from the LP Is This It, RCA Records, 2001For some reason, be that the increasingly early age kids are hitting puberty these days or just the mere fact that we live in a 24-7 news & media cycle now, musical acts with even a modicum of mainstream appeal never stay secrets for long, and they certainly don’t manage to secure an exclusively older audience without sliding into compulsory shock tactics or the overuse of words like “bitch” and “motherfucker”; in the time between discovering this incredibly tight new crew from NYC and actually seeing them live (a measly gap of perhaps 6 or 7 months), they had transformed from a scraggly bunch of struggling musicians to a scragglier bunch of “it” boys. While they were surely deserving, the fallout from such massive popularity came in the form of me & my partner’s neighbors at said Strokes show: on our left, a gaggle of giggling girls (none of them older than 12 or 13) chaperoned by a harrowing assortment of 40-something moms trying to look cool, on our right, some douchebag hipster couple, incapable of smiling, dancing or giving any indication that they were enjoying the show, trying even harder than the bored housewives were to be “cool”…I’m not sure who gave us the uglier look when we offered each group a hit off of the gargantuan joint we were smoking! Without any doubt, the Strokes completely blew us away, barreling through almost the whole album, the kind of show that reminds you of why you started going to concerts in the first place---to get wasted, dance, sing, and piss off squares (in approximately that order); I was so drunk by the encore that I actually bribed a bartender, who was already unloading beers into ice buckets and wiping down the counters, last call having been a good 20 minutes earlier, into giving me one last beer, and the kind enterprising young man sold me a Rolling Rock for $15. Ah, the careless exuberance of a youthful mindset! Our surrounding company be damned, we had an incredible time that night; predictably, the Strokes’ subsequent albums have been unable to capture the level of eager fun found on this debut. Beyond being a fucking excellent tune, this track reminds me of the first time I ever popped some Somas, freshman year of high school, but I digress…that’s a riotously irresponsible story for another wastey day…
