The Strokes Can Imitate Music that Was Dead and Irrelevant Long Before They Were Born

My friend Dean doesn't like what he calls "white people music," so he was baffled by the copy of the Strokes' Is This It that arrived in the mail from a friend in Brighton, England. "You like this shit?" he asked, tossing me the disc. "'Cause I don't understand it." Then he put on a Method Man album and went to make some coffee.

I had to admit I was curious, having heard a lot of buzz about the Strokes for a few months now?which in itself is remarkable, considering I don't read any music reviews, anywhere, in any medium (this paper included). So I put on the album, with its unfortunate title, a title that says "We've been overhyped to holy hell, so lower your expectations." Right, the fix is in but that's okay because we're in on the joke too. Another lame attempt by artists to immunize themselves against their own self-created hype (cf. Eggers, Dave).

I don't want to beat up on the Strokes, really. As far as oldies acts go, they do a passable job of imitating music that was dead and irrelevant long before they were born. The worst I can say about them is that they are not particularly bright or creative songwriters. Virtually the entire album can be summed up thusly: "I'm young and cute/I wear dirty cords/I'm on NME/I date girls from Ford." Fine. Every generation thinks it invents sex and nostalgia, as the fortune-cookie fortune taped to my monitor says, so I won't pick on a band just because they're young and cute and have nice hair and wear dirty corduroys. Going after the bozo or bozos who produced this piece of shit, however, is an entirely different matter.

Dig that cupped SM58-through-a-Fender-Princeton-in-a-refrigerator-box effect on the vocals. Check the "straight-ahead," "driving" guitar that's weaker than Kate Moss' perineum. Rock out to the bingy, boingy bass and swishy, pissy high-hat. What angers me is not that there is no production value to this record, but that there so obviously is, that this album tries so hard to sound shitty and tossed-off. (I can't tell you the producer's name, because I don't have the album: after a long argument Dean and I finally tossed a coin for it. He lost.)

But all press is good press. Just making a half-assed reviewer like myself angry is viewed as a victory of sorts, which I suppose it is. But what nobody seems to have the balls to admit is that sometimes bad is simply bad. Bad playing, bad songs, bad production, bad sound. The band is bad, the album is bad and the producer should be taken out back and shot. The moral of the story of the emperor who had no clothes was not that people noticed he had no clothes on, but that they did not. That all-important distinction is utterly lost on the major-label marketing monkeys of the Ritalin Generation. How much did this shit cost to record? What's the promotional budget? Somebody's getting screwed here, and in the end it's going to be the Strokes. If I were them I'd be running around the halls of the record company, cutting off ponytails and pouring India ink on every Armani suit.

In the middle of this tragic, irrelevant album I turned it off and put Method Man back on, a song called "Sweet Love": "My finger's on the clit, splashin'/your pussy lips got you spazzin'/love juices/marinatin' in your satins." That is some disgusting, vile, retarded shit. It's also mad, hard and brilliant. I think I'm beginning to understand what Dean means about white people music.