Listening Post: The Strokes - Is This It

The Strokes - Is This It - 2001

Fall, 2001.
It's early morning. Actually, more like 10 am. I'm flipping the dials and come to MTV. I still watch the channel every once in a while but I'm not sure why anymore. Popular music has become a vast wasteland of bubblegum pop, rap and rap/metal fusion. It's not fun for someone like me who was weaned on classic rock and pop. It's rather unnerving and depressing. My own band is barely a year old and we are already outdated. We play rock songs with choruses and verses and bridges and no studio tricks. As few tracks as possible to get the points of the songs across.
When I see something that really catches my attention. It's a scraggly band flopping around to a lo-fi steady beat. It's caustic and catchy and aggressive and fun as hell. It's "Last Night" by The Strokes. I make a quick note of the fact that I went to college with the video's director, turn off the tv, walk up the street to Virgin, buy the album and it's on steady play for the rest of the year.

To say that Is This It is an important album in the annals of rock history is just to acknowledge a truth. The Strokes make britpop possible. The Libertines. Arctic Monkeys. The Vines. The Hives. Jet. Scores of rock BANDS emerge. As quickly as Nirvana wiped away hair metal so did The Strokes kill Limp Bizkit (well, it took a little while, but....)

Taking what they've learned and loved of The Velvet Underground, The Cars The Stooges and so many others, and building on them as blocks, The Strokes' first album is a masterwork of pop and rock. Sure, singer Julian Casablancas's voice is distorted to the point of becoming fuzz, that's the point. He's singing about some scuzzy things, ("Barely Legal"? "Soma"?) these downtowners of his songs. The album is decidedly lo-fi as the instruments are mic'd for the most immediate sound. This is NOT a pro-tools record with dozens of overdubs. There are no more than 11 tracks used on the album...ever.

The result has been called one of the 1000 albums you must hear before you die. I concur. It's as listenable as it is important.

A couple years later a DJ calling himself DJ Hellraiser would mashup the music of "Hard to Explain" with Christina Aquilera's "Genie in a Bottle", proving once and for all that music is music is music and how it's wrapped up really shouldn't matter. But for this moment, ten years ago, boy did it matter.

Grade: A+
ASide: Barely Legal, Last Night, Is This It
BlindSide: Someday, Hard to Explain, The Modern Age