Photo by Flickr user lincoln-log.

D.C.’s favorite sons The Dismemberment Plan have reunited and will play a series of highly-anticipated concerts this weekend. To mark the occasion, we’ve asked members of our staff to pick their favorite Dismemberment Plan tune and write a post about it. We’ll have an entry every day for the rest of this week. Today: film critic Ian Buckwalter on “The Dismemberment Plan Gets Rich.”

I got to know the Dismemberment Plan one afternoon late in 1999. I was, as usually seems to be the case with me, late to the band, and I’d not yet heard them when I picked up Emergency & I. I just needed some new music to accompany the painting of a bedroom in my dim Adams Morgan basement apartment. My poor painting skills had two results that day: the CD cover ended up flecked with sprays of errant paint — which remain there 11 years later – and I ended up a huge fan of the Plan, having left the disc on repeat for the entirety of a project that took longer than I’d care to admit.

Now, for all of Emergency & I‘s undeniable genius, and despite having the songs from that record burrowed deep into the folds of my brain over all those repeated listens that afternoon and in the years since, there’s still one song by the band that I probably go back to more than all the others – and it’s not on that record. It’s “The Dismemberment Plan Gets Rich,” a bizarre success fantasy set to manic, video-game funk that appeared on their 2000 split-EP with Juno.