Meet Me In The Bathroom - Please Kill Me but if Iggy was Julian Casablancas

Some mentions of this on other threads but no dedicated thread.

It's a strange book - very readable but it keeps running back to this point of 'and the Strokes/Interpol/YYYs were about to be the biggest band in the world.' In my head, the '00s NYC rock thing was mostly a bust, a last gasp for rock that just showed that rap/R&B had taken over as the language of American youth culture. 17 years on and new bands don't seem terribly influenced by any of it, they're still looking back to the bands that influenced the Strokes/etc.

Still barely halfway through, I'm wondering if the tragedy/failure will start to make itself known.

Ha! As it happens, I read about twenty pages of the end at the Strand a couple hours ago, and, yeah, many of those interviewed are aware that Antics or the first Strokes album might've gone double platinum in 1996 but not in the peculiar interzone created by Napster lasting from 2001 through 2004, the year when Billboard allowed iTunes downloads to count toward sales.

thought this was pretty average. boring NYC exceptionalism, boring "ROCK AND ROLL" sex and drugs stories, inclusion of random bands that didn't really seem to fit the "scene" near the end of the book.

Our Bathroom Could Be Your Life
Yeah no

oh yah i picked this up and flipped through a couple months ago. looked bad. i was going to make some stupid poll out of the back cover but didn't

http://i68.tinypic.com/2po9zsg.jpg

we gotta use every sans-serif weight we got

poor Andy Greenwald, hemmed in by Fischerspooner and Mark Ronson

ilx 2018. regibno spekulor. jhaz whipe. intrpoolk.

tbf, Regina Spektor's album from last year was better than just about anything else tied directly to the narrative of the book

Well, the back cover is an abomination, at any rate.

i think plenty of newer bands are influenced by The Strokes

Great book; i burned through it stupid fast; it's a god 100 pages too long but hey what isn't.

They handed out these little sample-chapters at the Interpol UK shows last year; the 2001-2002 Interpol chunk basically, cute idea.

There's been talk of a 4 part TV documentary show but also a biopic?! Or at least that's what Lizzy Goodman's WTF episode seemed to hint at.

Crtl-Fing the book for cocaine would be embarrassing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NHmwmqB_H0

want everyone to listen to julian's band's bonkers new single

I loved this book but I'm a massive fan of the first 2 Interpol albums so I tore through the book. Enjoyed it a lot, but I also love rockstar bathos & 90s/00s NYC stuff so ymmv.

was anybody gay?

not unless you count drunken Julian tonguing dues on flea-covered sofa

dudes

close enough

ed droste

well yeah, i'm looking for news

That new Voidz single is actually pretty great.

Nice, a worse version of Britpop nostalgia.

I love how the back cover includes both "The White Stripes" and "Jack White."

'00 NYC, the ultimate scene that celebrates itself. I know multiple people who were in or around bands in NY at this time, and reading the book they were all basically left scratching their heads.

Most egregious omission from the book is Animal Collective, especially considering Grizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors, Black Dice are all mentioned or covered extensively in the latter half of the book. They're not even mentioned once. I asked LG about this, she said there were a lot of bands that were left out, not everyone could fit in. And that does make sense to me in a way, since AC have always been kind of a "nowhere" band: they grew up in Baltimore County, always said "hey we're Animal Collective from Baltimore, Maryland" at live shows, but by the time they took off, Panda Bear was already in Lisbon and Geologist was in DC. Also they were pretty insular, didn't really do the whole bar-crawling / let's hang out in a loft and do ecstasy thing. Nevertheless, they are inextricable from the sound of late 00s indie music that the latter half of the book is about.

she should've maybe just written a memoir about hanging out with interpol and the strokes instead of trying to make it a survey of the scene or whatever

what is conor oberst doing on that back cover when LCD soundsystem isn't

Search: Yeah Yeah Yeahs' It's Blitz! and all the White Stripes albums.

Destroy: the rest - and yeah, let's include Animal Collective.

xp - LCD Soundsytem and the DFA guys are interviewed as much as the Strokes/Interpol people, maybe they're on the front cover since people care about them more these days.

were the white stripes considered a part of this??? i guess i don't really think of them in that regard, esp cuz they formed in 97 and were on Sympathy for the Record Industry

Listened to the Lizzy Goodman WTF episode and it was pretty funny when she said the White Stripes weren't in the first wave with The Strokes/Interpol, which is sort of true since they had already broken out before any of those.

yeah their first album i heard about from a friend that was into more bands the makers and oblivions and stuff like that, like mid/late 90s garage stuff, estrus records etc

their major label debut came out the same month as Is This It & they both broke thru to the mainstream via MTV that same fall.

yeah i'm sure that was fun for u normies

I guess not everyone had a college roommate talking about the White Stripes a bunch before then maybe

De Stijl was already available across the country and there was a lot of 'indie' buzz a year before that. I was in Texas and had already heard about/owned albums by the White Stripes (and the Mooney Suzuki, Dirtbombs, other garage rock bands lost to my mind) way before the English press started promoting the Strokes.

Seems weird the White Stripes would be included in this cuz they could actually write a song.

fb is correct, white stripes were definitely poppin off in 2001

for us normies

I'm just kidding btw, the White Stripes totally can't write a song

They are the only group from this era with a decent drummer tho

I lived here all that time and was still going to a lot of shows til 2002 or so... While I was a sucker for the Moldy Peaches' whimsy and lo-finesse, otherwise the only *wow* moment I had was seeing the Yeah Yeah Yeahs open for someone at the Mercury Lounge and saying, "Well, that woman is a rock star."

I associate them most with said roommate, and the boyfriend of another friend from the mid-'00s complaining about his ex-bandmate selling a bunch of their gear to Jack White. I think he kept pointing at some picture in the Raconteurs album sleeve saying "that's my mixer!" all the time.

I apologize for clowning on these early 00s haricut bands, obv they did crucial work but don't take my word for it just listen to ...Gideon Yago

Gideon Yago, the Jimmy Fallon of MTV

Every generator gets the Kurt Loder they deserve

All those bands are like the inverse of the Eno quote: they may have had a lot of fans, but not a single person that listened to them was inspired to form a band.

Kurt Loder turning out to be a libertarian really bums me out

just look at his hitler haircut

warms my heart that Sway was the most successful survivor of that early 00s MTV News crew.

one of the only semi-listenable morning shows on radio is an accomplishment

he seems cool? I would be bummed out if it turned it he was not cool. Heather B is a hero

Sway rules

I meant that non-sarcastically! I usually hate listening to people talking on the way to work but Sway is one of the exceptions

hell yea

I thought y'all were talking about the Rae Smmemurd tune

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzYMOTVlpbQ

the Vic Mensa five fingers of death was so great

very readable (a la please kill me) but the historical framing is bunk. besides animal collective, there's no mention of oneida, jon spencer, girls against boys, yo la tengo, and many many others who'd explode her conceit that there was nothing going on in NYC besides the mooney suzuki until the strokes came along. the closest she approaches =acknowledging how big a deal NYC was in the *rock world* pre-strokes is tallying daniel kessler's various failed bids to get matador to release interpol's music -- without considering the implications of the biggest indie label in the country HQing in the city she's written off as a dead scene

were you going to list bands that were blowing up the scene and had a reach outside cmj and forgot or...

cntrl-F Ryan Adams for kinda lol mostly sad I bet

Jon Spencer is in it, though only in the context of touring with YYYs (suspicious he was more critical in the raw interview about YYYs asking to not play some nights because they didn't feel good) and commenting on the realization that these bands were not his peers but a solid generation younger.

I've slowed down the last couple of nights and read other stuff so I haven't gotten to Ryan Adams yet. Thought it was pretty weird that the 9/11 chapters didn't mention his "New York New York" video at all.

about YYYs asking to not play some nights because they didn't feel good

wut?

lol no one feels good you're in a rock band

Karen O came up to Spencer in his dressing room and asked if it would be okay if they didn't play that night, he said "uh, sure" and in my head his head exploded after she left the room

jon spencer isn't that much older than james murphy, and from the look of things, in much better shape

i wonder what james mcnew, scott mcloud, and johnny temple thought of stewart lupton

murray street 4ever

the best sy album, and rain on tin is the best thurston song, because he only sings for the first thirty seconds, and then just eight minutes of glorious guitar harmonies. thank god for jimo

Boss Hog still sounded great on their KEXP appearance last year, never got around to listening to the new album

love Murray Street

ended up reading this last week and I felt my bias toward the music I actually cared about

I was never really a Strokes or Interpol fan and this is very much a book about those two with other things woven in, to mixed results. the next two subjects, DFA Records and the yeah yeah yeahs, I did care about, and there is some good material although the interview snippets are juxtaposed in a way that makes for good reading but have huge tonal shifts from line-to-line when the quotes are from disparate transcriptions

there is an entirely different memoir that could be constructed from the blog/photo site/party material that gets shoved in the last part of the book. I understand why it’s presented as a tangential thing to the book’s main theme but it really blows apart the beginning where you have mtv journalists and media personalities bemoaning their near-irrelevance before covering new nyc bands only to have their quotes disappear, supplemented by remembrances of people who suddenly have blog-promoted parties frequented by Madonna entering the narrative

searching to see what some people from the scene are up to now (social media expert for a pet food company?) was entertaining

doesn't ryan adams brag about getting someone hooked on heroin in this book

a lot of the ryan adams-related material is excerpted here by Vulture: https://www.vulture.com/2017/05/the-strokes-an-oral-history.html

he, uh, does not come off well

that was my memory

i remember reading that excerpt and thinking it was a weird, bad parody, not knowing there was a whole book of it. I still listen to the YYYs a lot. There is a good selection of songs to work out to.

there's an adams/strokes member (albert hammond jr)/heroin thing that comes up several times

so you don't have to read the book and I recently did, how I remember it:

- everyone is doing lots of coke and drinking all the time
- it's unclear whether he introduces Strokes guy (to heroin or just is a strong enabler -- Adams, of course, claims it's neither. Hammond's candid about how he had this preconception that he was definitely going to be a heroin dude and paints it as inevitable
- there's a weird-ass intervention where Adams shows up to a bar thinking it's going to be a hangout, and it's the entire band there. they tell him to fuck off and that they won't be hanging with him anymore. it's implied Casablancas was the lead instigator for this. Adams' recollection is he tried to calm everyone down, orders a round of beers and then went to the restroom, and when he returned they were all gone. he brags about then drinking all of the beer round by himself (wow, cool story dude)
- prior to that, there's this weird dynamic in the book where he comes off like he definitely acts like he's just as successful as his peers (he's not) but he's also cooler than them. there's this vibe that Casablancas just got tired of him -- from Adams' side it's as if the band felt threatened by him being the top dog or something

the other couple parts of the book that I kind of breezed over because they felt tacked on in order to flesh things out all the way to 2011ish and fill in the timeline: lots of stuff about Vampire Weekend, who don't quite fit with the narrative geographically or with their vibe, but are painted as somehow quintessentially a late-00s "brooklyn band" and an extended sidebar about Kings of Leon who toured with the Strokes and seem like these young dudes (a couple were in their mid teens?!) who end up getting inducted into this coke/sex/touring whirlwind that just sounds like a soul-sucking nightmare

I'm still mildly disappointed that the book failed to address a notable carlos d blog phenomena, but that's my own fault for being online too much

Kings of Leon who toured with the Strokes and seem like these young dudes (a couple were in their mid teens?!) who end up getting inducted into this coke/sex/touring whirlwind that just sounds like a soul-sucking nightmare

KOL or the Strokes?

KOL. I'm not a fan so I knew nothing about them but they're apparently all family and the feeling was that they were new to the fame and rock star lifestyle (ugh) having gotten into it several years after the Strokes so they're the ones being inducted

afaict the Strokes were all in their early/mid 20s at that point

he, uh, does not come off well

― we're far from the challops now (voodoo chili), Thursday, February 21, 2019 4:37 PM (nineteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's quite the understatement.

Striking resemblance with the recent allegations coming to light: here, too, he pulls the 'wow so sad they remember it that way because that's not what happened'.

Aside from DFA/LCD stuff, the self-titled YYYs EP is my favorite thing from this scene.

i would say they are probably the most influential if one had to be picked. Gah, they are so amazing live. It's so rare to go to a show of someone already well known and still be blown away.

was in a friend's car the other day and "date with the night" came on and that shit still takes heads off imo

I liked each of their albums more than the last, with It's Blitz! still tops. Goddamn that thing is a decade old!

a lot of the ryan adams-related material is excerpted here by Vulture: https://www.vulture.com/2017/05/the-strokes-an-oral-history.html

― we're far from the challops now (voodoo chili), Thursday, February 21, 2019 9:36 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's interesting how he also used a lot of the manipulative gaslighting from the recent stuff to his relationships with other dude rockers

i mean i know he denies it in these excerpts but i would suggests there's absolutely zero reason to believe anything he says

jack white's quote about how it was important that the white stripes had already had albums out in the underground scene and kind of knew who they were was important to their survival was good

Ryan Adams' entire career feels like gaslighting, i feel like his stature as a major player was the result of a con. he hadn't released an album anyone outside of his fanbase cared about in two decades.

I know people have been going over it back and forth on the R Adams thread but there are just some performers that I know are critical/fan beloved, but they just sound like nothing to me. I mentioned on the My So Called Life thread that Archers is another one of those. I can buy and hear their records and absolutely nothing sticks. I like Mandy Moore though

Adams was aggressively midtempo and used vintage equipment and sang about being sad so it must have been "authentic" is always how I interpreted his continuing fandom.

I listen to almost no Americana/alt-country anymore but some of the '90s Old 97's stuff came up on shuffle and it holds up so much better because Rhett Miller was funny.

re: Carlos D - Elizabeth Goodman couldn't get a single interview with him, not a word, and it's really unfortunate because as soon as she was wrapping up writing, Carlos D started giving long, wistful, regretful interviews, real personal shit. She just missed him. I read this book mostly for Interpol juice and got it. Yeah, Ryan Adams pops up in a lot of chapters and comes off like a real scumbag. Never cared about him.

I was just skimming his top tracks and totally forgot about New Yorkx2. This is such basic older brother music. I guess things like the Jawhawks would fill that niche for me. Also not really a modern americana fan I guess.

I hope it's not lost in all this how completely amazing Lydia Loveless is and if you haven't listened to alt country stuff for a long time do yourself a favor

R Adams seems like such a rando to be in that book. But then I remembered he was dating Parker Posey around that time so I guess he was around.

yeah he's just sort of around the whole book, iirc there's maybe a chapter or two tops that actually focuses on him?

Adams kind of inserted himself in the NYC scene when he moved there after Whiskeytown broke up.

It gets forgotten about Adams these days, but at that time he was brilliant at becoming a professional 'friend of famous people'--he was tight w/Keith Richards, Elton John, Jack & Meg, the Strokes, Alanis, Winona Ryder, Beth Orton, Jessie Malin etc.

Elton John loved Adams, kept mentioning him in interviews circa 2001-2002.

The whole book is pretty random from Adams to Las Vegas's The Killers and detours to London.

I hope it's not lost in all this how completely amazing Lydia Loveless is and if you haven't listened to alt country stuff for a long time do yourself a favor

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, February 21, 2019 10:18 AM (fifty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Lydia Loveless is great, I'm listening to REAL on the turntable as I type this.

massive xps but i remember interviewing Jon Spencer circa the Strokes explosion and having to ask him about them, and him wincing and saying that maybe they shared a dry cleaner.

i remember yyys supporting GvsB at SXSW in 2002, and them being like absolute huge fans of yyys. people seemed to have a lot more goodwill for yyys than the rest of that NY scene, and with good reason because they were the greatest.

the strokes' first UK shows were really exciting, but even midway through that first album tour they were phoning it in. i remember liking their second album, though I can only remember the reggae song on it now. that first ep was wonderful, though the debut album feels spotty if i hear it now.

jack white always seemed a certain kind of genius to me, and light-years beyond the strokes and all that.

i've no real desire to read this book. the chapter I read online seemed clunky and poorly written, as far as oral histories go. that there's no oneida in there is unforgivable, given their work in making brooklyn a thing in the late 90s.

also karen o's new LP with danger mouse is excellent, and the yyys stuff has aged super super super well.

The yeah yeah yeah’s “maps” is the best song to come out of this scene

I think the framing of the book -- an author who is close with one band sees the emergence and shifting of a scene using her love of that band as a lens -- is a weird fit with the oral history format it takes. There are certain chapters where the exploration of a theme is really obviously created patchwork-style using quotes from a dozen people across a dozen interviews that took place in much different times

the prevalence of quotes in later chapters from Sarah Lewitinn and her cohort explain the Killers showing up, I think -- the blog/party scene really latched on to those guys

I was really surprised to learn that mainstream news types like Alex Wagner and John Heileman (sp?) were to at least some extent denizens of this scene. Maybe some of the rest of y'all remembered that but I sure didn't.

kept half-expecting to encounter Chris Hayes reminiscing about doing blow with Har Mar Superstar or something.

I was definitely amused by the number of Har Mar Superstar quotes

This book is $2.99 on nook right now.

it's not a good book

I'd have paid $3 for a handful of chapters!

I also tend to buy a magazine at the airport to read on the plane and feel no shame in skipping through, reading a couple articles, and throwing it in the recycling when I get to the destination, though

it probably has $3 worth of entertainment value, sure

I'd relive the snow day I spent reading the Beastie Boys book over the afternoon I spent reading this one, for sure

Documentary to premiere at Sundance; made by the same geezers who did Shut Up And Play The Hits

https://www.pulsefilms.com/work/item/mmitb

shut up and etc. was the moment where I invited friends over to have a party and show it, partway through realizing I wasn’t that into watching lcd soundsystem at that juncture

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgHN-YE7IPI

Meet me in the bathroom
please talk free (so I can make a documentary)

I fucking hate the way interviews are edited in documentary voice-overs now, where it sounds like every word was sliced out of a completely different sentence and patched together like a ransom note until it says what the director wants it to say. And that trailer has five or six really egregious examples of that. Plus, what the fuck are the Moldy Peaches doing in that roster of acts?

freak folk was surprisingly big in the east village scene back then.

rip to the sidewalk cafe

Moldy Peaches totally belong

And that trailer has five or six really egregious examples of that.

I would think a trailer is where it’s most forgivable? The dialogue may not be sliced up like that in the film itself

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUlhI2x82Pc

^ I totally remember the “one stare” girl. Who was she? She was a DJ, right? I hope the answer is not embarrassingly obvious.

I fucking hate the way interviews are edited in documentary voice-overs now

I think they may have been struggling for interview material. They approached me a couple of years back to see if I had old Strokes, etc interview tapes I could sell them.

Film is playing now at the Quad in NYC. Talked to forks about going to see using our MUBI GO vouchers and he said something funny.

^ I totally remember the “one stare” girl. Who was she? She was a DJ, right? I hope the answer is not embarrassingly obvious.

DJ Coldstare, I think? She was a Gawker "Blue States Lose" regular.

Perhaps in the interest of time I will just stay home and watch the “Maps” video once again.

I’m still not clear on when and if this is coming to UK cinemas.

It's coming out in the UK some time in January tbc.

I'd argue that to the extent that the 'Meet Me In The Bathroom' scene in New York's early 2000's represented a "rebellion" of any kind, it was the one which ushered in the permanent hegemony of the investor class. Privileged, tediously bacchanalian and aggressively non-political.

— The Paranoid Style (@paranoiacs) November 13, 2022

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/meet-me-in-the-bathroom-movie-review-2022
^linked within the replies to that tweet, docked a point or two for getting somebody’s name wrong.

I have a bunch of musician friends in New York who were all there when this was going on and didn't overlap or interact with this scene at all. So it tracks that it would be a self-contained group of privileged people all hanging out in the same places and then narcissistically branding it a "scene."

that's what a scene is tho

i mean u cd swap out "priveleged" but otherwise

I guess. It has always felt to me that this particular scene's impact was largely insular, and its cultural influence in the city vastly overstated. Kind of more like the/a fashion scene. I remember watching that Anna Wintour doc, and it's all about the stress and time it takes to run her magazine. But at one point it leaves her little bubble, revealing that the people outside it didn't really give a shit.

I dunno, maybe I'm just splitting hairs. Did any of these bands inspire people to form their own bands? Maybe that's my vague standard for hagiography.

If it was insular, then at least I guess maybe it didn’t institute a permanent hegemony of whatever…

Who were the other rich kids in the scene, besides the Strokes? I admit I don’t know the backgrounds of The Moldy Peaches etc. (And it’s not like people from “privileged” backgrounds had never been on the scene in New York before; members of Sonic Youth and Television being top of mind…)

The way I experienced this scene was that I saw and bought some of the recorded output at Other Music but didn’t go to any of their shows and sort of became suspicious of this scene such as it was, although maybe I saw Karen O around town once or twice (although not as much as I might have seen random members of SY) and maybe I saw The Walkmen (are they in this?) open for some other bands at Irving Plaza but that’s about it.

Really it made me long for the earlier days of Other Music, when they specialized in exotic sounds imported from exotic faraway locales such as Glasgow, Tokyo, Athens and Dayton.

xxpost The Walkmen came out of Jonathan Fire*eater, which I believe was a cohort of DC private and later Ivy League schools. I think Interpol guys were all international raised abroad kids, fwiw. But I think (Strokes aside) the "privilege" (as such) that became the norm is just coming from an upper middle class background that provided the stability and safety net to play music in an increasingly gentrified and high cost of living place. I don't think there's anything unique about that, but I suppose it helped cement NYC's transformation into a playground for similarly backgrounded peers who could afford to weather the shift from grungy to bobo.

the strokes still headline major festivals all over the world, so i think it would be hard to say that ppl outside new york don't give a shit about them. maybe that rise in popularity is a separate chapter from the meet me in the bathroom era but they're prob one of the bigger rock bands in the world & substantially more popular outside the US (tho that's true for pretty much all popular rock music these days). as far as influence goes... to me personally if harry styles "as it was" was mumble-sung by julian casablancas it could basically be on room on fire. clairo had a tik tok/chart hit a few years ago ("sofia") that is a blatant strokes homage. tracing rock band influence is kinda hard these days given how little rock music is in the popular consciousness... it comes thru far more in rap music & hyperpop which is pulling more from the emo/punk/pop punk end of things. paramore, fall out boy and blink 182 have inspired many more rappers (i.e. 24kgoldn "mood") than the strokes have, but i don't think the strokes are a cultural footnote or anything.

the rest of those bands probably are tho. YYYs, interpol feel fairly niche to me. LCD soundsystem got a bunch of headlining gigs at festivals around the world too but i don't think ppl really care about them like that. i think part of the allure of the meet me in the bathroom era for journalists and documentarians tho is that it was one of the last scenes (in rock music anyway) that was pre social media and thus very localized. i guess cobrasnake caught the tail end of some of that but you still had to know where to look to find those photos. the insularity of it might actually be the point.

I wonder, the people seeing the Strokes now, are they old people (like me), or are they young people attracted to the '90s nostalgia of them? I mean, it's been almost 25 years since that first EP, right? I have no idea what younger people think of the band, or if it's any different than how they think of watching "Friends" or "Seinfeld."

i think in general with rock music at the scale of crowds of hundreds of thousands, the nostalgia of it all is endemic to the experience. i think there’s still plenty of kids who seek a certain authenticity in rock music of the past except the rock music that is two decades old now is the strokes, the foo fighters, RHCP (who the strokes just toured with) etc and not led zeppelin or metallica or whatever. i mean when the strokes are headlining lollapalooza brazil or primavera, it definitely is not 30 and 40 year olds buying the majority of those tickets

Festivals outside the US are sort of a different thing, aren't they? Bigger, just kind of a broader experience, right? With Brazil being a particularly huge deal. Like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBCVsVKU4O4

You don't ever see crowds or enthusiasm like this in the US, imo.

I don't know anyone that saw the RHCP this past summer, but I guess they played stadiums? I assume anything that big draws a whole cross section of generations.

They played Stadium Arcadiums

Stadia Arcadia

Arcadia Ignea

Did any of these bands inspire people to form their own bands?

A fair number of bands I speak to cite the Strokes as a big influence, whether musically or just being their intro into this music.

I remember being backstage at a YYYs gig in Glasgow on one of their early tours, and some NYC disco-punk band that was being touted as the Next Big Thing by the NME coming in to say hi and being all deferential, and when they left Karen was like, "We've never heard of these guys before, they were not on the Brooklyn scene that we were on." But I'm guessing these things can be very hermetic and time-sensitive and based on who your friendship groups. Certainly, the "grunge" explosion pulled together a lot of groups who actually felt they didn't share a lot in common.

I remember interviewing the Blues Explosion around this time, and having to ask them what they thought about the Strokes et al, and Jon said something about thinking they didn't share much in common with the Strokes beyond the same dry cleaner.

There's an Arctic Monkeys song that literally starts with the line "I just wanted to be one of The Strokes".

do u think they meant it

When I interviewed Gilla Band recently, their guitarist Al said their earlier incarnation was indebted to Strokes, and that Arctic Monkeys had "a real fucking chokehold on our generation". Obvs they sound nothing like the Strokes or the Arctic Monkeys.

i have opinions abt the word influence btw

It's definitely debatable

I prefer the word exfluence.

Or effluence even.

Meet me in the bathroom indeed.

LCD soundsystem got a bunch of headlining gigs at festivals around the world too but i don't think ppl really care about them like that.

Strictly anecdotal, but LCD is the only band out of this scene with any currency at all among my son and his friends. Not sure they’ve even heard of, like, Interpol, and if they know the Strokes it’s only as a vague bit of history.

And coincidence or not, LCD *did* kind of anchor a scene, or sub-scene. At least that what DFA felt like to me. You could have "DFA night" (or whatever) at a club, or do a DFA tour. Most of the other acts around there then were just typical major label beneficiaries. We know about them and they got successful because they were highly, highly promoted and publicized, something that for obvious reasons just doesn't happen as much anymore.

Am I the only one who even hates the title of this?

In a way I think the title is apt, because it suggests the superficiality and self-conscious scenesterism of people very impressed with themselves for doing cocaine, the dumbest drug.

and Cheap Sex.

Yeah. Like, in Please Kill Me, the sex and the drugs feel actually wild and apocalyptic. Not so much here.

Plus, the music was more innovative.

xxxp I thought that line referred to meeting to hook up. It’s kind of a love song, yeah?

Even as a song lyric I hear it as both, but as a scene-encompassing summary I feel like drugs are very much implied.

I never actually listened to that song until just now. Made me want to put on "Sequestered in Memphis" instead for some reason.

I didn't even know there was a song with that title, or those lyrics (never got into the Strokes). I always assumed it was a drug reference.

Yeah. Like, in Please Kill Me, the sex and the drugs feel actually wild and apocalyptic. Not so much here.

I heard there was some artist interference in the edit of the movie, which is kind of hilarious when you think about how low stakes it all is really. Like if an already wafer-thin scene gets sanitized even more in the re-telling of it, you're not going to end up with much there.

Button-cute
Rapier-keen
Wafer-thin
And pauper-poor

most indie rock bands have horrible, thin, clicky hyper compressed drum sounds now, the lasting influence of the strokes

Meet me in the control booth.

some nerd shit about how they got their sound

https://www.soundonsound.com/people/gordon-raphael-producing-strokes

Does anyone remember a recent novel about a WASP family and a babysitter and someone who used to hang out in Grand Central and Tompkins Square Park and had a loft apartment and there was some kind of heist involving a van?

Is that for this thread? Lol in any case.

Was it written by an ILX0r?

Anyway, I’m starting to feel a bit like Johnny Mercer hating on The Beatles or something so maybe I should should just unbookmark this thread.

I know it sounds like a horrible premise for meeting in the bathroom, but it is killing me that I can't remember the title (the cost of age or reading carelessly) especially because I think you might consider it worthy of passing interest.

xps i think the moldy peaches were really more of the "anti-folk" thing which was basically the artists who hung around the sidewalk cafe all day and watched each others' sets. they may have had a social connection to the strokes but they didn't play the same kinds of gigs afaik.

i think the influence of this stuff on local nyc artists was immediate and centralizing, i mean there were certain enclaves like the sidewalk and the tonic in the late 90's but mainly it was disparate, lots of individual artists pursuing their own thing. and then after the strokes in particular became huge, all these people started playing shows on ludlow street and many of them oriented their sound more in that direction. i remember several bands and artists who were unsigned/unrecorded and doing really exciting stuff turning more revisionist and eventually putting out kinda boring, disappointing records.

I always thought of Tonic as much more avant and experimental.

yeah it was the enclave for that "scene" iow.

they may have had a social connection to the strokes but they didn't play the same kinds of gigs afaik.

Notwithstanding that the Moldy Peaches later opened for them on tour, right? (i.e., I assume you're talking about the early daze)

The only notable thing about the strokes imo is that they named an album after the best Stevie nicks song

Adam Green opened for the Strokes at the Mercury Lounge in 2000. I WAS THERE

^You rock!

xp i know they opened for the strokes, but i mean, i think they were still hanging out at the sidewalk cafe a good amount post-fame. that was almost like a songwriters' workshop feel, mostly solo acoustic artists who knew each others' material really well testing new songs in varying stages of completion and sticking around for hours afterward.

there was this one folk singer from the sidewalk cafe whose email list i was on, i think he played with adam green a lot- and around this time he formed a full band and sent out a joke email blast saying they were opening for the strokes at madison square garden.

The groups I enjoyed most from that time aren’t covered in the book. Such acts as Moisturizer; Electro Putas; Crème Blush. Perhaps these groups were oriented more toward the Tonic scene, but they played various places.

Isn't that almost always the way with scenes?

Yeah. But it also points out the kaleidoscopic nature of scenes. Scenes are defined a certain way based on the perspective you’re coming to them from. My scene was much different from Lizzie Goodman’s scene.

Feel like I myself was already scened out, already scene-burned by this time. But à chacun son goût, I guess. Think maybe there’s a way to say it in English, can’t recall.

Though there was definitely overlap

Morbs and I were pretty much the same age. I appreciated his take at the beginning of the thread.

Also you don’t necessarily feel like you’re in a scene when it’s happening. It’s a pretty abstract concept. The passage of time makes people feel more wistful and that’s when they try to make sense of their own past, categorizing it or whatever.

Does anyone remember a recent novel about a WASP family and a babysitter and someone who used to hang out in Grand Central and Tompkins Square Park and had a loft apartment and there was some kind of heist involving a van

This isn't Nell Zink's Doxology, is it?

you know i think i was at that "parking lot" event, though i don't recall it being a parking lot. it was, like, a vacant lot on the corner of a block in williamsburg. there were lots of big rocks. really big, like you could climb on them. i was there with my wife and remember thinking how adorable it is that young people have bands that yelp and flail around. i would not have predicted they'd build a movie around it 20 years later. i sort of can't believe it *is* 20 years later. but maybe it wasn't the same event? it was the same bands, though.

yeah "vacant lot" is how i'd characterize it. ilxor tracer hand was apparently also there and characterized it the same way:

The Liars - classic or dud

Is that the one where Shoplifting played or was that a different one?

Actually I think that one was like two-three years later

i don't remember them but that's not saying much. these are the bands that played the year after:

‘OUTDOOR PARKING LOT’ Last summer, when the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Liars played a show in this same vacant lot, it was a total scenester media circus, yet still ended up being the coolest show I saw all year. This time the bands are way less hyped, which means it will probably be even more fun. The Numbers and Measles, Mumps, Rubella play damaged, herky-jerky new wave, Dan Melchior’s Broke Revue are neo-garage royalty, and the Rogers Sisters throw a punky girl-group party. SATURDAY AT 2 P.M., corner of Wythe Avenue and Broadway, Brooklyn. (Phillips)

Dammit, my partner and I have been brainstorming a band called Measles Mumps Rubella for over a decade now

I remember seeing Liars play Brownies and then the closing night of some weird punk club run by Portuguese dudes in Connecticut in January 2002 - they were **amazing**. At Brownies, both Bob Bert and Jim Sclavunos were at the bar - half of Sonic Youth's drumming alumni.

you know i think i was at that "parking lot" event, though i don't recall it being a parking lot. it was, like, a vacant lot on the corner of a block in williamsburg. there were lots of big rocks. really big, like you could climb on them.

i was there and i think it could've been both. the classic vacant lot being used as an outdoor parking lot until some developer figures out what to with it. i remember it being fenced in, as an outdoor parking lot generally would be. i remember seeing gideon yago there, because these are the stupid things you remember 20 years later. that glorious moment right before *every* developer in williamsburg figured out what to do with their lots. across the street was the gretsch building, which had just gone on the market or was about to, which was the beginning of the end of everyhing.

Watched this the other day - tldr: it's not v good - but was intrigued by a clip of the moldy peaches doing karaoke at what looks to be olde London ilx hangout the King of Corsica. I know that Beth Ditto came along once, did the MPs too, and I have repressed the memory?

City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg (xpost to myself on a memory that required patience - may not be worth anyone else's time!)

Whenever the strokes come on at the bar it’s such a drag

Now on Showtime streaming

Ugh

Opposite reaction to interpol. Love dem

Is Carlos in costume?

As someone who never watches many videos and stuff, nor lived in NYC... fun throwback. Not sure it needed 9/11 footage. Good work getting the Courtney Love flashing/napping with half the Strokes footage though. That's relevant.

Sounds like you’re just as qualified to comment as everyone else here so uh go ahead

i may not have been posting here so much at the time but i think you'll find my GAPDY credentials are all in order

Carry on then

There’s 9/11 footage? Is it, like, the graphic kind?

Gross

No not really. Probably it was only there because they had footage of Interpol walking around in the dust. No one really talked about it.

Oh ok cool, thx

There is some 9/11 stuff in the Other Music doc, but it’s pretty relevant for various reasons.

I saw that. Yeah it made more sense.

Does Meet Me In The Bathroom work better as a book?

No not really. Probably it was only there because they had footage of Interpol walking around in the dust. No one really talked about it.

I’m so NYC myself that I…well…um…references provided upon request.

+1

More like Carlostars, amirite?

Lol.

Does Carlos still love Interpol though?

Just watched the doc; there’s a lot to like about it. They have a ton of great footage, and put it together really well.

There are for sure things you could critique (context, chronology, narrative, Ryan Adams)—but I was impressed and enjoyed it overall.

(Side note: I didn’t know James Murphy was the long-haired guy in that band Pony!)

A few more thoughts: it's very artfully done, kind of an "impressionistic" rock doc. I can see this approach not working for everyone... but I'm generally not a big fan of documentaries, as I tend to feel like they're "manipulating" me/the viewer (even when they're good), and this is at least somewhat subtle in its semi-manipulative Julian C boosterism (lol).

I also liked the strategy* of not showing what any of the folks narrating look like now... i.e., there are no "talking head" shots, you just hear their voices as they reminisce. This way, the spell isn't broken, and the doc isn't framed as a look back from any particular moment in time.

(*this approach also may have been forced by lack of $$ to fly around interviewing ppl in person – some of them are audibly even "phoning in" their narration.)

I mean, I would not have wanted to see Paul Banks' sallow, syphilitic expressions.

I just drove past Carlos’s high school this morning. There is a picture of him on the wall alongside other notable graduates like Joe Torre.

Wow I expressed some anger last night. Sorry to whoever it was that I was replying to

I enjoyed this well enough. Not particularly good, not particularly bad.

Didn’t realize what dorks Interpol were. And James Murphy.

And calstars.

No one in that so-called scene had any sense of humor. There’s no Iggy, no Debbie Harry, no David Byrne, no Ramone. This is why people don’t care about them.

Are those artists you listed known for their senses of humor(?) Byrne, I guess

I think so!

If Blondie is not funny. I don’t know what to tell you. If the Ramones are not funny I don’t know what to tell you.

Josefa otm

Iggy is fucking hilarious. There are so many funny lines in his catalog.

Iggy’s idea of a joke is: “This one goes out to all the Hebrew ladies in the audience.” If you’re talking about song lyrics, I guess it’s subjective… I like the Stooges but don’t think I’ve ever found them “funny”

(but plenty of “humorless” bands, like U2, have huge followings… so I don’t think it’s a big factor in popularity)

james murphy the most insufferable person on planet earth

Feel like all the bands that Josefa mentioned are extremely witty in their concepts even if they are not telling jokes of the Beatles Command Performance variety. Whereas with say, Interpol, who I actually kind of enjoy, it’s sort of like “hey wait, what if we could sound like Joy Division but more pompous and even more like The Doors?”

Fwiw I knew Carlos D and had no problem with him as a person but I never thought he was funny and was never interested enough to see his band. My grand tally was, I think I saw the Yeah Yeah Yeahs once, saw the Strokes once, saw the Moldy Peaches perhaps one and a half times, and never saw Interpol or LCD Soundsystem.

xxp

lol Brad. That was kind of my biggest takeaway from this thing.

The Strokes getting invited overseas and being treated like royalty vs. Interpol forcing themselves overseas to play a third rate nu-metal festival in a dive bar on Easter.

I like the early Interpol stuff fwiw, but their portrait in this is pretty funny.

New York cares

this is disgusting lol pic.twitter.com/ADUeum0BfE

— Nick Boyd (@NicholasBoyd) November 26, 2022

tfw you lose your edge so much you become a sphere

I guess you'd call these "tribulations" iirc

They just played a crypto convention a few months ago.

and The Strokes?

They've all been turned into NFTs.

(*this approach also may have been forced by lack of $$ to fly around interviewing ppl in person – some of them are audibly even "phoning in" their narration.)

I get the impression they were low on material to work with. I was emailed by the producers over lockdown, searching for old interview tapes they might be able to use in the documentary.

Watched this last night…read the book when it came out. Am mentioned in the book once and was interviewed for the movie but don’t think I had much influence on it. As someone who was very much there I have a lot of mixed feelings but an a bit too covided out right now to sum up, maybe later.

For a good corrective ive been posting excerpts from my 2002 livejournal on Facebook, which is definitely another view of the era, and one in which Ryan Adams is of zero relevance.

the documentary was decent enough for a few hours of light fun. some of the footage was good... as someone who has watched that strokes $2 bill concert only thru grainy videos seeing hi def footage of it was nice.

as josefa alludes to upthread, the main issue w/ this doc is just that nobody involved save for a few is a compelling narrator of their own story. albert hammond jr sums up the strokes by saying "we were all, like, brothers." the only person who shows up in the entire doc w/ a perspective worth chewing on is karen o. and then i thought the LCD/james murphy story line was interesting bcuz it actually at least tapped into some sense of music history & context outside of the LES in the year 2000

everything about interpol was quite boring tho i will say you did get a good sense from seeing early live footage of these bands how different interpol was in standing motionless on stage while the strokes & yyys were flailing all over the stage in front of moshing crowds. did actually make them seem kinda cool in their own way

it was also interesting seeing how much of this documentary's story was filtered thru MTV camera lenses. the framing at the beginning about how these bands were reactions against blink 182, limp bizkit etc felt forced to me, and i found it funny as the documentary goes on how tangibly you can feel the last gasp of MTV happening... john norris and gideon yago leaving their fingerprints behind grasping onto the nearly dead relevancy of mtv, their own careers, rock music, new york -- and, if the scene really was a reaction against TRL pop rock, how quickly the strokes et al let themselves be embraced by the same forces.

i think in general the doc would've benefited greatly from talking head interviews w/ journalists, critics etc who could've provided some contextualization beyond the gratuitous Y2K and 9/11 montages which all could've been summed up w/ a simple title card. there was something very hermetic about this doc in relation to music history & even as someone who loved a lot of these bands growing up, i don't think the scene was important enough to justify a documentary that provides only the most basic notions of historical context aka why any of this even matters

and i found it funny as the documentary goes on how tangibly you can feel the last gasp of MTV happening... john norris and gideon yago leaving their fingerprints behind grasping onto the nearly dead relevancy of mtv, their own careers, rock music, new york -- and, if the scene really was a reaction against TRL pop rock, how quickly the strokes et al let themselves be embraced by the same forces.

I always said that this whole "return of rock" thing (including satellite bands like the White Stripes, the Vines and the Hives) was probably the last chance that music media and major labels could successfully make "fetch" happen. Everything — the book, this doc, the LCD Soundsystem doc and endless residencies — is really just a generation of late-fortysomething/early-fiftysomething media class white people patting themselves on the back for doing 1991 Nirvana goldrush cosplay in 2001 because now they get to do 1991 media cosplay in the dying embers of media, and it's the last time anyone cared what they had to say

I always said that this whole "return of rock" thing (including satellite bands like the White Stripes, the Vines and the Hives) was probably the last chance that music media and major labels could successfully make "fetch" happen. Everything — the book, this doc, the LCD Soundsystem doc and endless residencies — is really just a generation of late-fortysomething/early-fiftysomething media class white people patting themselves on the back for doing 1991 Nirvana goldrush cosplay in 2001 because now they get to do 1991 media cosplay in the dying embers of media, and it's the last time anyone cared what they had to say

Agree 100%, even more so because at the exact same time all these bands were making what was supposedly the most important music ever at, like, the Mercury Lounge or wherever, I was backstage at Jones Beach or flying to Chicago to write cover stories on Slipknot and Disturbed (and features on a million also-rans like Staind and Static-X and whoever else) for Alternative Press. The New York music press tunneled up its own ass one night at CBGB in ~1975 and has never emerged for air since.

i think in general the doc would've benefited greatly from talking head interviews w/ journalists, critics etc who could've provided some contextualization beyond the gratuitous Y2K and 9/11 montages which all could've been summed up w/ a simple title card. there was something very hermetic about this doc in relation to music history

I actually liked the hermetic feel to it, and the lack of effort to draw those types of grand connections that docs typically shoot for... it was just kind of like: "This happened, maybe it doesn't even matter so much outside this frame, but it mattered to these people in this moment."

Been loving your LJ posts Dan.

Thanks.

Stevie mentioned Oneida upthread and they get covered in Cisco Bradley's forthcoming book on the Williamsburg Avant-Garde. Brian Chase from the YYY's pops up through his improv activities, but that's pretty much the only overlap with the MMITB/Manhattan scene. It's notable how all this weird and noisy stuff was happening at the same time as the Strokes et al, but seems a far more interesting scene artistically.
https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-williamsburg-avant-garde

I actually liked the hermetic feel to it, and the lack of effort to draw those types of grand connections that docs typically shoot for... it was just kind of like: "This happened, maybe it doesn't even matter so much outside this frame, but it mattered to these people in this moment."

― "Mick Wall at Kerrang!" (morrisp), Monday, November 28, 2022 3:32 PM (yesterday)

i think the issue for me is that it felt caught somewhere in between... this was not some hyper local scene in iowa or ohio or something where it doesn't matter at all if nobody outside the scene knew about it. if nothing else, the constant presence of MTV reminds us of that. but by the same token, it takes some unpacking to parse out the degree to which this scene actually mattered culturally outside of manhattan. either one of the stories at either end of those poles is interesting... the in between also can be but i think it requires contextualization from ppl who have thought critically about this stuff

Brian Chase from the YYY's pops up through his improv activities, but that's pretty much the only overlap with the MMITB/Manhattan scene.

idk if you mean in the book or in general but there was a tiny bit of overlap. Brian Chase was in The Seconds, Black Dice was on DFA, Liars basically decamped from MMITB to BKnoize on the 2nd album...

Didn't know about that williasmburg book, that's interesting. I don't think Brian Chase is the only overlap between those scenes, I think manhattan and brooklyn and the music scene at the time were small enough that there was a lot more overlap.

Oneida did exist on their own in many ways though. Probably the closest thing they got to the other side of a brooklyn scene might be when they played at Studio B with Black Dice and they asked me to DJ and Black Dice asked Ron Morelli, but no, it didn't turn into a techno rave.

I suppose it's all a continuum. The Strokes playing an MTV after-party on one side of a spectrum and Zs or whatever on the other side, but there was more than just Brian.

Everyone just knew each other from Oberlin tbh

Gabe from the Rapture was also in the ABCs. There's a whole Gang Gang Dance and related kind of thing too. Late troubleman records stuff. Hisham's projects, stuff that moved between brooklyn noisy stuff and manhattan art world.

They didn't know each other from Oberlin. They just knew me from Oberlin!

Rob from Oneida was not hanging out with Karen O at the 'sco.

I can get really really granular about the oberlin connections if you really have time on your hands.

I didn't mean Oneida specifically, was just saying a lot of Oberlin peeps in the sCeNe

also just remembered something else I wanted to respond to up there. Electro-putas may have been more Tonic and experimental, but Creme Blush was aiming for straight up electroclash success. They didn't make it but they were fun.

That's true, and I introduced a lot of them to each other. I know that sounds really arrogant but if you ask them they'd probably agree.

FWIW, Williamsburg gets a little attention in the doc... Oneida is mentioned a few times; there's a clip of Liars playing.

I also had Oneida DJ at Plant Bar with me.

https://mir-s3-cdn-cf.behance.net/project_modules/disp/4b54a050826837.56089678d6192.jpg

here's Meet Me in the Bathroom, the Oberlin story:

https://www2.oberlin.edu/alummag/spring2003/story4.html

dan, I still have most of my Acute CDs, good label

dan selzer was the one in the bathroom introducing people

Thanks.

I am the one person around then who never did cocaine, so my bathroom trips were pretty boring.

Creme Blush! I forgot about them, saw them on a bill at I think Southpaw. I liked them.

I found where Nicole Pinto from that band is now...

https://www.discogs.com/artist/5635352-Girls-In-Synthesis

I liked them, I spoke to her once at a show. Electroclash kept strange bedfellows. Alice Cohen of Philly synth-pop band the Vels was playing solo synth pop music on electroclash-adjecent bills during that era as well, also Twisted Ones type shows. She's still doing cool stuff.

the brooklyn/manhattan split and whatever storyline they tried to build out of that in the doc was done pretty clumsily... you could really feel the movie buckling under the weight of trying to build a coherent and compact thru line between all these bands. liars essentially show up randomly and without any explanation. they play almost the entire "maps" video in the movie but don't mention the thing about karen o crying being bcuz angus from liars didn't come to the video shoot or whatever. it was not done well

they play almost the entire "maps" video in the movie but don't mention the thing about karen o crying being bcuz angus from liars didn't come to the video shoot or whatever

― J0rdan S., Tuesday, November 29, 2022 12:17 PM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I heard there was some artist interference in the edit of the movie

― Position Position, Tuesday, November 15, 2022 1:11 PM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

(apologies for quoting myself)

i was at the studio last night and a bunch of 20something kids were raving about the strokes and arctic monkeys and the killers and eventually somebody asked me if I liked them and i had to say i hated all this shit

I guess I had stopped listening to hip indie between the Strokes first album and Arcade Fire/Arctic Monkeys/etc. so I just missed them completely but the real baffling ones to me are The Killers and Franz Ferdinand. They seemed like the death rattle of alt-rock radio at the time.

I never got the Strokes. To my old ear, they never did anything particularly novel or even interesting. To me, the most interesting thing about them is that the dad of one of the band members wrote "It Never Rains in Southern California."

i will cop to liking the white stripes, the occasional YYY song and the moldy peaches in small doses. the rest of them - interpol, lcd, hives, killers, arctic monkeys, franz ferdinand, strokes, ryan adams, liars, vampire weekend, TV on the Radio, Grizzly Bear, Phoenix - bleh.

oh yeah and arcade fire and the national too.
it confounds me because i like so much music but this whole "movement" was bleh as bleh could be.

cosign that except i'm cool w/arctic monkeys. most of those acts i don't find as boring as foo fighters or whatever but never had much interest. gonna watch the doc though.

the captions on my TV said simply "man," when a voiceover intoned that "all of a sudden there were so many bands" in the wake of Stokes, YYYs, etc in the NYC area, pushing the frankly bizarre idea that there were somehow not many bands around in the EV/Lower East Side/Wmsbrg axis in the late 90s…but I think this was Nick Zinner, who I otherwise would be fairly confident had a strong appreciation of JSBX, GvsB, Railroad Jerk and the Matador diaspora, much less Green Door/Coney Island High and many other factions involving rock bands playing G/B/D during the run up to 2001… which is to say that various, occasionally interlocking local rock scenes were quite healthy for a solid 15-20 years prior to 2000. I think this is self evident.

Maybe when Elizabeth goodman says "there was nothing of substance or excitement in the NYC rock scene until the bands I'm writing about (and socialized with) emerged," it makes for a clean and marketable narrative for her and her publisher's purposes. I guess it would not be quite as exciting to say "these bands got signed by major labels very quickly, and received fawning coverage from Legacy media, moreso than preceding scenes." Or for her to say "I got to NYC at this time and hung out with these guys, I wasn't present for preceding scenes, so I'm chronicling what I witnessed firsthand." But she indeed goes with the questionable "Jonathan Fireeater anticipated the Strokes et al, but they flamed out, adn then some other shit that wasn't in any way interesting happened, ho hum, whatever."

I’m avoiding this thread as I don’t want to read too much before I see it but for the Britishers, it’s available on Amazon Prime, Apple TV etc from February 24th.

What was weird about that line is it didn’t make it clear that there WAS an explosion of bands that moved to New York after the Strokes got hyped. I remember that well.

And yeah there were obviously scenes happening in NYC and good bands but it was a noticeable change. There were indie rock bands and wanna be heartbreakers type bands and alt folk and ladybug transistor and fly ashtray type stuff and no neck but there really wasn’t a lot of excitement. Strokes got hyped and electroclash and dance punk happened and every band moved here and it was very much more exciting. And terrible.

I moved back here after college in 97. Almost moved to Chicago instead because that’s where things were happening when I was in Chicago. Weasel Walter and Jim O’Rourke both told me how lame Brooklyn and New York were. Guess where they both moved a few years later?

At some point in the early 00s I was at an art opening with Nick Zinner, who as mentioned had been around, playing in bands, trying to make it with Champion of the Future. I did “Nick, is it me or are things getting more exciting? Like was I just not going out before and not noticing things?” And he said “no, it definitely is”. And I think it was that post strokes feeding frenzy that brought a lot of bands, good and bad, and a lot of attention.

That matador Coney Island cooler etc rock scene was healthy, but it wasn’t EXCITING in the same way.

CHALLENGE of the Future, with Aaron Diskin of Lycaen Pictus and Golem.

xxpost Veronica otm. there was a vital LES/EV/Wmsbrg scene - yes, mainly Matador related but lso strong ties to The Beasties/Grand Royal and the local Techno scene based in Liquid Sky records(more of a dn'b thing) /Temple Records/Satellite/Sonic Groove... I had/have friends who were active in those circles either in bands or scenesters or writers and I hung out a bit as a music fan and pal. Wasn't too surprising once LCD popped up - sort of a natural progression from the scuzzier but fun ( to me) "pigfuck" bands to stuff like Jonathan FE then Strokes.

Seeing some cool bands playing at Tonic or the Cooler is one thing, a few years later there were hundreds of bands and parties happening at the same time and downtown Manhattan was teaming in a way it hadn’t for years.

typed my response before reading Dan's but yep Dan is otm.

I’d think people like me and the captain here have good insight because there was a LOT more walls between the dance and rock worlds back then and not that many people with feet in both, and obviously we did, which is why we met.

si.

But people were always down to check out what was happening on "the other side" musically. haven't seen the doc but places like Rubulad were essential in opening minds and moving pasty asses to things they normally would've avoided.

Lots of stories from that time and some cool memories. It wasn't a total bust. When it was fun it was great to be in NYC.

I obviously have a ton of memories from the BK scene running parallel to this, but when I see those old Todd P posts with like an insane number of shows happening every week, I realize I could have been hitting everything way harder! Didn't really anticipate everything going away someday

Todd’s another who moved here then, and he didn’t really take off until Fitz from the twisted ones moved to Berlin a few years later.

Feel like I am a decade older than a bunch of you so my, um, heyday, was in the early nineties hanging around the EV and some scum rockers, watching the Reverb Mofos perform in a squat as it were. Not that I romanticize that era just didn't care much for the scene in this movie anyway, except for some recordings I would have purchase at Other Music. Most of which I probably typed upthread anyway.

I've never been much of a Nardwuar fan so idk if this is normally his vibe but the clip of him interviewing Juliana Casablancas and smugly making fun of him for going to school in Europe, laughing in his face about his dad, calling him phony like it was a big gotcha scoop, etc was very assholish & hard to watch

(or Julian Casablancas, even)

Yeah that was a real "??"... I don't know that interviewer or his schtick, so I was like "Who is this clown?"

Btw – https://pitchfork.com/news/the-moldy-peaches-reunite-announce-first-european-shows-in-20-years/

Nardwars whole Schtick is to be annoying and confuse people who assume he doesn’t know anything then he whips out some esoteric knowledge. Like when he’s interviewing RZA and pulls out some obscure kung fu poster as a gift or something, that’s kind of charming. But yeah playing gotcha with the strokes is a pretty low bar and that came across harsh.

ttly agree re: that nard clip, it was jarring to see him in that specific mode. that is not typically the vibe he has evolved into

Narduwar was totally passive aggressive punk comedy before he got into the delighting rappers thing.

xxxxx-post... you're quite right to mention Black Dice's LCD Connections etc. I should have qualified the Chase comment with "of the big indie rock bands". YYYs always seem tapped into noisier/weirder currents than The Strokes or Interpol. DFA initially came through in the UK via clubs like Optimo and Trash, so I always saw them as part of a different, more hipster/underground scene than The Strokes, but maybe the reality on the ground was different.

here's a deep Interpol connection...their current bass player is Brad Truax, who used to work at Mondo Kims and was in Andrew Deutsch's band Home, then was the road manager for Animal Collective. He's a respectable figure. I was happy how the movie treated Carlos...I didn't have the best history with him, though he's the only bandmember I met. The story I always tell is that I first met him when I was DJing at Black and White with Joshua Zucker, doing a Factory Records tribute. He came in and asked to look through our records, was nice enough. Not long after he was DJing at Barmacy with a woman named Meagan who had a new wave party called Atomic I think. I showed up with Karen O and Karen's good friend/my ex-girlfriend/later YYYs and Rapture co-manager Lauren, ie the person who invited me to join ILX in the first place because people were discussing the Homosexuals. I thought I'd be friendly so I walked up to Carlos and asked if he had any Ultravox, who I had been listening to a bunch around then and he responded indigently along the lines of "no I just have the popular stuff I don't dig deep like you and Joshua". I was just trying to be friendly and show a little interest in the activities! And Ultravox! It's not like I was requested [insert name of actually obscure and or rare band here]. And that was all before I ended up having a crush on and painfully brief fling with woman he had dated a few years before and was still hung up on him. Despite, or because of that, he was friendly the few times we spoke after.

I thought you were gonna say that he said the opposite (“I don’t touch that popular stuff”).

Now I wanna listen to The Homosexuals

Maybe there will be an extended version of the book featuring the Homosexuals, when Toddp and I set up their first shows in NY, Bruno backed by the Fuses from Baltimore (later versions would be backed by the guys from the Imaginary Icons and finally Apache Beat).

They did a manhattan show but then Todd and I set up the show at Tommy's Tavern in Greenpoint. When they showed up Bruno and Chuck were like WTF is this, shitty bar in the middle of nowhere neighborhood you can't even get to by train (without taking the G of course.)

By the time the show was over Bruno was ELATED. He said something like "that was what it was like in 77".

Same thing happened when I had Metal Urbain at Mighty Robot. These old guys coming back after so many years, playing New York for the first time and being bummed it's not some fancy venue, but then having an amazing time with great energy playing a DIY show.

watched this last night, it's alright. living in CA at the time my only tangential connection to any of this scene was frankly via ILX and going to see the Rapture with Lauren when they came to SF. I did see the Strokes and Interpol the first time either played SF and those were incredibly fun and short sets. But this scene on the whole has always seemed to be one that celebrates itself and the MTV connections are funny, because MTV is the worst example of this behavior: constantly covering itself, lionizing everything it's ever done as iconic. But is it really? Or does it just seem that way to you because you won't stop talking about yourself? Anyway, Ryan Adams is and always will be a douche.

Were you at the Strokes' Fillmore set in SF, with Moldy Peaches opening (Oct. 2001)?

Indeed I was, it remains the only strokes show I’ve ever seen

We were there too! Weird vibes in the crowd… I remember a fight breaking out near the stage.

Oh you’re right, I remember that too. This was around the same
Time there seemed to be lots of fainting at shows I went to as well.

Two Tascams shown in the first ten minutes, will this push my Portastudio 424's value to even greater heights?

i'm glad someone pointed out how weird the monologues sound up above, I thought it was just me (I was extraordinarily stoned while watching this). my guess they just edited out a lot of 'umms' and 'ahhs' between words but it's extremely poorly done, to the point where it almost sounds like entire sentences are constructed from different recordings of words. maybe it's just very bad post-production audio treatment.

maybe it's extremely heavy and shitty noise reduction run across all the dialogue in one track

VH1 wouldn't have aired something this dull to fill an afternoon in 2006.

the only time i saw the Strokes was they were opening the 7th street entry for Doves, the hype hadn't really reached Minnesota then so it felt like maybe they thought they should get a huge reception but the crowd was just like who are these guys? anyway, they played really well and I remember wanting to check them out. I remember me and my friend thought they reminded us of the Smiths a little bit which is a weird though in retrospect.

Julian was super duper wasted, there's these three little steps down to the pit area from the bar/merch booth. i was coming up, he was coming down. he tripped and fell into me, i managed to hold him up with his lit cigarette about 5 inches from my face. he just slurred hey sorry man and moved on.

Holy shit, I totally forgot I saw them open for Doves. That would have been, like ... 2001? I have no recollection of them. I did seem them open for Tom Petty, which I recall being ... fine.

I found a review of a Vancouver show on that tour from March 10, 2001. Based on a usual tour schedule that would put the Chicago/Minneapolis shows maybe a week or so prior to that, so before the album was out. I remember thinking their shirts with the Strokes logo were cool but I didn't buy one.

Back in 2019, I saw the Meet Me In The Bathroom art exhibit that was running at the Hole gallery in the EV. It was surprisingly above-average for this kind of "let's mythologize all the band shit in my closet" show - prob because you didn't have to look at any of The Strokes-related stuff if you didn't want to. This doc felt very much like something that would have played on a screen there - the old films are great, but somewhere out there a really outstanding YYYs doc could be possible.

how interesting can be a book about uooer middle class new yorker acts?

how interesting can a poster about racoon tanukis?

i finally watched this - as mentioned many times itt, most of the voiceovers are so useless!

like, i understand the idea of wanting to recreate the oral history vibe of the book but if you do not have oral history level material, then you end up with this glorified high school yearbook
“we were like a family”
“touring is hard”
and the fucking Sinatra “Very Good Year” montage the absolute facepalmistry

and then James Murphy and all of his liveblog awkardness to fill what feels like an hour. I understand his involvement and i knew he’d be in it but ugh TOO MUCH my interest in them and HIM especially is like, negative 1,000

and omggggggvv fuck that stupid Rapture song again forever i hate it

give me a Strokes documentary - 100% would watch; give me a Yeah Yeah Yeahs documentary - 100% would watch ; flush the rest of this honestly

There was an hour-long Fever To Tell doc out a few years ago. They even toured it in-person with live set afterwards.

Ok, 30 minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm-lBh0yC10

The whole scene was a charisma free zone as far as I can tell. Even the ones who are good on stage (Karen, maybe Carlos D, er, that’s it I think) look embarrassed to be there in interviews.

OOooh I am going to watch that YYY's thing. Thank you!

I still haven't read or watched MMitB. I will at some point.

give me a Strokes documentary - 100% would watch; give me a Yeah Yeah Yeahs documentary - 100% would watch ; flush the rest of this honestly

― werewolves of laudanum (VegemiteGrrl), Saturday, July 29, 2023 8:44 PM (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

I am seeing them both tomorrow night! I will make u a doc. Hang tight.

I am so unbelievably excited for this festival. Them the Walkmen, Angel Olsen, Be Your Own Pet and I am definitely forgetting others.

Icaught a download last month and watched it. It was quite good, not sure why I didn't get through the book other than the book disappearing into a pile and me finding something else. May still get through it.
Enjoyed the doc and handy that what was filmed at the time did get filmed

Just realized that the first time I saw the YYYs was 20 years ago! 2003 at the Kentish Town Forum. At one point we sat down and realized that Daniel and Carlos D from Interpol were sitting behind us.

Lol I have an extremely similar story. The only Interpol member I recognize at all is the vocalist from the band as I’m not a big fan of them. In the early 2010’s they came to a festival in Mexico and I was working for one of the sponsors so I got invited to the “vip” hospitality section. Anyhow, me and a friend got photographed and years later we found out that the Interpol guys we’re hanging out right behind us and you can see them in the photo - Daniel (had to look up again his name right now) is even smiling and photobombing in the background. A flabbergasted friend who is a fan saw the picture and started freaking out… I was sorry to disappoint him and tell him we never interacted at all with them.

Carlos D from Interpol had an article about how he used to dress up as a nazi published in Tablet magazine(?)

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/a-farewell-to-armbands-interpol-carlos-dengler

(twitter user @Aelkus just posted some extracts from this, did it not get mentioned on ilm at the time? I couldn't see anything, but there are about a dozen Interpol threads)

Let’s start with the most notorious item I ever wore, the piece that captivated music and fashion lovers during my aughts-era limelight: the army-style holster. I was visiting my tailor one day when I first saw it draped over a black shirt on a mannequin. I noted its clean lines and militaristic sheen. A rush of dopamine, like I’d had my first shot of whiskey or snort of coke, rushed through my synapses, and I felt the palpable euphoria of artistic inspiration.

What a fucking dork

the whole article is written like that

that article gave me herpes :(

I thought he just wanted to dress like Kraftwerk

reminds me of one of the glaring omissions in the MMITB documentary footage -- there are some vague gestures at "where are they now" but it's mostly limited to Karen O. there's a "Carlos shows off his holster" scene where he does the "I think it looks cool, it doesn't mean anything" song and dance but it's up to the viewer to bring their own interpretation. mine was "this guy definitely has thoughts about it, and I don't want to hear any of them" which is really borne out by that tablet article

great, you thought it looked edgy in a cool in ways you had not at all examined, and now you think it was kind of edgy and not cool? there are things you absolutely don't need to mythologize after the fact

the whole thing cribs pretty heavily off of the lester bangs "white noise supremacists" article but mentioning that would give away the game in that 1. the article came out in 1979 2. people were citing that article in the early 00s directly related to some of the contemporary attitudes on display