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

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.