[M-Mu] I Like The Strokes

Apologies for the short pause in posts and the delay in this one, I spent most of my week either dead tired and stressed on airplanes, dead tired and straight up sleeping for 13+ hrs a day, or just overall enjoying some desperately needed time out of the house, out of Florida. California specifically, funny that I keep being there for completely disconnected reasons. My excuses aside; The Strokes.



Bear with my slightly melted brain and indulge in my little obsession for a few minutes over a band I'm sure plenty know, but I want to shed some neat details and tidbits on. The Strokes are a band formed in 1998-1999ish that far, far too many people seemed to want to herald as the revival of grunge rock / garage rock. To actually explain why it "died" in the first place, you'd have to look to the history of the bands in the early 90's that defined rock.

I'm not exactly a music historian of any kind, but there is a coherent reason why rock allegedly died, and the one that seems to make the most sense is the general appearance of rock in the mainstream. Nirvana had "separated" in 1994, and both hip-hop and pop were absolutely dominating the Billboard Top 100 charts in 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999. Sure, you still had bands like Green Day keeping the flames of rock alive, but was definitely skewing more punk. What's most popular will inevitably create the most imitators, and become the way a decade is defined.



So, if we jump forward to 2000, The Strokes are grinding away in the underground New York music gig scene, a close-knit pack of friends that don't really care about what's popular, and actually quote The Cars and Guided by Voices as their main inspirations. The fact that they played largely locally and intensely consistently meant that if you went to a specific area of New York in 1999, practically anyone knew who they were, and knew their music was damn good. New York naturally attracts investors, and you get this perfect storm that created one of the strongest bidding wars for a band ever, nested within a musical void where nothing quite sounded like them.



With an unknown amount of drugs and alcohol in their systems due to several conflicting stories and reports and an impossible amount of hype behind their EP and first album (Is This It, 2001), I leave you to dig for yourself. But, I'd like to point out the most fascinating bits and pieces I've picked up over the years that you can pull out during any conversation where The Strokes are relevant, starting with...



Their incredible website that looks like it came straight from a spacehey profile, or geocities account, complete with that website we all went to in school to make animated flaming text to impress our friends. Just me ? The whole site is a 5-minute internet gem to dig through. What else...



Oh right, Julian has another band called The Voidz, if you still want the familiar vocals of The Strokes, but want something a little more experimental, trippy, and risky that couldn't really be released under a name with the legacy of The Strokes. Virtue and All Wordz Are Made Up is at least worth a listen in my opinion, though I could understand it not being for everyone. The album art in itself surrounding their discography scratches a deep artistic itch in me I can't put into words as well.



Though rewinding history...This Is It was supposed to have New York City Cops on it. Problem is...it was released juuuuuust before September 11th, 2001 outside the US, and the US release had to be changed slightly to accommodate the tragedy, meaning a whole new song was recorded, which ended up being "When It Started". Funnily enough though, the US release for the *vinyl* was exactly on September 11th, meaning it was the only copy sold within the US that had that track on it.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9e5kfNJLGgA

But wait, we're not done just yet ! New York City Cops as a single also has a historical footnote during the 2020 US elections. The Strokes played a set during a Bernie Sanders rally that apparently got rowdy enough that police came in to stop crowdsurfers, to which Julian proceeded to just start, singing it straight at them, and prompting fans to come onstage and mock the police with him. This was allegedly not part of the setlist for that night, but the energy of everyone coming onstage with that mocking "Fuck the Police" energy just feels like the perfect moment of the universe lining things up beautifully.



From Julian's absolutely painful interview on James Cordin's show, to the fact that we almost got the same Radiohead composer for everything past OK Computer, there's a lot to unpack with The Strokes, given how most only seem to know either Reptilla from Guitar Hero 3, or just Room on Fire in general. It's a band I can't really stop thinking about completely, it always seems to be in this state of being in just the right place at the right time. I love a lot of music, and I'm generally more positive than negative on it all, whether unknown or famous worldwide, but damn if it's hard to find faults in so many albums and performances of theirs. Thank you for listening to my ramblings anyhow, more next week.

Future posts will be marked with a [M-Mu] to denote they're my weekly Monday music blog things, so that I can also post more personal stuff not music related. The fakeout is thinking that the first M stands for Monday, but it actually stands for Moth. But, they don't just stand, they fly, but they're not flies, they're moths. Weird, right ? I like commas.

(2023-5-23 Update: Fixed broken Imgur links and migrated to imgbb)