names exactly what it tells: a pretext for New York.

Structure of the lyrics — the admission as slogan

Three-verse pop-rock form with chorus, bridge, final chorus. The lyrics turn around a central repeated image:

“This is the excuse that we’re making / Is it good enough for what you’re paying?”

Read without context, these lines sound vaguely critical — someone negotiating, apologising poorly. With context, they become literal: Stephen Dewaele is asking his label (PIAS) to pay for a trip to New York to see his girlfriend Nancy Whang. The text says: here is the pretext we’re giving you; is it good enough to justify what you’re paying?

James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem) reportedly advised the Dewaeles to call the track by its real name, “NY Excuse” — not to hide behind metaphor. The pretext becomes the title. The admission becomes the song.

The procedure — the track as logistics

What makes NY Excuse singular in the Soulwax catalog is that the song exists for an extra-musical reason. One usually writes a song because one has something to say. Here, one writes a song so that someone pays for a plane ticket. The sentimental motive (see Nancy in NY) triggers the musical act.

The song is therefore, strictly, a pretext that held. The label pays for the ticket. Stephen goes. The track becomes a single. The LCD Soundsystem / Nancy Whang collaboration deepens — a year later, Whang will sing on E Talking (Nite Version), which will become the duo’s biggest radio success. The fiction of the pretext proves productive.

The derived versions — the system in motion

As often with the Dewaeles, the track does not stay in one form. It generates a family of versions that all comment on the original.

• NY Excuse (Day Version) — 2004, Any Minute Now album. The standard “song” version, around 4 minutes, pop-rock structure. The one released as single, with video.
• NY Excuse (Nite Version) — 2005, Nite Versions album. Full self-remix by the Dewaeles: pushed tempo, extended bridge, DJ-friendly intro, voice treated differently. The track shifts from song format to set format.
• NY Excuse (Fast Version) — circulates as B-side and on compilations, sped up even more than the Nite Version. Tested in DJ sets.
• NY Excuse (Extended) — long version available on some editions, around 8 minutes.
• Live 2017 onwards — replayed with the From Deewee arrangements (nine musicians in a circle), the track takes a third life: live-electronic-rock instead of studio-dance-punk.

This version system is not ornament. It is consistent with the Soulwax thesis: a track is not a finished object but material that can be run through the studio chain again. NY Excuse therefore exists, strictly, in the plural. The “canonical version” does not exist — there is a tree of versions, all equally legitimate.

The arrangement (Day Version)

Tempo ~128 BPM. Minor key (E minor by ear [TO VERIFY]). Saturated counter-chant guitar, dominant syncopated funk-punk bass, frontal live drums, Juno- or Moog-type synth lead on the chorus. Stephen Dewaele’s voice rapped-sung, direct to mic, unprocessed. Flood production: broad stereo space, unified compression, dry grain. Mix lets every instrument remain legible without crushing — stays rock in its make, even though the rhythmic grid already thinks club.

Lineage and resonances

Upstream: contemporary New York dance-punk — The Rapture (House of Jealous Lovers, 2002), Radio 4, LCD Soundsystem itself (Losing My Edge, 2002). Soulwax arrive from the Belgian flank, but the DFA/NY ecosystem is their focal point. NY Excuse is also, on the affective level, an homage to that ecosystem — New York is not just any city, it’s the city where the scene Soulwax admire lives.

Downstream: the Dewaele ↔ Whang collaboration settles durably. E Talking (Nite Version) (2005) with Whang’s vocal added becomes their biggest single (#27 UK). The Soulwax LCD Soundsystem remixes (Get Innocuous!, 2007) come from that friendship. Ten years later, Nancy Whang will admit in an interview that she dislikes her own voice on NY Excuse — a woman in a bar once told her “that’s you on NY Excuse!” and she wanted to hide.

Reading under the permanences

Permanence 1 — The DJ-set thinks the album: NY Excuse is the perfect example of the family of versions. A song does not reduce to its radio version. It unfolds in Day Version, Nite Version, Fast Version, Extended, Live. The DJ-set thinks the album because the DJ grammar — you can always remix, rearrange, extend, speed up — applies to the work itself. There is never a “final version”.

Permanence 2 — Friction as writing: double friction. Musical friction (rock + club + funk + pop) already analysed. But also, rarer: friction between music and life. The song is a true pretext. It explicitly lies (it’s the chorus’s subject) while saying exactly what it does. This transparency is part of the Dewaele method — hide nothing of the gesture, own the fabricated and sometimes cynical character of a pop song. Murphy was right: calling the track by its name is more honest than inventing a metaphor.

Why this track and not another: NY Excuse is the track that connects the Any Minute Now era to the New York LCD/DFA circle. Without this collaboration, no Nancy Whang on E Talking. Without Nancy Whang on E Talking, no #27 UK. Without #27 UK, no mainstream recognition that unlocks the canonical remix catalog (LCD Get Innocuous!, MGMT Kids, Robbie Williams Lovelight). The entire 2004-2012 remix decade begins, in a way, with a plane ticket paid by a Belgian label to join a New York keyboardist. The logistics-song had lasting musicological effects.

Critique + listening — biographical context source: Stephen Dewaele interview for Clash Magazine; Nancy Whang interview for Self-Titled Magazine