The Strokes -- Room on Fire
The summer before my freshman year of college I worked in an administrative department of my soon-to-be university, alongside a guy I had gone to high school with and who was entering his sophomore year at the same school. To get us through the long stretches of producing the university identification cards for the incoming class of freshmen we'd listen to our CDs. I guess at some point I had cycled through all of mine, so my colleague let me peruse his collection for some new material. My selection of The Strokes' debut album Is This It?, which I did not own and had not heard in its entirety, was met with a sneer of disapproval. "The Strokes? Please," he reprimanded, "maybe if you're a screaming sixteen-year-old girl" (apparently he had grown sick of the CD). Of course, by that point, in mid-2004, his criticism did carry legitimacy. The Strokes had long since eclipsed the up-and-coming garage-revivalist coolness that had "saved rock-n-roll," and were now a fixture of mainstream anti-mainstreamism, latched onto by pop culture as an ironic exercise in subculture hipness (think MGMT or any band that's ever been featured in an iPod commercial). But that didn't make them any less good.
By the time the next summer had rolled around and my old coworker had moved on to a different summer activity, I found myself working the same job, and this time The Strokes' follow-up album, Room on Fire, was most often my work-music of choice. The opening "I wanna be forgotten/and I don't wanna be reminded" whisked me away from my desk chair to crowded post-half-past-midnight college bars and hazy fraternity basements; into laughing crowds when you steal a look towards the girl you caught eyes with on the way in -- but then also through the crowded halls of high school and the parking lot after school on a Friday and the bored weekends. The songs struck a chord somewhere amongst the sometimes thick, sometimes acute nostalgia of my then-life's "coming-of-age" moments, however cheesy they seemed: moments that were encompassed by both high school and college timeframes. I was a starry-eyed rising sophomore with high school behind me, but with its taste still in my mouth. And I'd gone through a damn lot of riveting and momentous social situations, you'd better believe it. Julian Casablancas' ineptitude for writing lyrics worth their weight in anything more valuable than empty beer bottles, a perennial favorite target of critics' jeers and sneers, turned out to be The Strokes' most endearing quality.
But let's not forget about the music itself. It is, in fact, nothing short of brilliant. Love them or hate them, The Strokes changed modern rock -- they were the original postpunk revivalists, or at least the ones that brought the movement to national attention. They were good at it, and they knew it. Much like their scrappy, perpetually-recovering-from-the-night-before image, every note of these songs is carefully thought out and placed strategically amongst the others. They are musical whizkids and are probably kind of nerdy about it. They get a lot of comparisons to Television, which I partially agree with. The Strokes are a little less dramatic; they attack and execute the songs all business-like, without the exuberance or drama-queenism of Television. No, they definitely wrote songs that could only have been written by kids who grew up in the eighties and nineties.
It's an interesting contrast -- the obsessive detail of the instrumentation and song construction, and the lazy, half-drunk lyrics. Like I said, it's nothing short of brilliant. Listen to "Automatic Stop," the robot-reggae third track on Room On Fire, and you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. Get lost in your own memories of those high school dances, those late nights in your favorite dim-lit local establishment, that end of the relationship that was either never a relationship in the first place or isn't really ending (see "The End has no End," track 10). It's a fun, fanciful album, and it remains one of my favorites. Call me a doting sixteen-year-old girl.
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