Easy Street: Rufus Wainwright on Second Avenue.   (Photo: Michael Lavine)

Rufus Wainwright
Holden Caulfield Was Never Like This
The singer as seeker.

Talk about the duality of man: Rufus Wainwright can evoke both heartbreaking innocence and startling debauchery within just a few lines of a song. His new album, Want One (out this week), was written as he got over a drug habit: “I had to go through my own personal September 11 and heal myself a little bit,” he says. “So I seem to be in the same biorhythm as this city.”
MY KIND OF TOWN: “I have to live in New York for many reasons: I like eating food at two in the morning, I’m gay, and I’m totally addicted to architecture. I used to come to New York on the weekends. I went to Millbrook, and a lot of my friends had Park Avenue apartments. So I’d come here as much as I could to check out everybody’s private elevators. I think my first impression of New York was that it was really gay. I didn’t quite know what it was at the time, but I definitely remember it being very sexually charged.”
LET’S DO THE TIME WARP: “One goes through a lot of time warps in this city. You can hang out with Edith Wharton, and then spend the afternoon with Dorothy Parker—or you can go to Starbucks. I first lived on Park and 82nd, with a Broadway producer, a couple. I lived in the maid’s room and would do errands for them and play piano at their cocktail parties. It was a very Six Degrees of Separation lifestyle. I was also working at the Film Forum and at the Lion’s Head. A lot of my feeling then was a sort of Holden Caulfield Waspy alienation. I would wander alone around the West Village, around Bleecker Street, and go to Caffe Reggio. It was a bit lonely. But I got that full dose of the uptown society women getting really drunk and hitting on me and telling me that they liked anal sex, too. That was kind of interesting.”
BABY, PLEASE DON’T GO: “I moved to L.A. to do my first record, but after my second one, I moved back to New York in earnest and stayed in the Chelsea Hotel for about a year. I started playing gigs at bars—as in just drinking with friends. I really do believe that socializing in New York is itself kind of a performance. I was here after 9/11. I was maybe gonna move to Paris, and the kind of reaction I got was, Please don’t leave, we need you! And I think that’s in a weird way where you’ve got to live, where you’re needed. And we live in kind of a damaged place, so part of this is an obligation. And part of it is, you know, the center of the world. At times. It’s the center of all of the bullshit of the world, too.”
FAVORITE THINGS: For live music, the Bottom Line, Fez, the Living Room, and Arlene’s Grocery. For home listening, “Radiohead’s new album is great. I like Sigur Rós when I can’t sleep. And my sister, Martha, is an undervalued, underappreciated artist right now. She should have her fair share.” For eating, Souen. For going out, “I used to love the Cock, but I haven’t gone there in a long time. I’m trying to move up in that department. I love Chez Es Saada on East 1st Street. Veselka seems to be timeless for me. And you definitely need to be somewhere timeless when you’re drinking a lot of coffee.”

James Murphy
This Ain’t No Disco
LCD Soundsystem’s star succeeds by staying small.

James Murphy is contemplating the coming backlash. He’s standing over the most recent issue of Time Out New York, which rests on a fold-out table in his label’s crowded corner office on West 13th Street. A review of a new album by the Rapture—DFA’s premier band—ends with the line “The backlash starts here.”

Murphy, whose band LCD Soundsystem skewers the cool crowd’s pretensions, relishes the dis as song fodder. “I’m working on a song called ‘Here Comes the Backlash,’ ” he says, laughing, “so this is perfect.” He then turns slightly serious. “The backlash thing is so easy,” he explains. “I mean, I love the Strokes. I know that ten years from now, I’ll be barbecuing for my kids in a KISS THE COOK APRON and a Strokes record will come on the radio and I’ll be like, ‘Yeah, that was great.’ And then I’ll say, ‘Don’t hit your sister!’ ” He doubles over laughing.

It’s this sly, self-lacerating sense of humor that made LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge” one of the best singles of 2002. In the song, Murphy plays a past-his-prime hipster (himself before DFA took off, Murphy says) who spins one exaggerated tale of coolness after another. But it’s Murphy and partner Tim Goldsworthy’s inventive remixes and productions for bands like the Rapture, Le Tigre, and Metro Area that have made DFA the New York scene’s most in-demand producers.

The basement recording studios are packed haphazardly with vintage musical instruments like “Fun Machine,” a keyboard from the seventies that makes Kraftwerkesque sounds. An adjoining room is for recording “disco hand claps.” This sense of musical sprawl is the key to the DFA’s unique sound, which is simultaneously disco, punk, funk. And it’s why stars like Janet Jackson are calling: “She said [affects whispery Jackson voice], ‘I like your sound. It’s simple and it’s funky.’ ” Murphy worries, though. “With the big artists, it’s [affects gruff manager’s voice]: ‘She’ll be there from two to four. Make something funky.’ I can’t do that.”

This ethic means that a major-label deal for DFA is probably out of the question, too. “This is a real democracy,” he explains. “Any one of us can refuse to do something, even without a valid reason. Our goals are modest. I want to own a home, not rent a Hummer. We can do this forever as long as we keep our heads straight.” —Ethan Brown

Kathleen Hanna
Hanna and Her Sisters
In NYC, girls rule too.

The original riot grrrl, Kathleen Hanna moved to New York from Olympia, Washington (by way of North Carolina), in 1998, the same year her hugely influential feminist rock band Bikini Kill broke up. Since then, her music as the leader of electronic act Le Tigre, which mixes fun, danceable beats with savvy lyrics straight out of Queer Theory 101, has been no less political. But Hanna—who lives in the West Village with her longtime boyfriend, Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz—can most often be found relaxing over a game of Scrabble or squiring her beloved dog Freddy around town.
ART ROCK “I took the train up to go to Apex Art to see this Laura Cottingham movie about seventies feminist art called Not for Sale,” says Hanna. “It’s my total thing, being obsessed with seventies feminist art—and eighties and nineties. It was ten hours from Durham to New York, and I went and saw it five times. I was like, I have to move to New York because I have to be near this.”
HER FIRST TIME “I was in Bikini Kill, and I remember being like, Oh, yeah, this is CBGB’s, I’ve read about this in books, it’s supposed to be this big deal. And then backstage was the size of a phone booth covered in vomit, and I was like, This is the fabulous CBGB’s? And everyone there was so rude.”
SUB POP “One time I was going out to that Mermaid Festival in Coney Island. I was wearing my bikini and I had my headphones on, and it was one of those perfect moments when the subway comes up out of the ground and the light hits you in the face. I knew I was going to the beach and I was going to ride a roller coaster and I was really excited. That moment is what I write for. I want to write the perfect thing to be on someone’s headphones when they come out of the subway into the light.”