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

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