Friday, December 02, 2005
The Strokes in Filter Magazine
One More First Impression
Long live The Strokes
by Steven Chen
Remember five years ago? We were treated to subtle, glimmering treasures like Radiohead’s Kid A, Modest Mouse’s From the Moon to Antarctica and Grandaddy’s The Sophtware Slump. Yet, those albums mostly just made an impact in some place called the “indie world.” Outside in the actual world, a gorilla named Fred Durst was doing it all for the nookie, Creed were pawning off ego-manical Christian music as rock onto an unsuspecting public, and the Backstreet Boys were still selling millions of records.
When the Strokes made landfall in January of 2001 with their teaser, The Modern Age EP (more of a single actually), then for real later on that year with the full-length Is This It, there seemed to be a sense that music had been schizophrenic for far too long, and that finally there would be sanity again. Here was real music, and here was also something that MTV could play. On the strength of hype alone, people weren’t just talking about the Strokes; they were talking about talking about the Strokes, some of them already getting sick of al album that was barely a month old.
“When we first came out, there was too much written for what we had. All we had was 11 songs that clocked in at half an hour at that point, and we were getting the kind of attention that’s usually reserved for bands that are on their fifth, sixth album,” says Nick Valensi, the most outwardly engaging member of the band and perhaps its unofficial spokesperson. He’s let his hair grow quite a bit since we’ve last seen him, and that along with his height and cheekbones, is a reminder that you’re dealing with a person many consider to be a rock star. “It might’ve hurt us a bit just because it was too much, you know? At first, everybody would say, ‘Oh man, the Strokes are this new great band. I love them,’ and two months later, the same people were saying, ‘I fucking hate that band.’”
“For us, we were so lucky in so many ways, it just seemed fake,” says Albert Hammond Jr., whose dad, Albert Hammond Sr., is also a musician – a prolific best-selling songwriter responsible for such hits as Starship’s, “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” and Tina Turner’s “I Don’t Wanna Lose You” – although back in Hammond Sr.’s day, it took a lot longer than a year to get famous. In the case of Hammond Jr., it was difficult to catch up with or even comprehend the instant frenzy over his band. “Like the way the press reacted in England,” he says. “People just saw us and got really excited. I don’t know why, but they did.”
It’s tough to imagine how any follow-up could have lived up to the impossible heights that Is This It had attained. Room On Fire, released in 2003, was as noble an attempt as any absurdly high-pressure sophomore effort – an attempt to recapture the stripped-down heat that had transformed these five kids from New York not so much into chart-toppers or commercial monsters, but, rather, a pop-culture phenomenon. If one were to take what the press were saying to heart, the Strokes were supposedly everything from the harbingers of rock and roll’s triumphant return and the spearhead of a New York cultural renaissance, to the Velvet Underground reincarnate, the new Nirvana, and the first new and real large-scale rock band in what had seemed like ages. The unnerving thing is that some of that was true, though to what extent is up for debate.
“Do you see yourself doing this for a long time, in the next 10 years?”
“Did you guys set out to make a different record?”
“Why didn’t Gordon Raphael produce this record?”
Fabrizio Moretti is listing some of the questions that the media have bombarded the band with so far. For the past week, the Strokes have been tirelessly interviewing with international press, and tomorrow they’ll be shooting a video for their first single, “Juicebox.” After that, they’re off to South America for a string of shows – their first in over a year – and their first ever on that continent.
“Ten years, man. That’s a long time!” Valensi blurts out sarcastically.
“What’s another one?” Moretti says. “Oh, ‘What’s your favorite song to play?’ And that’s such a bitch to answer.” Of the five Moretti seems the least like a harbinger of rock’s triumphant return. Less guarded than singer Julian Casablancas or Hammond, less quiet than Nikolai Fraiture, and less polished than Valensi, Moretti is the most casual and uncensored member of the band, which makes him fun and instantly disarming. “It’s like, man, why are you trying to pigeonhole me already?”
Two of the questions Moretti lists are aimed directly at the Strokes’ upcoming third album, First Impressions of Earth, and have already become tedious but will, without a doubt, continue to be slung at the group interview after interview after interview. In this case, on is the observation that there seems to be a heavier and more pronounced sound that either of the previous two records, especially on the aggressive “Juicebox” whose sinister chorus has Casablancas asking (but pretty much demanding), “Why don’t you come over here?” The other fact is that the Strokes opted for a new producer this time – veteran David Kahne, whose diverse roster includes everyone from Sublime to No Doubt. He’s a more seasoned (and some might say slicker) producer than Gordon Raphael who worked on the first two Strokes albums.
“What we really started to do after our two first albums was something different,” says Fraiture, the “soft-spoken” member of the Strokes, though that shouldn’t imply that he doesn’t have a lot to say. “We felt we maximized our capabilities with that medium. And then David came along, and it was rough at first. We weren’t sure if we liked his style, but eventually, little by little, he understood what we liked and he understood what we could do.”
“Before we even started recording, we all knew that we didn’t want to repeat ourselves with the same kind of production quality,” Valensi adds. “So that was pretty conscious and deliberate.”
Kahne wanted to bring out what had surprised him when he first entered the studio with eh Strokes: that Casablancas was one of the most talented singers he’s ever worked with, that Valensi was, in fact, a spectacular guitarist, and that everyone in the band basically exhibited a level of skill that wasn’t immediately obvious because the Strokes have always been a ‘less is more’ kind of band. One thing people will notice right off the bat is that Casablancas’ distorted vocal, a trademark of previous albums, has been replaced by a crisper sound. “Julian’s voice is naturally really big,” Kahne says. “I felt like I was carving pieces of him off of himself. It seemed stupid to be taking someone who sang so big and make it so small.”
From Casablancas’ perspective, however, there was more at stake. “Sometimes, I think he just had these opportunities to make it like a pop gem,” he says. “And it was like, ‘But if you do that, I’ll hate this song.’ It’s like, ‘Sure, I could hit that note…and I will hate you forever.”
Fraiture adds, “David was like, ‘That was really good,’ and he cant understand why we didn’t like it. I think it made for a challenge for everyone, in the best possible way.”
For the most part, it seems the two parties agreed, insofar as two people with very strong but somewhat different notions of perfection can agree on perfection itself. At one point during recording, Kahne says, Casablancas left the room, came back, and asked, “Did you change the drums? They sound different.” Kahne said no at first, but remembered that he’d brought the hi-hat up one decibel. Casablancas asked him to put it back, which he did. He listened to it again. “Okay, there it is,” he told Kahne.
One thing to think about, if you’re the Strokes, is how to navigate between doing too little and doing too much, especially when “doing little,” so to speak, seems to be what people have responded to so strongly.
“Sometimes I play something, and I need the rest of the band to tell me, ‘Dude, that’s a little bit much,’” Valensi says. “I’m sure I’ve had to tell other people in the band, like, ‘Maybe you should try to tone that down a little bit.’ That happens, you know? We’ll get carried away sometimes, but that’s why we’re working together.”
He’s inclined to agree with the reviewer who said that Room On Fire sounded like a do-over of the first album, with the same energy and mentality as Is This It directed at different songs (meant as a compliment). The record itself met with mostly positive reviews, with some minor backlash, and without the kind of critical mass that had gathered with the first one – nor was such a response to be expected. A little bit of a dip seemed near impossible to avoid, just as some amount of deflation comes naturally with over-inflation. With Room On Fire, Valensi explains, there was no room to second-guess or think out all of the songs because the pressure of following Is This It was a timing issue as well. There was a sense among the band’s members that, with all the praise that was being lavished upon them, they had to “catch up” with their credibility and do it quickly. Had there been more time Valensi may have elaborated on a part her and fine-tuned a guitar there. As it was, on the same day that they mastered the album, the Strokes left for Japan. “In retrospect, it was pretty ridiculous,” Moretti recalls.
Recording First Impressions of Earth, on the other hand, was infinitely more relaxing. The band built its own studio in Manhattan and took its time, pairing off into different groups to brainstorm more efficiently. Casablancas enjoyed being more meticulous with his singing, Hammond fell asleep occasionally on the hard studio floor, and Valensi found for the first time that he actually enjoyed Pink Floyd, something he’d never been able to do before. “David Gilmour – his playing was definitely brought into the forefront of my consciousness,” he says. “I’ve always like music that was a little bit more immediate, and the first two and a half minutes on a Pink Floyd song is just like a two-chord progression that’s going nowhere, and I wanted it to get somewhere. But maybe I have more patience now.”
There’s an irony in asking Casablancas to talk about a song that repeats the phrase, “I’ve got nothin’ to say,” about 15 times in just over three minutes. On “Ask Me Anything,” one of the softest songs the Strokes have ever done, he sings over a long Mellotron (a first for the band), “I’ve got nothing’ to say/I got nothin’ to give/No reason to live/And I will fight to survive/I got nothin’ to hide/Wish I wasn’t so shy.”
Casablancas struggles with an answer, not so much out of having nothing to say, nut out of discomfort with the whole idea of talking about himself. “The chorus was something I had, and I just kept repeating, ‘I got nothing to say,’” he explains. “It’s almost like a regrettable – I don’t know. It’s hard to say something that has a real purpose, you know? It’s just that you have nothing to say. It’s hard to put it in words.” Finally, he just defers to another part of the song, Nick was playing on a verse. He was playing two of the chords, and I started to sandwich stuff over it, and that was the verse.”
It’s not that Casablancas doesn’t want to talk’ he just maybe doesn’t want to talk with you, the interviewer, about him, the artist. Later on, he’ll take another stab at explaining why he doesn’t like sharing things about himself – a difficult thing. To do when you think about it. “It feels like its wrong to have that need to explain the truth. It’s just boring for people I guess. Sorry, I shouldn’t be talking about this. Let’s forget the last five minutes. So, anyways man,
Like many artists, Casablancas doesn’t read much of his own press. He tries to draw a metaphor between that and a fairy tale about a boy who puts a jar of milk on his head and then cheese over that, only to have the cheese melt, all of which somewhere amounts to the idea of not wanting to compensate in the wrong way every time you read an article about yourself. It makes sense, sort of, and in a way his discomfort with the media seems connected to the entire band’s relationship with the current state of popular music, which despite being Fred Durst-less at the moment, is still somewhat of a giant question mark.
“I don’t’ know how it works, but there’s some kind of system going on that I’ve sort of given up trying to understand, I mean, we’re sort of in no man’s land. We’re not aggressive enough to be on the modern rock station – you know, you’ve got like sharp changes. It’s either super aggressive or diet, watered-down pop, over-produced stuff. I guess they just concentrate on what makes money, and they just put all their energy into that. And anything else has a hard time surviving on its own,” Casablancas says.
From Valensi’s perspective, the music world is at least more tolerable than it used to be. Many would say that the success of the Strokes was even largely responsible for that change. “I don’t think we really contributed to the fall of the boy bands. That was sort of coming anyway. Not to say that the nu-metal one wasn’t coming anyway. But I think we did our small part to stop that machine,” he says, adding, “I’ll take the Killers over Staind any day of the week, hand down. That’s not to say that the state of music is great or in great shape. But is it better than what we had six or seven, eight years ago? Definitely.”
One barometer for the state of mainstream music might be the monolith that MTV has become. And what’s worth noting is that indie bands like Modest Mouse and Grandaddy and Sigur Ros haven’t really been excised from MTV’s version of the world. It’s just that they’ve been relegated to being the background music for some of the network’s 50 or so shows, of which fewer than 10 play music videos. While the Strokes’ image and brand of music are decidedly more MTV-friendly, there’s still no guarantee that MTV will promote them. Moretti says, “It’s crazy, they’re always playing ‘Hard to Explain’ or ‘Someday’ in the background. It’s like, ‘Thanks for playing our video.’”
Nor does Hammond buy the argument that MTV’s hands are tied by consumer demand when it comes to choosing which videos to play. “They could put on anything they way and people would see it,” he says. “That’s the power they have. I think they could put on anything, play it enough, and everyone would be like, ‘That’s amazing!’” Meanwhile, he continues, the “heads” on those shows say they’re fans. “Usually, if I say I’m a fan, it means I usually try to listen to it or like it. If I’m not a fan, then I play something completely different. People love it! Can’t play it though.”
“Play it all the time in the bathroom while taking a shit.” Moretti laughs.
“Bought it for Christmas for everyone,” says Hammond.
“But it just doesn’t’ fit into the grain of MTV,” Valensi finishes.
One way to look at it, Valensi says, is, “I don’t think MTV really needs us. Or we really need them, really.” He thinks this over. “I guess maybe they don’t need us a little bit more than we don’t need them.” To be fair, the two have maintained a consistent relationship of bouncing ideas off on another, some of which work and some of which involve things like having the Strokes play only a third of a song during and awards show, which they declined. The network had also asked if the band would be interested in doing a “24 Hours With the Strokes” special to take place in a hotel room, but the guys ultimately declined that as well, out of a concern that they would have no say as to how they would be presented. “What if that’s the thing that it takes for everyone to recognize us in all the wrong ways? That’s scary,” Hammond worries. “I think we’ve always liked MTV, and sometimes they just have ideas that don’t really work with us. I don’t think we’re gonna put ourselves in a position where we’re gonna feel weird.”
Fed up with boring videos that simply showed people strumming guitars, banging drums, and lip-syncing, Casablancas used to try to push and agenda of weirder, more interesting videos. But having hit so many walls, he just tends to go with the flow these days. Tomorrow, the band is shooting a video whose call sheet seeks “talent that is comfortable with getting physical on set.” The premise is that a live performance of “Juicebox” broadcast over a radio show hosted by David Cross inspires people all over the city to make out and possibly more.
“Blowjobs,” Moretti offers.
Valensi doesn’t miss a beat. “Couple of blowjobs, some rim jobs. Couple of donkey punches and a Dirty Sanchez.”
“Cleveland steamers.”
“One or two Cleveland steamers,” Valensi agrees, though he adds, “We can’t guarantee.”
“Clam chowder,” Hammond says.
Moretti looks confused. “What’s clam chowder? Just clam chowder?”
At this point, a show like “24 Hours With the Strokes” doesn’t seem like such a bad idea, although some publicist somewhere might disagree and claim that this was the problem with last time. “Over-saturation of anything makes people sick of it,” Valensi is careful to note. But if that were true, you can’t help but wonder how MTV finds it beneficial to repeat the same couple dozen videos despite having thousands to choose from. Frankly, Moretti’s sick of what he sees as a self-perpetuating cycle of bands copying each other, in which bands take cues from the very bands influences initially. He says, “It’s an ocean of confused originality.” You start to understand why Casablancas gets bored hearing himself talk, and wonder if it’s not boredom, but exhaustion.
“There will always be these spin-off bands that kind of pervert everything that was cool in the beginning,” Fraiture says. “And then everyone’s sick of that. Everyone’s saying, ‘Oh, music sucks now. Rock is dead.’ Then another band comes out with something different.”
In any case, “It’s not up to us, right?” Hammond concludes. “It’s not like we created the hype.”
