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

james murphy the most insufferable person on planet earth

Feel like all the bands that Josefa mentioned are extremely witty in their concepts even if they are not telling jokes of the Beatles Command Performance variety. Whereas with say, Interpol, who I actually kind of enjoy, it’s sort of like “hey wait, what if we could sound like Joy Division but more pompous and even more like The Doors?”

Fwiw I knew Carlos D and had no problem with him as a person but I never thought he was funny and was never interested enough to see his band. My grand tally was, I think I saw the Yeah Yeah Yeahs once, saw the Strokes once, saw the Moldy Peaches perhaps one and a half times, and never saw Interpol or LCD Soundsystem.

xxp

lol Brad. That was kind of my biggest takeaway from this thing.

The Strokes getting invited overseas and being treated like royalty vs. Interpol forcing themselves overseas to play a third rate nu-metal festival in a dive bar on Easter.

I like the early Interpol stuff fwiw, but their portrait in this is pretty funny.

New York cares

this is disgusting lol pic.twitter.com/ADUeum0BfE

— Nick Boyd (@NicholasBoyd) November 26, 2022

tfw you lose your edge so much you become a sphere

I guess you'd call these "tribulations" iirc

They just played a crypto convention a few months ago.

and The Strokes?

They've all been turned into NFTs.

(*this approach also may have been forced by lack of $$ to fly around interviewing ppl in person – some of them are audibly even "phoning in" their narration.)

I get the impression they were low on material to work with. I was emailed by the producers over lockdown, searching for old interview tapes they might be able to use in the documentary.

Watched this last night…read the book when it came out. Am mentioned in the book once and was interviewed for the movie but don’t think I had much influence on it. As someone who was very much there I have a lot of mixed feelings but an a bit too covided out right now to sum up, maybe later.

For a good corrective ive been posting excerpts from my 2002 livejournal on Facebook, which is definitely another view of the era, and one in which Ryan Adams is of zero relevance.

the documentary was decent enough for a few hours of light fun. some of the footage was good... as someone who has watched that strokes $2 bill concert only thru grainy videos seeing hi def footage of it was nice.

as josefa alludes to upthread, the main issue w/ this doc is just that nobody involved save for a few is a compelling narrator of their own story. albert hammond jr sums up the strokes by saying "we were all, like, brothers." the only person who shows up in the entire doc w/ a perspective worth chewing on is karen o. and then i thought the LCD/james murphy story line was interesting bcuz it actually at least tapped into some sense of music history & context outside of the LES in the year 2000

everything about interpol was quite boring tho i will say you did get a good sense from seeing early live footage of these bands how different interpol was in standing motionless on stage while the strokes & yyys were flailing all over the stage in front of moshing crowds. did actually make them seem kinda cool in their own way

it was also interesting seeing how much of this documentary's story was filtered thru MTV camera lenses. the framing at the beginning about how these bands were reactions against blink 182, limp bizkit etc felt forced to me, and i found it funny as the documentary goes on how tangibly you can feel the last gasp of MTV happening... john norris and gideon yago leaving their fingerprints behind grasping onto the nearly dead relevancy of mtv, their own careers, rock music, new york -- and, if the scene really was a reaction against TRL pop rock, how quickly the strokes et al let themselves be embraced by the same forces.

i think in general the doc would've benefited greatly from talking head interviews w/ journalists, critics etc who could've provided some contextualization beyond the gratuitous Y2K and 9/11 montages which all could've been summed up w/ a simple title card. there was something very hermetic about this doc in relation to music history & even as someone who loved a lot of these bands growing up, i don't think the scene was important enough to justify a documentary that provides only the most basic notions of historical context aka why any of this even matters

and i found it funny as the documentary goes on how tangibly you can feel the last gasp of MTV happening... john norris and gideon yago leaving their fingerprints behind grasping onto the nearly dead relevancy of mtv, their own careers, rock music, new york -- and, if the scene really was a reaction against TRL pop rock, how quickly the strokes et al let themselves be embraced by the same forces.

I always said that this whole "return of rock" thing (including satellite bands like the White Stripes, the Vines and the Hives) was probably the last chance that music media and major labels could successfully make "fetch" happen. Everything — the book, this doc, the LCD Soundsystem doc and endless residencies — is really just a generation of late-fortysomething/early-fiftysomething media class white people patting themselves on the back for doing 1991 Nirvana goldrush cosplay in 2001 because now they get to do 1991 media cosplay in the dying embers of media, and it's the last time anyone cared what they had to say

I always said that this whole "return of rock" thing (including satellite bands like the White Stripes, the Vines and the Hives) was probably the last chance that music media and major labels could successfully make "fetch" happen. Everything — the book, this doc, the LCD Soundsystem doc and endless residencies — is really just a generation of late-fortysomething/early-fiftysomething media class white people patting themselves on the back for doing 1991 Nirvana goldrush cosplay in 2001 because now they get to do 1991 media cosplay in the dying embers of media, and it's the last time anyone cared what they had to say

Agree 100%, even more so because at the exact same time all these bands were making what was supposedly the most important music ever at, like, the Mercury Lounge or wherever, I was backstage at Jones Beach or flying to Chicago to write cover stories on Slipknot and Disturbed (and features on a million also-rans like Staind and Static-X and whoever else) for Alternative Press. The New York music press tunneled up its own ass one night at CBGB in ~1975 and has never emerged for air since.

i think in general the doc would've benefited greatly from talking head interviews w/ journalists, critics etc who could've provided some contextualization beyond the gratuitous Y2K and 9/11 montages which all could've been summed up w/ a simple title card. there was something very hermetic about this doc in relation to music history

I actually liked the hermetic feel to it, and the lack of effort to draw those types of grand connections that docs typically shoot for... it was just kind of like: "This happened, maybe it doesn't even matter so much outside this frame, but it mattered to these people in this moment."

Been loving your LJ posts Dan.

Thanks.

Stevie mentioned Oneida upthread and they get covered in Cisco Bradley's forthcoming book on the Williamsburg Avant-Garde. Brian Chase from the YYY's pops up through his improv activities, but that's pretty much the only overlap with the MMITB/Manhattan scene. It's notable how all this weird and noisy stuff was happening at the same time as the Strokes et al, but seems a far more interesting scene artistically.
https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-williamsburg-avant-garde

I actually liked the hermetic feel to it, and the lack of effort to draw those types of grand connections that docs typically shoot for... it was just kind of like: "This happened, maybe it doesn't even matter so much outside this frame, but it mattered to these people in this moment."

― "Mick Wall at Kerrang!" (morrisp), Monday, November 28, 2022 3:32 PM (yesterday)

i think the issue for me is that it felt caught somewhere in between... this was not some hyper local scene in iowa or ohio or something where it doesn't matter at all if nobody outside the scene knew about it. if nothing else, the constant presence of MTV reminds us of that. but by the same token, it takes some unpacking to parse out the degree to which this scene actually mattered culturally outside of manhattan. either one of the stories at either end of those poles is interesting... the in between also can be but i think it requires contextualization from ppl who have thought critically about this stuff

Brian Chase from the YYY's pops up through his improv activities, but that's pretty much the only overlap with the MMITB/Manhattan scene.

idk if you mean in the book or in general but there was a tiny bit of overlap. Brian Chase was in The Seconds, Black Dice was on DFA, Liars basically decamped from MMITB to BKnoize on the 2nd album...

Didn't know about that williasmburg book, that's interesting. I don't think Brian Chase is the only overlap between those scenes, I think manhattan and brooklyn and the music scene at the time were small enough that there was a lot more overlap.

Oneida did exist on their own in many ways though. Probably the closest thing they got to the other side of a brooklyn scene might be when they played at Studio B with Black Dice and they asked me to DJ and Black Dice asked Ron Morelli, but no, it didn't turn into a techno rave.

I suppose it's all a continuum. The Strokes playing an MTV after-party on one side of a spectrum and Zs or whatever on the other side, but there was more than just Brian.

Everyone just knew each other from Oberlin tbh

Gabe from the Rapture was also in the ABCs. There's a whole Gang Gang Dance and related kind of thing too. Late troubleman records stuff. Hisham's projects, stuff that moved between brooklyn noisy stuff and manhattan art world.

They didn't know each other from Oberlin. They just knew me from Oberlin!

Rob from Oneida was not hanging out with Karen O at the 'sco.

I can get really really granular about the oberlin connections if you really have time on your hands.

I didn't mean Oneida specifically, was just saying a lot of Oberlin peeps in the sCeNe

also just remembered something else I wanted to respond to up there. Electro-putas may have been more Tonic and experimental, but Creme Blush was aiming for straight up electroclash success. They didn't make it but they were fun.

That's true, and I introduced a lot of them to each other. I know that sounds really arrogant but if you ask them they'd probably agree.

FWIW, Williamsburg gets a little attention in the doc... Oneida is mentioned a few times; there's a clip of Liars playing.

I also had Oneida DJ at Plant Bar with me.

https://mir-s3-cdn-cf.behance.net/project_modules/disp/4b54a050826837.56089678d6192.jpg

here's Meet Me in the Bathroom, the Oberlin story:

https://www2.oberlin.edu/alummag/spring2003/story4.html

dan, I still have most of my Acute CDs, good label

dan selzer was the one in the bathroom introducing people

Thanks.

I am the one person around then who never did cocaine, so my bathroom trips were pretty boring.

Creme Blush! I forgot about them, saw them on a bill at I think Southpaw. I liked them.

I found where Nicole Pinto from that band is now...

https://www.discogs.com/artist/5635352-Girls-In-Synthesis

I liked them, I spoke to her once at a show. Electroclash kept strange bedfellows. Alice Cohen of Philly synth-pop band the Vels was playing solo synth pop music on electroclash-adjecent bills during that era as well, also Twisted Ones type shows. She's still doing cool stuff.

the brooklyn/manhattan split and whatever storyline they tried to build out of that in the doc was done pretty clumsily... you could really feel the movie buckling under the weight of trying to build a coherent and compact thru line between all these bands. liars essentially show up randomly and without any explanation. they play almost the entire "maps" video in the movie but don't mention the thing about karen o crying being bcuz angus from liars didn't come to the video shoot or whatever. it was not done well

they play almost the entire "maps" video in the movie but don't mention the thing about karen o crying being bcuz angus from liars didn't come to the video shoot or whatever

― J0rdan S., Tuesday, November 29, 2022 12:17 PM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I heard there was some artist interference in the edit of the movie

― Position Position, Tuesday, November 15, 2022 1:11 PM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

(apologies for quoting myself)

i was at the studio last night and a bunch of 20something kids were raving about the strokes and arctic monkeys and the killers and eventually somebody asked me if I liked them and i had to say i hated all this shit

I guess I had stopped listening to hip indie between the Strokes first album and Arcade Fire/Arctic Monkeys/etc. so I just missed them completely but the real baffling ones to me are The Killers and Franz Ferdinand. They seemed like the death rattle of alt-rock radio at the time.

I never got the Strokes. To my old ear, they never did anything particularly novel or even interesting. To me, the most interesting thing about them is that the dad of one of the band members wrote "It Never Rains in Southern California."

i will cop to liking the white stripes, the occasional YYY song and the moldy peaches in small doses. the rest of them - interpol, lcd, hives, killers, arctic monkeys, franz ferdinand, strokes, ryan adams, liars, vampire weekend, TV on the Radio, Grizzly Bear, Phoenix - bleh.

oh yeah and arcade fire and the national too.
it confounds me because i like so much music but this whole "movement" was bleh as bleh could be.

cosign that except i'm cool w/arctic monkeys. most of those acts i don't find as boring as foo fighters or whatever but never had much interest. gonna watch the doc though.

the captions on my TV said simply "man," when a voiceover intoned that "all of a sudden there were so many bands" in the wake of Stokes, YYYs, etc in the NYC area, pushing the frankly bizarre idea that there were somehow not many bands around in the EV/Lower East Side/Wmsbrg axis in the late 90s…but I think this was Nick Zinner, who I otherwise would be fairly confident had a strong appreciation of JSBX, GvsB, Railroad Jerk and the Matador diaspora, much less Green Door/Coney Island High and many other factions involving rock bands playing G/B/D during the run up to 2001… which is to say that various, occasionally interlocking local rock scenes were quite healthy for a solid 15-20 years prior to 2000. I think this is self evident.

Maybe when Elizabeth goodman says "there was nothing of substance or excitement in the NYC rock scene until the bands I'm writing about (and socialized with) emerged," it makes for a clean and marketable narrative for her and her publisher's purposes. I guess it would not be quite as exciting to say "these bands got signed by major labels very quickly, and received fawning coverage from Legacy media, moreso than preceding scenes." Or for her to say "I got to NYC at this time and hung out with these guys, I wasn't present for preceding scenes, so I'm chronicling what I witnessed firsthand." But she indeed goes with the questionable "Jonathan Fireeater anticipated the Strokes et al, but they flamed out, adn then some other shit that wasn't in any way interesting happened, ho hum, whatever."