The Strokes

My first reaction of listening to Is This It was exactly the title, so I actually do like how the Strokes addressed the hype that way ahead of time, and closed the album out with a song that demands you either “Take It or Leave It.” What’s impressed me, however, is the album’s staying power. I swear, this album of upfront tunes and hooks and solos has somehow grown on me. Because the Strokes and producer Gordon Raphael fought for it to not sound clean or modern, the album does sound closer to the classic bands that the Strokes want to channel so despite the album being tied to 9/11 because the U.S. version pushed back the release date and changed the tracklist to remove the disparaging “New York City Cops,” it doesn’t sound like 2001, it sounds like it could have been released in 1981, 1991, or even 2011.

I how the album opens not with a bang, but with a shrug. I like how many of the songs are super sexual in nature, especially “Last Night” and “Barely Legal”—both of which were originally available on The Modern Age EP but they’re cleaned up here and in their definitive versions—that feels like Casablancas channeling classic rock more than he is actually horny. I like the Loaded bump of “The Modern Age” (Casablancas sounds remarkably like Lou Reed on the EP version) and the back and forth guitar hook of “Take It or Leave It” especially as it harmonizes with Casablancas on the chorus. I like that everybody agrees that the original Australian release with “New York City Cops” is the definitive version, with its replacement “When It Started” written on the quick (and it sounds like it, especially that guitar solo), and because “New York City Cops” kicks ass.

I like almost all of these songs and marvel to how tight the album is, shrugging off the decade of excess that preceded it by just presenting 11 songs where Velvet Underground chord changes on the dual guitars of Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. are played quick as punk, getting in and out in 32 minutes. Casablancas here has a practically power pop sense of catchy tuneage that he’s able to fold into his vocal melodies, and the slight distortion on his voice makes it so you want to keep hearing them not just to decipher the lyrics but because his voice sometimes comes in like thunder. “New York City Cops… THEY AIN’T TOO SMART.” Yeah, insert that—gestures at vein—right here. The hook of “Last Nite” isn’t the choruses, but hearing him go “LAST NITE” the way he does, channeling the frustration of being turned off with just two words before we even get to the rest of the verse. Meanwhile, the rhythm section don’t miss a beat here despite the fact that Nikolai Fraiture’s bass is curiously mixed lower than you would expect, and that drummer Fabrizio Moretti isn’t doing anything flashy here which works to its advantage, whereas their next album exposes his limitations because the songs don’t bump as hard.

In Da Capo Best Music Writing 2002, there’s an email exchange in August 2001 where someone named Scott P. wisely summed it up, “Key to their appeal, as well, I think is that like Oasis they not only return a guitar-bass-drums setup with familiar consensus-building roots to rock but they act and, arguably first and foremost desire to be rock stars in all of the elegantly wasted, groupie-shagging conotations (sic). […] Pop music being inspired by Lou Reed and Television! Finally! Some of these writers, whether they’ve known it or not, have probably waited a long time to be able to back a band such as the Strokes.”

The idea that the Strokes were saving rock music was very obviously myth-making by music critics happy that there was a presentable band with a rockstar attitude and image on their hands. It didn’t directly translate to commercial success. Is This It peaked at #33 in the U.S. charts (which was certainly a better achievement than the White Stripes were able to do that same year as White Blood Cells hit #61), and of its singles, the highest-charting was “Last Nite” that hit #5 on the charts, but only on Modern Rock Tracks and not on the main Billboard singles. Though the album sold enough to go gold, as Chris Deville pointed out in his recent write-up of the album for its 20th year anniversary for Stereogum, it wouldn’t go platinum until almost a decade later.

To address a viral tweet on X, there is not 40 rock records from 2001 that are better than Is This It, or frankly 40 better albums of any genre, so in a way the critics were right about this album. Even so, they were also wrong in their dangerous hype, which actually did matter for this band who failed to live up to the insane expectations everyone had from them before their debut album even dropped. Of all the different types of music criticism, the one that I might hate the most is the type that gushes lavish praise because it comes off as desperate marketing hype and because it, without fail, ages poorly.