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

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."

I’m avoiding this thread as I don’t want to read too much before I see it but for the Britishers, it’s available on Amazon Prime, Apple TV etc from February 24th.

What was weird about that line is it didn’t make it clear that there WAS an explosion of bands that moved to New York after the Strokes got hyped. I remember that well.

And yeah there were obviously scenes happening in NYC and good bands but it was a noticeable change. There were indie rock bands and wanna be heartbreakers type bands and alt folk and ladybug transistor and fly ashtray type stuff and no neck but there really wasn’t a lot of excitement. Strokes got hyped and electroclash and dance punk happened and every band moved here and it was very much more exciting. And terrible.

I moved back here after college in 97. Almost moved to Chicago instead because that’s where things were happening when I was in Chicago. Weasel Walter and Jim O’Rourke both told me how lame Brooklyn and New York were. Guess where they both moved a few years later?

At some point in the early 00s I was at an art opening with Nick Zinner, who as mentioned had been around, playing in bands, trying to make it with Champion of the Future. I did “Nick, is it me or are things getting more exciting? Like was I just not going out before and not noticing things?” And he said “no, it definitely is”. And I think it was that post strokes feeding frenzy that brought a lot of bands, good and bad, and a lot of attention.

That matador Coney Island cooler etc rock scene was healthy, but it wasn’t EXCITING in the same way.

CHALLENGE of the Future, with Aaron Diskin of Lycaen Pictus and Golem.

xxpost Veronica otm. there was a vital LES/EV/Wmsbrg scene - yes, mainly Matador related but lso strong ties to The Beasties/Grand Royal and the local Techno scene based in Liquid Sky records(more of a dn'b thing) /Temple Records/Satellite/Sonic Groove... I had/have friends who were active in those circles either in bands or scenesters or writers and I hung out a bit as a music fan and pal. Wasn't too surprising once LCD popped up - sort of a natural progression from the scuzzier but fun ( to me) "pigfuck" bands to stuff like Jonathan FE then Strokes.

Seeing some cool bands playing at Tonic or the Cooler is one thing, a few years later there were hundreds of bands and parties happening at the same time and downtown Manhattan was teaming in a way it hadn’t for years.

typed my response before reading Dan's but yep Dan is otm.

I’d think people like me and the captain here have good insight because there was a LOT more walls between the dance and rock worlds back then and not that many people with feet in both, and obviously we did, which is why we met.

si.

But people were always down to check out what was happening on "the other side" musically. haven't seen the doc but places like Rubulad were essential in opening minds and moving pasty asses to things they normally would've avoided.

Lots of stories from that time and some cool memories. It wasn't a total bust. When it was fun it was great to be in NYC.

I obviously have a ton of memories from the BK scene running parallel to this, but when I see those old Todd P posts with like an insane number of shows happening every week, I realize I could have been hitting everything way harder! Didn't really anticipate everything going away someday

Todd’s another who moved here then, and he didn’t really take off until Fitz from the twisted ones moved to Berlin a few years later.

Feel like I am a decade older than a bunch of you so my, um, heyday, was in the early nineties hanging around the EV and some scum rockers, watching the Reverb Mofos perform in a squat as it were. Not that I romanticize that era just didn't care much for the scene in this movie anyway, except for some recordings I would have purchase at Other Music. Most of which I probably typed upthread anyway.

I've never been much of a Nardwuar fan so idk if this is normally his vibe but the clip of him interviewing Juliana Casablancas and smugly making fun of him for going to school in Europe, laughing in his face about his dad, calling him phony like it was a big gotcha scoop, etc was very assholish & hard to watch

(or Julian Casablancas, even)

Yeah that was a real "??"... I don't know that interviewer or his schtick, so I was like "Who is this clown?"

Btw – https://pitchfork.com/news/the-moldy-peaches-reunite-announce-first-european-shows-in-20-years/

Nardwars whole Schtick is to be annoying and confuse people who assume he doesn’t know anything then he whips out some esoteric knowledge. Like when he’s interviewing RZA and pulls out some obscure kung fu poster as a gift or something, that’s kind of charming. But yeah playing gotcha with the strokes is a pretty low bar and that came across harsh.

ttly agree re: that nard clip, it was jarring to see him in that specific mode. that is not typically the vibe he has evolved into

Narduwar was totally passive aggressive punk comedy before he got into the delighting rappers thing.

xxxxx-post... you're quite right to mention Black Dice's LCD Connections etc. I should have qualified the Chase comment with "of the big indie rock bands". YYYs always seem tapped into noisier/weirder currents than The Strokes or Interpol. DFA initially came through in the UK via clubs like Optimo and Trash, so I always saw them as part of a different, more hipster/underground scene than The Strokes, but maybe the reality on the ground was different.