Is this it? Really? This is the album that put The Strokes on the covers of god knows how many magazines, the album that put New York City back on the rock and roll map, the album that came in very close to the top of many magazines’ lists of the best albums of the first decade of the New Millennium? The album that changed the Free World?
Gimme a fuckin’ break.
I get the hype. I do. Good-looking lads from New York City, perhaps the world’s consummate rock and roll town, making said consummate rock and roll town relevant again after how long? New York City was dead, the Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls and Patti Smith and every goddamn band that made CBGBs famous and every goddamn band to come along after that (No Wave, ho hum) were ancient history, and please don’t toss off the names Lou Reed or David Byrne or Sonic Youth because they’re weren’t artists, they were curated cultural sacred cows and zombified sacred cows at that.
But these were the guys who gave the entire goddamn city mouth-to-mouth resuscitation? God help us all. Manhattan must have been even deader than I thought.
Because I’ve listened to the title track and opener of The Strokes’ 2001 debut LP Is This It more times than I can count, trying to discern exactly what it is that makes The Strokes a great rock and roll band, and I can’t get past the one-minute mark without falling into a coma. It’s a sing-song house-trained punk rock snooze.
But the band’s look and the hype and the rock journalists falling over one another to feature the band first, all of it reached a cultural boiling point, and The Strokes went off like a fireworks extravaganza over the Statue of Goddamn Liberty.
Of course, rock is about more than music, and it always has been; that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Strike the right pose and wear the right clothes at the right time, and the labels and music magazine writers will come salivating along, although being in the right place helps too, and there has never been a righter place than the Big Apple.
Especially after 9/11. People were hungry for good news stories coming out of NYC after the Twin Towers fell, and The Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Interpol were good news indeed—New York City wasn’t dead! It was a petri dish of fabulous new bands, and the flagship band and most fabulous of them all was The Strokes. The writers for Spin didn’t even have to spin it.
But back to Is This It. When I hear “Last Nite” and “Someday,” I get it, they’ve got catchy melodies, and they’re delivered with punk energy and electric guitar drive, and they do indeed sound NEW, even if the opening of “Last Nite” is a direct rip of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers’ “American Girl.” And even if The Killers, and I’m no fan of The Killers, do much the same thing and do it better.
But Casablancas’ vocals on “Last Nite” are urgent, the guitar solo is a gas, and the takeout is great. The guitars in “Someday” are a fast drive in a gypsy cab, fuck the red lights, and Casablancas is in the back seat providing a running commentary on how he’s not going to waste any more time. And I like it when he hits the high notes—they’re like an aside before he gets back to the business of laying down the law.
The Strokes like to establish propulsive grooves, but all too often they forget to add melodies, and it begins with the second cut, “The Modern Age.” There’s a monotony to Casablancas’ vocals, and frankly, if it weren’t for the positively ferocious guitar solo, which seems to wake Casablancas up, gets him to do some cool stuttering in fact, I would have no use for the song whatsoever.
“Soma” opens like a Television song before degenerating into more monotony, and it points to a serious weakness in the music of The Strokes: the lyrics simply don’t cut it. Isn’t that what New York is all about? Think of any NYC band worth a damn. What do they have in common? Great lyrics, from the Velvet Underground to the New York Dolls all the way through the Talking Heads and Blondie and Richard Hell & the Voidoids and the Dictators (hell yeah) and the Ramones, and I could go on.
Even Patti Smith, who has written some of the worst “rock poetry” I’ve ever come across, has always been worth a laugh, god bless her poses and her Rimbaud obsession. The Strokes specialize in romantic disaffection, which doesn’t generally bring out the best lyrically speaking, and they don’t aim very high, mainly speaking in generalities, or worse.
What do we get with “Soma”? Lines like “Racing against sunbeams/Losing against fig dreams/In your eyes.” Jaysus wept! “Hard to Explain” is all chug-a-lug and no melody, all propulsive guitar churn and grind without a song behind it, and while Casablancas tosses off the all-too-rare memorable line (“The joke is on you, this place is a zoo”) I listen to this one (I listen to all of them) and what I don’t hear is a lyrical intelligence at work.
“Trying Your Luck,” same deal—Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond, Jr. establish a dual-guitar groove, but it’s not a very exciting groove, while Casablancas delivers lines like
“No harm, he’s armed
Setting off all your alarms
They’re trapped, I can’t
Never be there in time, I’ll think about that.”
Which makes me think, the guy has a gun, the girl is in a car, there are miners in trouble, but Casablanca can’t help them because by the time he gets there, they’ll be dead, which is something he’ll have to think about. All of that said, The Strokes pull off a typical stroke towards the end—namely, they up the urgency level. Casablancas seems to wake up, and you think, “Well, that wasn’t so bad,” until you remember you spent most of the song bored stiff.
“Take It or Leave” is an exception—Casablancas is animated from the very start, and what you get as a result is a punk song with drive that never gives you the opportunity to nod off. Melody? Well, not really, but you don’t miss it much on this one. “When It Started” has a friendly guitar riff, but the excitement level is zero, no, make that less than zero. Casablancas seems to be wandering around looking for the melody and making what he thinks are the appropriate noises as he does so, and this one doesn’t even have a big bang of an ending, too bad for us.
“Alone, Together” has a syncopated guitar thing going on, and it’s captivating, but not enough to disguise the fact that once again the song is all twin-guitar push and pull and no melody, which some bands can pull off, but The Strokes ain’t one of them. Casablancas livens things up, loses his New York cool, and gets all riled up, in fact, but it takes a while, and once again I’m faced with the same dilemma—at song’s end I’m impressed, but do I really want to listen to the first couple of minutes again? Not on your life.
“Barely Legal” has enough of a melody, and by that I mean barely, to keep me interested from the beginning. Casablancas has so many words to spit out, he can’t help but sound frantic. If the guitar riff that runs through it bores me (it’s monotonous, friends), Casablancas saves this one. However, once again, I don’t find myself listening to the actual words he’s singing because I don’t find them all that interesting, and if you can’t make a song called “Barely Legal” interesting, things are hopeless.
Message to The Strokes: You’re letting the Big Apple down!
I suppose somebody had to save us from a New York City Punk Rock Renaissance consisting of the likes of Interpol and The Walkmen, but I’ll never understand this band—I’m convinced you had to see them live, that their Cult of Personality was based on having been there. But that can’t be right because The Strokes made it big, and how many people who raved about this record actually saw the band?
The Strokes are credited with bringing electric guitars back into vogue, along with panache and a good fashion sense. Well okay. Credit where credit is due. But I listen to them, and I have a hard time adding them to the list of great bands from New York City. I don’t hear anything truly memorable in their music, anything that puts them in the same league as the legendary NYC bands that came before them.
It’s hard to find people who didn’t like Is This It, but I finally discovered one in Rob Bolton of Exclaim! who wrote, “… it’s really too bad that this album is such a bore. Sure, there are a couple of somewhat catchy songs, but not only does this album not live up to the excessive hype (in fairness, no album could), it is completely uninspiring.” Thank you, Mr. Bolton, for speaking truth to the indomitable powers of promotion, even if your grammar could use some work.
The Strokes didn’t save rock and roll for the simple reason that rock and roll didn’t need saving. Rock and roll was doing just fine. The Strokes just happened to be the darlings of the people who operate the star-making machinery of the popular song. Right place, right time, who cares, I don’t.
Don’t believe the hype, although just about everyone did. Because New York City is New York City and New York City is where hype is king, and frankly, New York City can go fuck itself.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
C+
