The Strokes Live on Stephen Colbert

New Strokes!

🎶 The Strokes — Falling Out of Love

Haven't been this excited for an album in a long time. I've written about The Strokes quite a bit in the past, but they are one of my all time favorite bands. From high school through college, The Strokes were always on. I think they are one of the very few important American bands of the last 25 years. The New Abnormal was a masterpiece. Excited to see how they follow that (nearly impossible right?) -- Falling Out of Love is promising!

What is Indie Sleaze?

Is the vibe... shifting? Suddenly, bands like The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Interpol are coming back into the cultural zeitgeist. In the last month, we've seen articles in NME, Dazed, VICE, the Guardian, The Cut, Harpers Bizarre, Vogue, Esquire, Stylist, and GQ all talking about the return of Indie Sleaze... but what is Indie Sleaze? And why are we suddenly trying to capture the vibe of the early 2000s...?

To me, it sort of feels like a bunch of us aging millennials are starting to feel irrelevant and disconnected from youth culture. The result... an engineered movement to create cultural significance by trying to recreate a feeling they we once had... listening to The Strokes, on their iPod, in their American Apparel zippy as they furiously type on their blog. Oh shit. 

🌎 Links

Sundance: ‘Jeen-Yuhs’ Gives Us the Old Kanye

The first chapter of this three-part docuseries brings you back to Ye’s beginning — and gives you a superhero origin story.

Why it’s too early to get excited about Web3

The man who defined the term "Web 2.0" (referring to the version of the internet most of us know today. An internet dominated by companies that provide services in exchange for your personal data) shares his thoughts on Web3.

How Tumblr Became Popular for Being Obsolete
Speaking of Web 2.0 – Tumblr's status as a relic of the Internet has attracted prodigal users as well as new ones. If Tumblr is a relic... what is Blogger? Is anyone else still using this platform? 

Meet Me in The Bathroom
Welcome to pre-9/11 New York City, when the world was unaware of the profound political and cultural shifts about to occur, and an entire generation was thirsty for more than the post–alternative pop rock plaguing MTV. In the cafés, clubs, and bars of the Lower East Side there convened a group of outsiders and misfits full of ambition and rock star dreams. When The Strokes secured a residency at the Mercury Lounge in 2000, the scene that had previously been ignored by record labels and music magazines took off.

Mars Wrigley company rolled out a sterile, bone-dry rebrand of those sentient, sexy, candy-shelled roly-polys we like to call M&Ms.
"The corporate fat cats in their ivory tower made of chewing gum have ughnooooooified the M&Ms because they think we, the current customers, are a bunch of dumpy sluts who need to be taught proper manners. The Mars Wrigley Corporation doesn’t think that girl M&Ms can do everything that boy M&Ms can do – and in heels!"

The rise and fall of Esprit, San Francisco’s coolest clothing brand
But underneath the splashy magazine profiles and heavy-handed political messaging lies another tale. It’s one of San Francisco corporate excess and office trampolines. By the mid-’90s, mirroring the rest of Boomer culture, the Bay Area hippies had fully transformed into take-no-prisoners capitalists, complete with brutal corporate takeovers and tumultuous divorces.

The Strokes – Hard to Explain Live on SNL (2002)

This is it and then it wasn't, an oral history of The Strokes

In 1998, five New York friends — Julian Casablancas, Albert Hammond Jr., Fabrizio Moretti, Nick Valensi, and Nikolai Fraiture — formed a band called the Strokes. They released a debut album, Is This It, in 2001. In 2009, NME named it Album of the Decade; Rolling Stone ranked it No. 2, behind Radiohead’s Kid A. This is an account of what happened in between, starting in 2002 (via Vulture).

I have always had a hard time getting into anything after The Strokes second album, Room On Fire. I've tried, but outside a few gems on First Impressions of Earth, the rest of their work pales in comparison to their first two albums. Today, Vulture published an oral history of The Strokes that details the rise and fall of the band. The article features interviews with musicians, including Ryan Adams, who were close with the band and witnessed the collapse.