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

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.