Finished Meet Me In The Bathroom

The book. And yeah, I guess I finished the song too. I had a jokey headline all ready to go, "Please Kill Them," a reference to the Legs McNeil NYC Punk oral history, but the people in that book were even more annoying than the scions of the wealthy wandering through Lizzie Goodman's book. And while we're here, let's take a moment to marvel at the amount of work that went into this book. Lizzie Goodman, goddamn. She deserves a medal, as does whoever did the indexing for this fucker. Maggie Nelson, an NYU (I think) music grad who I heard on SNL one time, and who, in my completely subjective opinion, has a singing voice that could sterilize every guinea pigs within 30 yards of her voice, is thanked for her research help conducted when she was just an undergrad with stars in her eyes . The more things change...

There's a story where Marc Spitz, formerly a senior writer at Spin magazine--also formerly a living breathing resident of planet Earth; Spitz died a couple of years ago; his humor and passion are sorely missed--, so Spitz is hanging out with Julian Casablancas, frontman for The Strokes. Julian's just finished recording the follow-up to Is This It. And he and Spitz bring home a couple of girls and a big bag of coke, whereupon Julian, the Smart One in the band, plays the advance cassette over and over again wondering if it's any good. Then he plays Talking Heads' Don't Worry About The Government over and over, wishing his new album, the forthcoming Room On Fire, sounded as good as the T. Heads. Spitz comforts his buddy. The girls don't get mentioned. Sounds like a hell of a party!

There's something almost appallingly pathetic and sad in most of the book's stories. There's a story about an Austin club owner very sweetly asking Karen O and her buddies to be nice to the dressing room he just paid lots of money to renovate, and of course they fucking thrash the place just because, and I'm not exaggerating, he asked them not to. Weirdly, they're telling the story years later for the book, but there's no sign of any remorse, no sign that anyone in the book really gives a shit about anyone else, really.  Hell, most of the time they don't even give a shit about themselves. Even their reaction to 9/11 is narcissistic and apolitical. Basically, a holy fuck we might all die. Let's party!

Back to Julian, Marc, and the anonymous girls (I think Eleanor Friedberger is the only woman in the book who gets to play an instrument) at the party. Anybody who gets coked up and tries to judge the quality of recorded sound is, how can I put this, barking up the wrong bamboo tree. What Julian should have done was call me on the phone and ask my opinion. There's some great songs on there, Julian, but it's sequenced all wrong. So you get this kind of mid-tempo lull in the middle that kills the momentum. And like, how do you not make The End Has No End the last song on the album? It's one of the best things you ever did, and it's such an obvious last-song. Instead you put I Can't Win at the end. Move it into that mid-tempo lull I was talking about, and you've solved that problem. Also, you might want to think about these song titles. Last album, you had Is This It, Last Nite, Hard To Explain, etc., songs where the title appeared in the songs lyrics. Ain't nobody going to be standing in the front row of your shows yelling Reptilia! or What Ever Happened! or Automatic Stop! I've had this album for fucking 15 years now, and I still can't remember which ones the reggae one and which ones the Smokey Robinson one. Again, great songs, sounds great, but it also sounds like a fucking mess.

Instead, they just put it out.

The only time class ever gets mentioned is when we're introduced to Vampire Weekend and Ezra pulls out his I'm-not-wealthy-I'm-just-middle-class bona fides. Motherfucker, you attended an Ivy League college in one of the most expensive cities in America. You're not Bruce Springsteen. (Bruce Springsteen isn't even Bruce Springsteen, but that's a subject for another time). You're a fantastic lyricist and guitar player. Just chill. But the featured players in Meet Me In the Bathroom the Book are all either fucking loaded (in every sense) or attached to loaded friends. DFA basically owes its existence to a NYC trust-fund weenie who got his dad to buy him a Manhattan building so he could set up a studio and have some cool music/film buddies. James Murphy, a man who never met an opportunity he didn't like, got in on the ground floor of that shit.

Funnily enough, TV On the Radio and Fiery Furnaces, probably my two favorite bands to come out of that era, get kinda short-changed in the book. Not enough crazy stories, true (hearing the TVotR drummer complain about how Interpol gets all the groupies and he gets married couples wanting to buy him a cup of coffee is funny as fuck), but also not enough chart success either. The music journalism adage that "the more popular you are, the more you're worth writing about" definitely applies here.

To be fair, those stories are great, as are those bands first albums (Is This It, the Master EP, Turn On the Bright Lights). The story seriously drags when those bands, uh, continue to make records. Intra-band fighting, underwhelming music, and way too many drugs--over and over, ad nasueum, ad nausea. Everyone thought these bands were ripping off VU or Patti or Joy Division, but it turns out all they ever really wanted to be was Duran Duran.

We'll leave you with this song, an angry stab of NYC nihilism and loathing from that era that sounds like someone smashing the mirror that everyone around them can't stop staring into (and snorting off of). It also takes the Strokes/Interpol sound to a place that neither band ever quite got to.