The 2001 album David Bowie was massively disappointed in: “They’ve got to stop”
Anything that David Bowie ever listened to usually needed a little bit of an edge to it to get his approval.
He wasn’t in the business to make the most textbook rock and roll songs ever created, and even when he became one of the biggest glam stars in the world, he wasn’t afraid to move on to something different whenever he worked on his next record. Everything that he ever made was about forward motion, and that extended to the kind of bands that struck his fancy when he wasn’t crafting his own tunes.
Because looking through Bowie’s favourite collaborators, a lot of them were known to be more on the fringes of pop music most of the time. Brian Eno was already a resident art rocker thanks to his work with Roxy Music before ‘The Starman’ started working with him, and even if Bowie was ahead of the curve when discovering people like Stevie Ray Vaughan, it made more sense for him to keep moving when talking about the work that bands like Pixies were doing in the underground music scene.
He didn’t want to be a one-trick pony, and half the time that meant pulling from bands he felt never compromised their sound. Iggy Pop and Lou Reed weren’t ones to go along with the program, and even when Bowie’s sound started to become en vogue again when working with people like Trent Reznor, he felt that rock and roll was going in a far more sanitised direction when he saw what some of the biggest names in garage rock had been doing at the turn of the 2000s.
The Britpop movement was already clearly inspired by what Bowie had done during his glam era, but bands like The White Stripes had begun taking the building blocks of rock and roll and twisting them on their heads. Since the nu-metal movement and grunge were all about self-deprication, this was the genre meant for everyone to get over themselves, but even if Bowie was on his own path, he felt that The Strokes could have benefited from being a little more original.
Is This It is still one of the crowning achievements of the 2000s rock scene in many respects, but Bowie wasn’t taking to it like everyone else was, saying, “It has 3 good songs on it. I think they’ve got to stop sounding quite so retro, and really open up their writing more, and they could be quite good. I haven’t yet seen them live, so I can’t say if they really live up to all the hype. But I was quite disappointed with the album.” But maybe that came from Bowie looking for a bit more of a challenge in his music.
Heathen was already the sound of him trying out new spaces in his sound, but he felt much more at home when listening to a band like Arcade Fire back in the day. He had enough respect for the band to actually sing backing vocals on some of their later records, but maybe the biggest problem with The Strokes for ‘The Starman’ was them wearing their influences on their sleeve a little too much.
You can tell from their tunes that they were heavily influenced by The Velvet Underground, but it’s not like Julian Casablancas was ever trying to do a carbon copy of what Lou Reed was doing. Reed’s voice had a lot more character to it whenever he sang, and while Casablancas goes for a much more crooning style whenever he sang tunes like ‘Someday’, it was easy to see them trying to go for the same kind of garage-style clangor that their idols were going for.
So while Bowie may have been a little bit more protective of the band that dared him to dream big, it wasn’t like The Strokes were completely derivative by any stretch. The rest of the rock world had become far too dour by this point, and this was the perfect way for people to leave the melodrama in the past and start bringing rock and roll back into the sweaty New York City clubs where it belonged.
