The last scene: New York in the early 2000s

Meet Me In The Bathroom is documentary based on the book by Lizzy Goldman, which in turn took its title from a song by The Strokes. It is documentary about the New York scene of the early 21st century, focussed on the Strokes themselves and on other bands of that era: the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, The Moldy Peaches, etc. When I first saw posters for the film my initial thought was that those bands were not actually good enough to justify a documentary about their scene. Then I though back to how exciting it was when the existence of the New York scene was announced to the world, because scenes are exciting in a way that individual bands are not. Also, having been told all my life that New York is an amazingly cool place, the prospect of there being actually cool music emerging from it was something that was easy to lap up. With the passage of time, my sense was that most of these bands had rather underdelivered, which raised the prospect that a film about them would be a bit of a trudge, leading to more discerning viewers being irritated by an endless parade of mediocre music juxtaposed against a commentary about how great the whole thing was. Nevertheless, I decided to take one for the team and booked myself in to see the film.

And it's actually very enjoyable. It does not necessarily shake me out of my belief that most of these acts were quite good rather than truly great, but it does communicate a sense of how exciting it must have been when the bands all burst onto the scene together. Formally it combines a lot of archival footage of the artists with recordings (possibly for interviews made for the book) of people talking about the scene. It is a very time-bound artefact, looking at a scene that emerged in the period when mobile video technology had become sufficiently cheap that it was possible for there to be loads of footage of the bands playing live and goofing around offstage, but from before the rise of people not paying for music precluded the emergence of such a scene.

The Strokes are the film's main focus, which is fair enough: they were the first of the bands to break big, and they also broke very big indeed, going almost overnight from playing toilet venues in New York to being superstars in the UK. It's easy to see why they were so successful, with catchy tunes and good lucks being a perennially winning combo. I'm still undecided as to how actually good they were, but they are definitely at least quite good, and the film has certainly made me interested in listening to their first album again.

One thing the film definitely did was confirm me in my view that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were the most essential band to emerge from that scene. A lot of that is down to Karen O, but not everything. She is a very charismatic frontwoman, but there is an energy to how Nick Zinner's guitars and Brian Chase's drums play off her yelps that adds to more the sum of its parts. It's also striking that in a scene defined by its good lookers (e.g. The Strokes and Interpol), Karen O is surprisingly plain-looking (controversial), probably not even being the best looker in the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (doubly controversial); yet for all, that throw her onstage and she transforms into a super-charismatic rock goddess. The film was also interesting on the pressure heaped on Karen O as the most visible woman in a pretty blokey scene.

My view on the other key band of that scene was also reinforced. The Moldy Peaches may have been a bunch of underachieving wasters who never followed up on their early success (quirky artistic success, not commercial success) but I still feel they had something, and hearing their tunes in the cinema alongside the others did not make me feel that I was wrong. Their underachievement is in some ways kind of surprising. There is a bit in the film where Kimya Dawson of The Moldy Peaches is talking about supporting The Strokes on their first tour of the UK, where the latter were living the rock star dream as they discovered that on our side of the Atlantic they had become superstars. Dawson mentions being a bit older than The Strokes and saying to them, "Dudes, do you maybe not want to get completely wasted all the time so that you will be able to remember all this?" (to which The Strokes collectively responded, "SHUT UP KIMYA AND GIMME THE DRØGS! WHERE ARE THE SEXY GIRLS?").

Beyond that we're into first wave also-ran territory: Interpol (good looking, not obviously essential in the music department), Liars (tuneless), TV On The Radio (not sure I've ever heard anything by them), etc. Then the second wave, which is essentially James Murphy & Tim Goldsworthy's DFA Records and the acts associated with it. For the purposes of the film that was basically The Rapture (who were on DFA for a bit but then left because some kind of mysterious prickology was delaying the release of their album) and Murphy's own LCD Soundsystem, a band summoned into existence by the success of the "Losing My Edge" single. Obviously, you know the tune; in fact it is about you (and not because you are one of the kids who is coming up from behind). The situating of the tune in the film was interesting, as it came up in the context of how the rise of Napster and file-sharing was suddenly making everything available to everyone, killing off the cachet that came from having hunted down obscure old records. The film also mentioned how file sharing strangled bands' incomes, playing a large part in the decline of band-based music, which may well mean that the early 2000s New York scene is the last of its kind.

images:

The Strokes (Pitchfork: "Vintage Photos of the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, James Murphy, and More From Meet Me in the Bathroom")

Yeah Yeah Yeahs (Wikipedia)