Brave New World, Old Music: Re-contextualizing Is This It
Records age differently. In spite of being released within a month of each other in 2001, *NSYNC’s Celebrity and The Strokes’ Is This It, they were destined different fates. One, instantly consumed, faded. At best, a popular fad. The other, seeded itself in your thoughts, matured.
People don’t expect you to have grown up listening to *NSYNC’s Celebrity. Critics, friends, boyfriends, they don’t say, “You’ve never listened to *NSYNC’s Celebrity?! Well, you’re fucking out of your mind!“ Those bouts of well-meaning condescension apply almost exclusively to seminal records like Is This It. And for those very reasons, it makes them seem all the more daunting today. (This is probably a good time to mention I’ve been aggressively avoiding Beyoncé’s Lemonade.) First, you’re supposed to weigh the heavy notion that Is This It is our Nevermind, The Strokes, our Nirvana. Or, our Velvets (or Stooges)–depending on which publication you’ve been reading. Once you accept or refute that hefty claim, you’re supposed to deal with a deteriorating trajectory. You listen to the bookers say, “The Strokes only made it because their manager had them open for every band that played Mercury Lounge.” Then you accept the downright insta-ridicule of their offspring solo projects. And you watch the media giveth and taketh away, in case you missed it the first time around.
Is This It kept resurging in my consciousness through the past decade: am I excluding myself from fourth-wave rock’n’roll greatness? Still, I didn’t cave. I hesitatingly turned down the offer to interview guitarist Albert Hammond Jr. for I didn’t want to deal with the band’s discography. I came out unscathed in 2016, without ever having listened to The Strokes.
See, if I didn’t listen to Is This It, I couldn’t have fallen in love with The Strokes. If I didn’t fall in love with The Strokes, I didn’t have to deal with their unmatched follow-ups.
Something changed this year. Mercury is in retrograde, my friend and co-editor, Krista, reminded me. Perhaps, the planets conspired to compel me to evaluate the life-changing hypothesis of Is This It. Or perhaps I was willing to explore the brave new world. Wasn’t it Huxley who in 1926 said of his second trip to America: “just to know the worst, as one must do from time to time, I think.” I finally felt primed to close myself off to the world and deal with the weighty and, quite frankly, extremely unfair expectation that this record was going to change my life. So I finally unpacked the baggage that comes with a seminal record, dissected the year of the iTunes launch. The year 2001, when*NSYNC, Backstreet Boys and Britney were talking heads of the pop culture-scape. Don Felder and Courtney Love filed lawsuits: one wanting back in the music business, the other wanting out. Christina Aguilera dropped “Lady Marmalade” and Blink 182 released Take Your Pants Off And Jacket. The 9/11 terrorist attack brought music to a screeching halt, suspending MTV and VH1 to carry CBS newsfeeds, till Springsteen and Petty turned the noise into music again.
But when I took all that into consideration, it only made me realize that Is This It did not come with any contextual baggage. We pride ourselves with chronological snobbery when we retrospect on race and gender in pop culture. But ask yourself this: how different is 2016 from 2001? Same old major label contracts, but new artists. Same old digital launches, but new services. Same old teeny bopper audience, new talking heads. We’ve proven all prophecies about our decade wrong: we don’t drive flying cars or wear self-tying shoes or chew sex hormone gum. Hell, we don’t even have the “next Nirvana” or the “next Stooges” amongst us. What we have is Julian Casablancas’ apathetic narrative on this album, devastatingly questioning the ideologies of our Brave New Word–Is This It?
A shiny guitar line speeds, fries, fizzles out, dies. Only six seconds into the opener, there’s that illusory feeling of burning out. Instantaneous disaffection. Fabrizio Moretti’s open hi-hat escorts you into a ballad, followed by Nikolai Fraiture’s outspoken, bumbling bassline. Drought over, here are America’s tears. You’re washed up from the day, month, year, existence. Tables turn. Promises break before they’re made. You think about the reason you’re here, wherever here may be. Fears are different, you work so you won’t have to try so hard. You’re nervous. You hope people pretend to be nice so you can be mean. Looking down at times feels nice. Are you happy? Tired? Jaded? Weary? Disdained? “I just lied to get to your apartment, now I’m staying here just for a while.” You lose control. Tomorrow will be different. Someday.
Is this it, a question? Or just a hanging statement? “Oh, people they don’t understand/ No, girlfriends, they don’t understand/ In spaceships, they won’t understand/ And me, I ain’t ever gonna understand.”
Is this it, a millennial dissatisfaction? Or the Roman ruins of your youth? The unparalleled distance between what you want and what you get? You grew up believing you deserve it, only to learn you have to earn every single bit of it. “I want it all, I just can’t figure out…nothing.” Can’t you see I’m trying? I don’t even like it. Unhappiness? Discontent? Emotional claustrophobia?
Is this…it–“‘You drink too much’ makes me drink just the same.” Another one, keep going. You’re limited only by your own imagination. Go on, till it feels like you’re on a Soma holiday…until you’re drunk on apathy.
Unless you consider the cult of youth, ultra-modern mass misery a Nirvana territory alone, Is This It doesn’t have much in common with Nevermind. Instead of hiding underneath a veneer of heroin secrets, the record whirlpools inside ultra-modern rosy rebellion, eddies into every crevice of our culture disconnect. “Last Nite” gleefully–packaged with a guitar solo–confesses that we, as a culture, have no idea why we feel so empty (“Well, I’ve been in town for just about fifteen minutes now/ And baby, I feel so down/ And I don’t know why/ I keep walkin’ for miles”). The Strokes have the same, zany haha-my-anxiety-is-going-to-kill-me @sosadtoday brand of humor. Perpetuated by a somewhat distant narrative wrapped inside a catchy pop melody.
“Barely Legal,” a nod to guitarist Nick Valensi’s age at the time of recording (he was twenty), grapples with the compulsion to suffer the exaggerated demands of a civilized existence. The song, like much of the record, moves back and forth between lethargy and agitation (“They ordered me to make mistakes”). The song humanizes the starving elite (“I didn’t take no short cuts/ I used the money I saved up”), with an unstable but uniform sadness as Julian’s vocals obtrusively shred until they despair into you.
“Hard To Explain” packs a breathless chorus with witty aphorisms and arcane youth complexities (“I missed the last bus, I’ll take the next train/ I say the right things, but act the wrong way/ I like it right here, but I cannot stay/ This place is a zoo/ ‘You’re right, it’s true’). Like a siren call of urban culture, it’s a contagious, (ask the guitar line) candid representation of youthful frustration and comfort in being misunderstood. It responds to the preponderance of Huxley-ean predictions embodied in our society (“Oh, we shared some ideas/ All obsessed with fame/ Says we’re all the same/ Oh, I don’t see it that way”).
“Someday” ridicules society’s obsession with making every member useful. It takes deviant pleasure in being alone (“Alone we stand, together we fall apart”). “Alone, Together” passively explores mindless promiscuity with an unaffected instrumentation (“Lisa says, ‘Take time for me’/ Dropping him down to his knees /Ah, chest down”).
“Soma” alludes to the fictional government-mandated drug in Brave New World, designed to instill a deeper value of community, identity and stability (“And these friends, they keep asking for more”). The slight inflection in Julian’s voice that triggers a half step rise when he says “They liked it/ Tried to hide it” stays with you. When the individual feels, the community reels. Despite the generational lag time, Is This It sounds uncannily like the exhaustive conditioning of our youth.
But what does Is This It leave us with? If Ryan Adams were to cover this record, it’d be a Johnny Cash shade of gloomy. If you were to look at Wavves in the light of Is This It, they’d appear totally unoriginal. The Strokes certainly aren’t exactly fated to exile on an island of Alpha-Plus misfits. We all, when we attain a certain age, contemplate the nullness of human existence, wonder if this is it. They were twenty and world weary in 2001, we are twenty and world weary today. Sanity is impossible, but getting drunk with this fifteen year old record might keep misery at bay.
Originally published at thesympathizer.com on May 4, 2016.
