The 2003 Strokes song that copied Sonic Youth: “Totally ripping it off”
When Alex Turner opened Arctic Monkeys’ 2018 album Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino with the line, “I just wanted to be one of The Strokes,” he really wasn’t joking.
The Sheffield indie legend has never been shy to express just how much the New York band inspired him. Much of that debut record was the British band rehashing their lo-fi garage sound to fit a more bespoke domestic audience, thus inspiring a string of indie sleaze copycats whose sound can all be traced back to The Strokes eventually.
But while it felt like The Strokes invented their own style of indie rock in the 2000s, with their debut album sounding like nothing that had come before it, there was still a sense that they were building off of what came before, more specifically in New York. There was a rebellious energy in the city that traced all the way back to the days of punk and new wave, and The Strokes were simply building on that by delivering a record that refused to let indie die out.
But then came the all-important second record. The pressure on the band to shift and deliver something worthy of a follow-up yet original enough to be fresh forced them into a corner that only their New York natives could help them out of.
The fourth track, ‘12:51’, felt like an innovative take on their lo-fi brand, with Nick Valensi leading them into what felt like a different sonic territory for them. “I was playing these silly little jazz things using my neck pickup with the guitar’s tone control rolled all the way down, and I accidentally stepped on the DeVille’s channel-switching footpedal,” he remembered.
He explained, “The gain on that channel was on 12, and all of a sudden the tone sounded like an analogue-synth sound, or a weird heavy-metal, Joe Satriani tone. Julian was the one who really saw the possibilities of that tone for ’12:51′. So I played along with the vocal melody, doubled the part, and that was it. It was all a bit of an accident; I was just trying to get a nice jazz tone, but it sounded cool”.
While Julian Casablancas was the one who did, in fact, help him explore the song, he had reservations of his own. After all, it was Casablancas whose face led this new indie renaissance and for a band who’d crafted a healthy reputation of refreshing the rock landscape, he was fair to worry about them slipping into subconscious pastiche.
While working on the song, he feared that The Strokes sounded too much like one band that any New York music fan worth their salt would have picked up on, remembering, “When we were recording it, I said to Gordon [Raphael, producer], ‘Do you think it sounds too much like that Sonic Youth song? Because I’m totally ripping it off’.”
It was Sonic Youth’s song ‘Bull in the Heater’ that the frontman had a particular worry they were copying, but really, it felt like a natural evolution more than a hammy attempt at replicating something, if anything, showcasing the ways in which New York had grown up in the ten years that existed between the two songs.
