Hey hey, my my
Rock's frequent revivals suggest that Neil Young was right
I’d not thought about it before, but my life may have turned on the release of an indie rock album two decades ago on 30 July. On that day Is This It, the Strokes’ debut album, came out in Australia, returning to the band’s American home later that year via Britain.
By most accounts, the record changed the course of music. Once again, leather-jacketed rock bands were cool. Something close to rock and roll was being played again. A million copycat bands emerged in the following years, culminating in what is derisively termed ‘landfill indie’.
This includes several of my own bands. Having picked up the guitar at the start of 2008, I started playing with people as I was leaving school (instead of participating in school, my teachers may have argued). I was not very good, but rather than go to university I decided to stay home and keep noodling in whatever bands would have me.
All because of the Strokes? Well, maybe. The song that actually got me into playing was Don’t Look Back in Anger by Oasis – specifically a live version recorded in 2001, the same year that Is This It came out. My brother had picked up the guitar a year or two before, the likes of the Arctic Monkeys ringing in his ears.
Stories like the Strokes’ are not so unusual though. Those who knew them at the time report a Stakhanovite work ethic, with producer Gordon Raphael noting “incredible involvement and awareness at that age”, the band members being in their early twenties:
“Even when they did drink a couple of beers, there was nobody falling down and slurring their speech. They were working like crazy. It was very eye-opening, when I saw how completely precise they wanted their music to be.”
This tale is similar to the Beatles’ famous stint in Hamburg, which pop science writer Malcolm Gladwell used as an example of his (probably rubbish) rule that you need 10,000 hours of practice to master something. The Rolling Stones had a similar experience of living together in a band house, eventually riding on the wave of interest the Beatles created in British rock bands.
To return to a recent theme, I suspect that Tara Joshi is right when she says that “good timing” was as important as the other factors she names in the Strokes' success: singer Julian Casablancas’ “strange charisma”, the band’s “innate chemistry”, and their “scrawny good looks”. A cool band arrived when there was an appetite for it.
This is despite the music industry's infamous inability to work out what will sell, best described in John Niven’s Kill Your Friends, a novel based on his experience in music that is redolent of American Psycho. The trade has not earnt its reputation as a den of chancers for nowt.
And yet, people are drawn to it. This may be, as the fogy in me moans, the yoot’s yearning for fame. More generously it may be that for kids with food in the fridge and parents who can pay the mortgage expressing ‘your truth’ can seem the most pressing concern.
Since friends started dicking around with instruments together there have always been some kids in a garage or on an industrial estate making noise. The rest of the world only tends to notice when it taps into the zeitgeist, which is probably for the best.
As it happens, my own band Chameleon Inc are releasing our first single this Friday, two decades after Is This It. “Rock and roll will never die,” as Neil Young wrote, so long as there are people with the inclination to defibrillate the corpse every so often.