The Strokes, ‘Someday’, and the ‘Meet Me In The Bathroom’ movement
It was the city that never slept, but the kids couldn’t stop yawning. With the lights, the culture, the business and the art that came from it, people would be forgiven for mistaking New York as the stage for the Big Bang, the epicentre of the entire universe, where it all began, and apparently, it all came to an end. This is where music would be given new life, a reincarnation of indie sleaze, long messy hair, leather, rebellion, The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem and more. However, before all of that, before sound would be changed forever, there was nothing.
In the early 2000s, New York was a city unsure of itself. It was recovering from the trauma of 9/11, America was on the brink of war, the dot-com bubble had burst, and no one knew what the future held. While things hung in the balance, no one dared move, and the atmosphere of fear, sadness and trepidation manifested as nothing. Sometimes, nothing is peaceful, measured tranquillity in the heart of a city so used to doing everything at once. However, for a small sub-section of young adults, there was nothing peaceful about the emptiness; in fact, the silence was deafening.
The reason people moved to New York was for experience. It was a city full of talent and ideas, art and culture, sex, booze and drugs. People went because they wanted to party, listen to music and have their minds opened to new things physically and emotionally. As such, around the early 2000s, during this standstill, as the world decided its next steps, the generation who had just moved there and were ready to see what life was about was left by the wayside.
Nights were spent in dive bars, drinking beer and scoring whatever drugs were going around; bands rose to fame and shot back down in weeks, and people would walk the streets and bunk in strangers’ apartments, exploring every nook and cranny of The Big Apple in the hope of finding… something. It turns out that something would come from the art of looking rather than the discovery itself, as one band voiced the frustration of a bored generation simply by asking, is this it?
Where there’s New York, there will always be music, but during this period, sound was in a lull. A few bands had looked promising but broken up before they could go anywhere, and the specific genre that would be the next big thing was also in contention. Finally, a band of good-looking, too-cool-for-school kids with wealthy parents and nothing to lose started playing some shows, and it wasn’t long before word spread.
If New York was the big bang for the rest of the universe, The Strokes were the same for indie music post-2000. They had a sound that was hard to define and even harder to ignore, one with a layer of static draped over it and a frontman who could convey enthusiasm while looking like he didn’t give a fuck. It was as addictive as the drugs going around and so formed just as crucial a part of New York’s underbelly.
The New York and UK music scenes took a particular interest in The Strokes, meaning they managed to sign a record deal and start making music. When they released their debut album, Is This It, it changed how people thought about music. It was cool to read music magazines again; leather was back, and several other bands from the New York scene followed in their wake. The Strokes were a windbreaker that made it easier for people to combat the headwind of a world not knowing what it wanted to listen to. Soon, bands like Yeah Yeah Yeahs and LCD Soundsystem were generating their own fanbases, selling millions of records and climbing the same ladder that The Strokes had set up.
The album had several standouts, but one song that hit a nerve and remains just as poignant today is the track ‘Someday’. It talked about the realisation that people drift apart and that you don’t stay friends with the people you were close to when you were younger.
The Meet Me In The Bathroom era of music that took place in the early noughties was relatively short-lived, as bands broke up and the scene it developed evolved too quickly to hold onto. In that sense, the words of ‘Someday’ resonated in real-time, as the album Is This It managed to depict the present and the future of the movement it was setting out.
But The Strokes contribution is more than music. They reignited a spark of creativity missing in a world that didn’t know which way it was turning. They presented an apathy towards the bigger picture with a focus on the now, which made people excited to be creative and to look forward again, even if that looking forward meant acknowledging you might not be around the same people in years to come as you are now.
New York continues to be a starting point for a lot of musicians and artists, recovering from lulls to produce movements in new and exciting ways, the Big Bang, the epicentre of everything, wide awake.
