FADER is celebrating its' 50th issue with a rough, ghostly video of The Strokes shot by Colin Lane in 2001 in the midst of them becoming the darlings of New York. The piece that accompanies these first images of a band that changed music for me in every way is better written than anything i could ever attempt so check the whole bit out here. If you need a tasting to be convinced...
Squabbles and footnotes aside, in the pages of history books and The FADER, New York rock in the 21st century began with the Strokes. Of course the Strokes always evoked New York rock of the 20th Century, but that was kind of the point. The band captured the city’s borrowed nostalgia for a time when young men wore tight jackets and let their hair fall into their faces, then wrote thrilling songs about the dejected glamour such lifestyle decisions would lead to. At the time of their arrival, downtown Manhattan was still stuck in the orange plastic/white vinyl hangover of lounge culture, but the Strokes were a band for dark bars where the bathroom door was always broken and you could sink into a booth and hide out from adulthood for a few more years. They were a great band for New York because no one could agree on them: they were either the best or the worst thing that could have happened. People would tell you they hated them and everything they stood for, then a couple of beers later they’d confide that they’d never actually heard them or that they secretly loved them. They were one more part of the city you could endlessly kvetch about, then take pride in because no other city had anything nearly as good.
The Strokes-Is This It.mp3
The Strokes-What Ever Happened.mp3
The Strokes Tags
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