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Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011
An intriguing oral history of the post-9/11 decline of the old-guard music industry and rebirth of the New York rock scene, led by a group of iconoclastic rock bands.
In the second half of the twentieth-century New York was the source of new sounds, including the Greenwich Village folk scene, punk and new wave, and hip-hop. But as the end of the millennium neared, cutting-edge bands began emerging from Seattle, Austin, and London, pushing New York further from the epicenter. The behemoth music industry, too, found itself in free fall, under siege from technology. Then 9/11/2001 plunged the country into a state of uncertainty and war—and a dozen New York City bands that had been honing their sound and style in relative obscurity suddenly became symbols of glamour for a young, web-savvy, forward-looking generation in need of an anthem.
Meet Me in the Bathroom charts the transformation of the New York music scene in the first decade of the 2000s, the bands behind it—including The Strokes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem, Interpol, and Vampire Weekend—and the cultural forces that shaped it, from the Internet to a booming real estate market that forced artists out of the Lower East Side to Williamsburg. Drawing on 200 original interviews with James Murphy, Julian Casablancas, Karen O, Ezra Koenig, and many others musicians, artists, journalists, bloggers, photographers, managers, music executives, groupies, models, movie stars, and DJs who lived through this explosive time, journalist Lizzy Goodman offers a fascinating portrait of a time and a place that gave birth to a new era in modern rock-and-roll.
In the second half of the twentieth-century New York was the source of new sounds, including the Greenwich Village folk scene, punk and new wave, and hip-hop. But as the end of the millennium neared, cutting-edge bands began emerging from Seattle, Austin, and London, pushing New York further from the epicenter. The behemoth music industry, too, found itself in free fall, under siege from technology. Then 9/11/2001 plunged the country into a state of uncertainty and war—and a dozen New York City bands that had been honing their sound and style in relative obscurity suddenly became symbols of glamour for a young, web-savvy, forward-looking generation in need of an anthem.
Meet Me in the Bathroom charts the transformation of the New York music scene in the first decade of the 2000s, the bands behind it—including The Strokes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem, Interpol, and Vampire Weekend—and the cultural forces that shaped it, from the Internet to a booming real estate market that forced artists out of the Lower East Side to Williamsburg. Drawing on 200 original interviews with James Murphy, Julian Casablancas, Karen O, Ezra Koenig, and many others musicians, artists, journalists, bloggers, photographers, managers, music executives, groupies, models, movie stars, and DJs who lived through this explosive time, journalist Lizzy Goodman offers a fascinating portrait of a time and a place that gave birth to a new era in modern rock-and-roll.
622 pages, Hardcover
First published May 23, 2017
About the author
Lizzy Goodman
4 books148 followersLizzy Goodman is a journalist whose writing on rock and roll, fashion, and popular culture has appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and NME. She is a contributing editor at ELLE and a regular contributor to New York magazine. She lives in upstate New York with her two basset hounds, Joni Mitchell and Jerry Orbach.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,121 reviews
December 19, 2017
This book is fine. It is also a complete existential nightmare.
Look: oral histories tend to be very readable, especially if the people being interviewed have big personalities. Sure enough, this book is very readable because it's full of a bunch of successful/inspired/crazy people saying interesting things.
But while reading Meet Me In The Bathroom is a pleasant enough experience it is also a stone-cold bummer because: damn, man, I don't want my generation to descend up its own butthole the same way that the Boomers did.
Look: I was in college when a lot of these bands released their first records. I remember the Strokes being played at house parties. I fell in love with Interpol during 2005, which was the first year that I was living completely on my own, two and a half thousand miles from where I grew up. Hell, the National - who are interviewed in the book but not really discussed - have been my favorite band for going on a decade.
But it's a big leap to go from "I like these bands" to "these bands were important. They Meant Something."
Did these bands change things? Sure, why not. But you know who else changed things? Reality TV and Starbucks and PornHub and SpongeBob Squarepants. I'm told that a butterfly can change the world if it flaps its wings hard enough.
Oh, and 9/11 changed things - and that is covered here, but maybe not as fully as it should be. Outside of an anecdote from Connor Oberst about playing an anti-Bush song on Jay Leno's talk show this book mostly steers clear of politics - which seems insane to me? I feel like the two wars were a really dominant story during this time period and their complete absence from this story feels strange to me. But I guess the author just had to make room for a fortieth story about how all of these dudes loved doing cocaine at hip clubs like third (or fifth) generation photocopies of Led Zeppelin. But I digress...
Look, I don't mind if the people that were in these bands talk about themselves as if they were important; its a given that their first person perspective will be skewed and they will be unreliable narrators. But the fact that *NONE* of the people here seem to see the writing on the wall is just annoying; everyone seems to be in denial about the fact that even the biggest bands are only super-famous for fifteen minutes now because there's so much media vying for our attention all the time that it's impossible to keep focusing on the same thing for too long... Oh, and also: 'the biggest bands' are really only mid-size anymore because the monoculture has fractured and its impossible for a single artist to speak to everyone anymore... I mean, hell, the Stokes were big, but I know a ton of people who completely missed them because they were exclusively into Spearboxx/The Love Below that year, but of course that wouldn't be covered here because OutKast is from Atlanta and thus out of this book's purview - but again: I digress.
My point is this: its all well and good to document an interesting scene after its passed. But we can't over-mythologize it, and we can't take it too seriously. At the end of the day the Strokes were a band that had one pretty decent record and then they more or less went away. That's great! That's more than most bands can claim, and I get why people would want to know more about their time in the spotlight. But that isn't enough to treat them like world-changing icons; doing so is both inaccurate and also unfair to them.
If you're in my generation and want to know more about the bands of your adolescence then by all means read this book. But while you are doing that you can never lose sight of this simple truth: we have to be better than the Boomers, and that means steering clear of self-important posturing about how influential and revolutionary and overall great we were. We were fine, and quite frankly, that's good enough.
Look: oral histories tend to be very readable, especially if the people being interviewed have big personalities. Sure enough, this book is very readable because it's full of a bunch of successful/inspired/crazy people saying interesting things.
But while reading Meet Me In The Bathroom is a pleasant enough experience it is also a stone-cold bummer because: damn, man, I don't want my generation to descend up its own butthole the same way that the Boomers did.
Look: I was in college when a lot of these bands released their first records. I remember the Strokes being played at house parties. I fell in love with Interpol during 2005, which was the first year that I was living completely on my own, two and a half thousand miles from where I grew up. Hell, the National - who are interviewed in the book but not really discussed - have been my favorite band for going on a decade.
But it's a big leap to go from "I like these bands" to "these bands were important. They Meant Something."
Did these bands change things? Sure, why not. But you know who else changed things? Reality TV and Starbucks and PornHub and SpongeBob Squarepants. I'm told that a butterfly can change the world if it flaps its wings hard enough.
Oh, and 9/11 changed things - and that is covered here, but maybe not as fully as it should be. Outside of an anecdote from Connor Oberst about playing an anti-Bush song on Jay Leno's talk show this book mostly steers clear of politics - which seems insane to me? I feel like the two wars were a really dominant story during this time period and their complete absence from this story feels strange to me. But I guess the author just had to make room for a fortieth story about how all of these dudes loved doing cocaine at hip clubs like third (or fifth) generation photocopies of Led Zeppelin. But I digress...
Look, I don't mind if the people that were in these bands talk about themselves as if they were important; its a given that their first person perspective will be skewed and they will be unreliable narrators. But the fact that *NONE* of the people here seem to see the writing on the wall is just annoying; everyone seems to be in denial about the fact that even the biggest bands are only super-famous for fifteen minutes now because there's so much media vying for our attention all the time that it's impossible to keep focusing on the same thing for too long... Oh, and also: 'the biggest bands' are really only mid-size anymore because the monoculture has fractured and its impossible for a single artist to speak to everyone anymore... I mean, hell, the Stokes were big, but I know a ton of people who completely missed them because they were exclusively into Spearboxx/The Love Below that year, but of course that wouldn't be covered here because OutKast is from Atlanta and thus out of this book's purview - but again: I digress.
My point is this: its all well and good to document an interesting scene after its passed. But we can't over-mythologize it, and we can't take it too seriously. At the end of the day the Strokes were a band that had one pretty decent record and then they more or less went away. That's great! That's more than most bands can claim, and I get why people would want to know more about their time in the spotlight. But that isn't enough to treat them like world-changing icons; doing so is both inaccurate and also unfair to them.
If you're in my generation and want to know more about the bands of your adolescence then by all means read this book. But while you are doing that you can never lose sight of this simple truth: we have to be better than the Boomers, and that means steering clear of self-important posturing about how influential and revolutionary and overall great we were. We were fine, and quite frankly, that's good enough.
June 21, 2017
Will there ever be another "scene" like the one that Lizzy Goodman describes in MMITB? Whether it was Seattle for grunge, the Sunset Strip for hair metal, Boston for '80s era "college" music, Laurel Canyon in the early '70s, Motown in the '60s, or any other number of scenes, so much of music history can be traced back to a bunch of bands emanating from one central location playing stylistically-similar jams. MMITB does a tremendous job of capturing the dynamic LES/rock scene of the early Aughts, which very well may be the last "scene" of its kind (due to technology, loss of monoculture, corporate consolidation, etc.). The oral history format is perfectly implemented here, as Goodman got musicians, publicists, industry professionals, bloggers, and groupies to dish about this incredible era. I can't think of anyone --save for maybe Carlos D-- who I wanted to hear from but didn't. BRAVO! 👏👏
(Oh, if you're reading this book and you want to listen to all the music that's mentioned, I made a Spotify playlist of EVERY SINGLE SONG MENTIONED IN THE BOOK for that very purpose: https://open.spotify.com/user/unclegr... )
(Oh, if you're reading this book and you want to listen to all the music that's mentioned, I made a Spotify playlist of EVERY SINGLE SONG MENTIONED IN THE BOOK for that very purpose: https://open.spotify.com/user/unclegr... )
February 14, 2023
OMG, there's now a trailer for the documentary based on the book: https://www.nme.com/news/music/watch-...
I'm not crying, you are!!!
I'm not going to lie, I got so emotional reading this tome, as it talks about music I love, no, music I LOVE. Quoting a vast range of musicians, journalists, bloggers, and people from the music industry, Goodman creates a mosaic of voices and thus evokes the spirit of NYC and its music scene in the first decade of the new millennium. Three narrative strands hold the book together: The stories of The Strokes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and DFA with James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy. Goodman talks about their influences, rise and careers, and shows how they interacted with an influenced others, like The White Stripes (Detroit), The Hives (Sweden), The Vines (Australia), Franz Ferdinand (UK) et al. She also refers to the political climate that influenced the time and thus the arts - George W. Bush, 9/11, the Iraq War - and how digitalization and the internet changed the music industry and affected the protagonists.
I really enjoyed how Goodman combines all the hard facts with tons of anecdotes - this is an oral history, after all. We hang out with Paul Banks and weird-ass Carlos from Interpol, watch madness unfold when the Followills first get confronted with rockstar parties in downtown NYC, and are just as stunned as Adam Green when the crowd goes nuts about the Moldy Peaches' stage outfits (Robin Hood, chicken, you name it). When this book was released, a lot of the reporting focused on Julian Casablancas calling Ryan Adams a bad influence for Albert Hammond Jr. who struggled with a severe heroin addiction, but for me, the real diss came from Fab:
Ryan Adams: "It was very dramatic, the way it all went down, very much in style of "The Godfather", where the family business was being attended to. (...)."
Fabrizio Moretti: "I'm sure Ryan Adams has his own story and it's grandiose and beautiful and whatnot, but he's not that major of a player in the Strokes' history."
Haha, so much for that - but now Ryan Adams has some other problems on his hands anyway (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/ar...).
The heart of the book is also the heart of the movement, and it's the story of The Strokes - parts of this narrative broke my heart. This is my favorite band, they were the trailblazers, and Goodman details how they started to struggle and to disintegrate from "Room On Fire" onwards, overwhelmed by what was happening around them and fighting among and with themselves. There are quite a few bands who went through the door The Strokes opened and became more successful than them, and many of them - like The Killers or Kings of Leon - certainly are good bands, but the way The Strokes boycotted themselves is just heart-breaking. Although no one can take their impact on music history away from them, I wish they would have found a way to play in the same league when it comes to mainstream success, because they would have deserved it.
When journalist Alex Wagner is cited saying about Ezra Koenig: "Come on. Ezra is not Julian, right? They are not battling the same demons. (...) I mean, there's this very reasonable millennial idea of your art form as a fundamentally manageable thing. Like, you could go and be an artist, as opposed to you can't be anything but an artist and it's this all-encompassing demon you have to wrestle with", I see that Koenig's attitude is reasonable, but it also makes me want to punch him in the face a bit, you know? (Sorry, Ezra, Vampire Weekend is great and all, but Julian Casablancas is my favorite singer ever.)
As you have probably realized by now, this book is pretty much unreadable if you don't have any prior knowledge about the music Goodman discusses, but if you do and you are into it, this read will blow your mind and fill your heart. There's also a fun Spotify playlist for the book: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6OY...
I'm not crying, you are!!!
I'm not going to lie, I got so emotional reading this tome, as it talks about music I love, no, music I LOVE. Quoting a vast range of musicians, journalists, bloggers, and people from the music industry, Goodman creates a mosaic of voices and thus evokes the spirit of NYC and its music scene in the first decade of the new millennium. Three narrative strands hold the book together: The stories of The Strokes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and DFA with James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy. Goodman talks about their influences, rise and careers, and shows how they interacted with an influenced others, like The White Stripes (Detroit), The Hives (Sweden), The Vines (Australia), Franz Ferdinand (UK) et al. She also refers to the political climate that influenced the time and thus the arts - George W. Bush, 9/11, the Iraq War - and how digitalization and the internet changed the music industry and affected the protagonists.
I really enjoyed how Goodman combines all the hard facts with tons of anecdotes - this is an oral history, after all. We hang out with Paul Banks and weird-ass Carlos from Interpol, watch madness unfold when the Followills first get confronted with rockstar parties in downtown NYC, and are just as stunned as Adam Green when the crowd goes nuts about the Moldy Peaches' stage outfits (Robin Hood, chicken, you name it). When this book was released, a lot of the reporting focused on Julian Casablancas calling Ryan Adams a bad influence for Albert Hammond Jr. who struggled with a severe heroin addiction, but for me, the real diss came from Fab:
Ryan Adams: "It was very dramatic, the way it all went down, very much in style of "The Godfather", where the family business was being attended to. (...)."
Fabrizio Moretti: "I'm sure Ryan Adams has his own story and it's grandiose and beautiful and whatnot, but he's not that major of a player in the Strokes' history."
Haha, so much for that - but now Ryan Adams has some other problems on his hands anyway (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/ar...).
The heart of the book is also the heart of the movement, and it's the story of The Strokes - parts of this narrative broke my heart. This is my favorite band, they were the trailblazers, and Goodman details how they started to struggle and to disintegrate from "Room On Fire" onwards, overwhelmed by what was happening around them and fighting among and with themselves. There are quite a few bands who went through the door The Strokes opened and became more successful than them, and many of them - like The Killers or Kings of Leon - certainly are good bands, but the way The Strokes boycotted themselves is just heart-breaking. Although no one can take their impact on music history away from them, I wish they would have found a way to play in the same league when it comes to mainstream success, because they would have deserved it.
When journalist Alex Wagner is cited saying about Ezra Koenig: "Come on. Ezra is not Julian, right? They are not battling the same demons. (...) I mean, there's this very reasonable millennial idea of your art form as a fundamentally manageable thing. Like, you could go and be an artist, as opposed to you can't be anything but an artist and it's this all-encompassing demon you have to wrestle with", I see that Koenig's attitude is reasonable, but it also makes me want to punch him in the face a bit, you know? (Sorry, Ezra, Vampire Weekend is great and all, but Julian Casablancas is my favorite singer ever.)
As you have probably realized by now, this book is pretty much unreadable if you don't have any prior knowledge about the music Goodman discusses, but if you do and you are into it, this read will blow your mind and fill your heart. There's also a fun Spotify playlist for the book: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6OY...
March 3, 2018
A great book to browse through and realize you don’t actually care what male rockers were doing in New York City from 2001 to 2011.
May 1, 2018
I can’t begin to tell you the sense of relief when I finished this book. It had been staring at me-unfinished-for weeks.
You’d think that an oral history of the New York City music scene from the early 00s (well, the white, middle class, trust fund bit of it) would be accessible and inviting but what emerges from this overlong, extraordinarily self regarding book are a pile of pretty unpleasant human beings and, in some instances, cocksure charlatans feted as if they were some kind of artistic geniuses.
This is- in a nutshell- 500 repetitive pages of “The Strokes were brilliant, weren’t they?” Well, they might have been but the argument for their brilliance should, to my mind, go beyond how cool they were and how many drugs they were able to ingest. I’m no prude but much of this book is akin to being on the last train home when you’re sober and everyone else has had a skinful. It might be thoroughly delightful for them but it sure as hell isn’t for you.
This is not just about The Strokes though: they just happen to be the centre of this tale. Loose connections between bands and artists are offered up as proof positive of a “scene” even though these self same bands and artists go out of their way to tell you that no such coherent scene actually existed. If there is anything that holds these artists together is the reemergence and critical fawning for guitar based rock music and, true to form, there’s plenty of comment from the NME which is hilarious given this is just about the time when everyone started ignoring them.
Structurally, the book suffers from a lack of coherent editing and it assumes a knowledge of the characters in the narrative that would win you the weekly pub pop quiz hands down. Characters enter and exit without explanation or context and chapter headings are a ramshackle collection of quotes, snatched lyrics or rock journalist cliches.
The book’s biggest problem is the absence of context or a critical eye. These acts exist in an exclusive bubble where, seemingly, everyone is a genius or a misunderstood genius so you have genuine talent (Ryan Adams for example) alongside, say, Vampire Weekend who, even their most ardent supporters would acknowledge, are likely to be nothing more than an Oxford comma in the history of music. Remember this is the same decade when Eminem basically ruled everything; in this world, it appears to be Har Mar Superstar. This is no criticism of either artist but, come on: live in the real world.
On the plus side, Goodman adroitly evokes a sense of time and place pretty well but I’m less and less convinced that it’s a place that anyone with any sense of humility would want to be a part of. Compare this to the determination, hard work and sheer bloody mindedness of the artists in Michael Azzerad’s This Band Could Be Your Life ( which this book has laughably been compared to) and you’ll soon be left feeling empty and short changed. For the most part the artists here come over as entitled, smarmy and with a mere modicum of talent.
The author clearly loves the music that emerged from this scene but it’s buried in as much love for the scene itself and, over 500 pages, it is BORING. When it was all over, I breathed an enormous sigh of relief. There is some wonderful music from
NYC from the decade this book covers. You should use your hard earned money on buying some of it; this book might be big but, regrettably, it’s not clever.
You’d think that an oral history of the New York City music scene from the early 00s (well, the white, middle class, trust fund bit of it) would be accessible and inviting but what emerges from this overlong, extraordinarily self regarding book are a pile of pretty unpleasant human beings and, in some instances, cocksure charlatans feted as if they were some kind of artistic geniuses.
This is- in a nutshell- 500 repetitive pages of “The Strokes were brilliant, weren’t they?” Well, they might have been but the argument for their brilliance should, to my mind, go beyond how cool they were and how many drugs they were able to ingest. I’m no prude but much of this book is akin to being on the last train home when you’re sober and everyone else has had a skinful. It might be thoroughly delightful for them but it sure as hell isn’t for you.
This is not just about The Strokes though: they just happen to be the centre of this tale. Loose connections between bands and artists are offered up as proof positive of a “scene” even though these self same bands and artists go out of their way to tell you that no such coherent scene actually existed. If there is anything that holds these artists together is the reemergence and critical fawning for guitar based rock music and, true to form, there’s plenty of comment from the NME which is hilarious given this is just about the time when everyone started ignoring them.
Structurally, the book suffers from a lack of coherent editing and it assumes a knowledge of the characters in the narrative that would win you the weekly pub pop quiz hands down. Characters enter and exit without explanation or context and chapter headings are a ramshackle collection of quotes, snatched lyrics or rock journalist cliches.
The book’s biggest problem is the absence of context or a critical eye. These acts exist in an exclusive bubble where, seemingly, everyone is a genius or a misunderstood genius so you have genuine talent (Ryan Adams for example) alongside, say, Vampire Weekend who, even their most ardent supporters would acknowledge, are likely to be nothing more than an Oxford comma in the history of music. Remember this is the same decade when Eminem basically ruled everything; in this world, it appears to be Har Mar Superstar. This is no criticism of either artist but, come on: live in the real world.
On the plus side, Goodman adroitly evokes a sense of time and place pretty well but I’m less and less convinced that it’s a place that anyone with any sense of humility would want to be a part of. Compare this to the determination, hard work and sheer bloody mindedness of the artists in Michael Azzerad’s This Band Could Be Your Life ( which this book has laughably been compared to) and you’ll soon be left feeling empty and short changed. For the most part the artists here come over as entitled, smarmy and with a mere modicum of talent.
The author clearly loves the music that emerged from this scene but it’s buried in as much love for the scene itself and, over 500 pages, it is BORING. When it was all over, I breathed an enormous sigh of relief. There is some wonderful music from
NYC from the decade this book covers. You should use your hard earned money on buying some of it; this book might be big but, regrettably, it’s not clever.
December 5, 2018
Ryan Adams is a knob.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 21, 2019
The musical-era biography is probably my favorite type of reading material, that and/or artist memoirs/autobiographies. Our Band Could Be Your Life remains a seminal experience for how much music it led me to discover and come to love; the ideals espoused by those 80s punks whose lives and work were all intertwined deeply affected me, inspired me, and/or served as fodder for appropriation/regurgitation.
Prior to the publication of Meet Me in the Bathroom the function of books like this for me had always been to connect with periods I felt disappointed to have missed. I used to feel I was one of those “born at the wrong time” people. In hindsight, that was a stupid sentiment. I first read the Azerrad book while living in the middle of a similarly seminal movement, and had no idea.
Meet Me in the Bathroom is the first good* book of this type to cover a period during which I was an active, enthusiastic consumer of the art being created. In fact, there are only two albums in the book with which I had not intentionally engaged previously--the YYYs' and Jonathan Fire*Eater’s first EPs. However, until reading the book, I had been completely unaware how much context I’d missed. I'd been a naive midwestern boy listening from afar, vaguely imagining an NYC I wouldn’t visit until the whole thing had mostly concluded (actually well before 2011, which I’ll get to). The now-renown bands making innovative music in turn-of-the-millennium New York City were just as intertwined and interconnected as the underground punks in the 80s, if not more so. The constant proximity of so much simultaneous ingenious--and occasional genius--is astounding and far from coincidental.
*I also lived through and actively participated in the late 90s/early-2000s emo era as chronicled in Nothing Feels Good by Andy Greenwald--also a frequently quoted journalist in MMitB. But… most of that music sucks now, and that book kind of sucks; it was written too soon, before the era's end. However, it’s literally the only thing Greenwald has produced that I haven’t loved. Anyway...*
The subtitle Rebirth and Rock & Roll in New York City 2001-2011 is a partial misnomer. The ebook version is about 550 pages long. Around 475 of those pages span the years 2000 to 2004 or so, rather than the neater, nicer, more eminently marketable “2001-2011.” Still, Lizzy Gordon’s oral history is intuitively structured, built using Rashomon-style collective recollections of two culturally separate but simultaneously-occuring NYC scenes as throughlines. One documents the foundation, emergence, and ascendance of alleged rock-saviors the Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Interpol. The other thread chronicles dance-rock behemoth DFA Records and its primary export, LCD Soundsystem. Many bands in the orbit of those two blazing suns also appear, generally any major act that hailed from or frequently visited the region and/or received a Pitchfork BNM at some point. There is a massive quantity of astounding and confounding information here, yet Gordon keeps the dual narratives tightly focused, for the most part avoiding indulgence in inconsequential tangents.
Gordon devotes the remaining pages to the aftermath of the bands that broke through during that time, with additional lip service paid to the next generation, mainly Vampire Weekend, but also Grizzly Bear and The National, though quotes from members of the latter two are used mostly for scene-setting. If I have any negative criticism, I wish Gordon had devoted either fewer pages or many more to the bands from later in the decade. And I wish she'd talked to Sufjan Stevens, who was hanging with those crowds at the time, and whose reliably strange perspective likely would have added an entirely different take on the events.
Also, the conclusion comes too soon. The book ends with LCD and the Strokes’ first shows at MSG, which took place on back-to-back nights. You know, the once-legendary “final” LCD show. The book ends there, yet we know both bands, plus Interpol and the YYYs, are still around slugging it out, trying to reach, or intentionally not reach, the pop summit none of them quite did.
So, back to the context I didn’t have as a midwestern high school/college student listening to this stuff 10-15 years ago. All these artists, separately monolithic in my mind, knew each other, collaborated, loved/hated/dated each other. That changes everything! But the real surprise here mainly this: they all lived hard, used and abused alcohol and drugs, loads and loads of drugs, all kinds. With the exception of the Strokes, none of these bands seemed particularly hedonistic, and certainly weren't marketed as such. The Strokes were so characteristically casual and cool about it that it seemed somehow irrelevant. They were indestructible. No people with such perfect birthnames as those could ever die. However, apparently everyone in that scene was, to some degree, a fucked up dirtbag, so much so that I frequently wondered how all of them survived. How did these people live, and yet so many of the icons of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s wound up dead? I’m guessing the availability and social acceptability of recovery programs is a big factor. Destigmatization.
Perhaps the most disheartening, disappointing takeaway is the book’s revelation that DFA/LCD kingpin James Murphy, long held up as the Kind Uncle of Indie Rock, is, in fact, not kind. At all. No, the dude comes off here as an entitled, vindictive monster, a petulant genius baby willing to completely sever ties with and/or destroy anyone who stood/stands in his way, no matter how strong those friendships had previously been. He ruined multiple careers and takes no responsibility for it. People openly refer to Murphy as a sociopath. This would be more difficult to handle if his music was just a little less than absolutely, transcendently perfect, which it isn’t, and so we’ll probably just continue to accept and forgive the artistic fascism required for this particular man to achieve that world-beating level of creative work. And, honestly, the fact that Murphy was able to successfully design, cultivate, and maintain this image probably means that he's an even bigger genius than we previously assumed.
Meet Me in the Bathroom rules. It’s gossipy, dirty, and addictive. I blew through it in less that 48 hours. If you consider yourself a fan any one of the bands mentioned above, this is required reading.
One last note: the book ends with a funny quote from Julian Casablancas, uttered on stage at a huge show in southern California. When he said that, this is the truth, and I mention it with equal parts pride and irony: I was there.
Prior to the publication of Meet Me in the Bathroom the function of books like this for me had always been to connect with periods I felt disappointed to have missed. I used to feel I was one of those “born at the wrong time” people. In hindsight, that was a stupid sentiment. I first read the Azerrad book while living in the middle of a similarly seminal movement, and had no idea.
Meet Me in the Bathroom is the first good* book of this type to cover a period during which I was an active, enthusiastic consumer of the art being created. In fact, there are only two albums in the book with which I had not intentionally engaged previously--the YYYs' and Jonathan Fire*Eater’s first EPs. However, until reading the book, I had been completely unaware how much context I’d missed. I'd been a naive midwestern boy listening from afar, vaguely imagining an NYC I wouldn’t visit until the whole thing had mostly concluded (actually well before 2011, which I’ll get to). The now-renown bands making innovative music in turn-of-the-millennium New York City were just as intertwined and interconnected as the underground punks in the 80s, if not more so. The constant proximity of so much simultaneous ingenious--and occasional genius--is astounding and far from coincidental.
*I also lived through and actively participated in the late 90s/early-2000s emo era as chronicled in Nothing Feels Good by Andy Greenwald--also a frequently quoted journalist in MMitB. But… most of that music sucks now, and that book kind of sucks; it was written too soon, before the era's end. However, it’s literally the only thing Greenwald has produced that I haven’t loved. Anyway...*
The subtitle Rebirth and Rock & Roll in New York City 2001-2011 is a partial misnomer. The ebook version is about 550 pages long. Around 475 of those pages span the years 2000 to 2004 or so, rather than the neater, nicer, more eminently marketable “2001-2011.” Still, Lizzy Gordon’s oral history is intuitively structured, built using Rashomon-style collective recollections of two culturally separate but simultaneously-occuring NYC scenes as throughlines. One documents the foundation, emergence, and ascendance of alleged rock-saviors the Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Interpol. The other thread chronicles dance-rock behemoth DFA Records and its primary export, LCD Soundsystem. Many bands in the orbit of those two blazing suns also appear, generally any major act that hailed from or frequently visited the region and/or received a Pitchfork BNM at some point. There is a massive quantity of astounding and confounding information here, yet Gordon keeps the dual narratives tightly focused, for the most part avoiding indulgence in inconsequential tangents.
Gordon devotes the remaining pages to the aftermath of the bands that broke through during that time, with additional lip service paid to the next generation, mainly Vampire Weekend, but also Grizzly Bear and The National, though quotes from members of the latter two are used mostly for scene-setting. If I have any negative criticism, I wish Gordon had devoted either fewer pages or many more to the bands from later in the decade. And I wish she'd talked to Sufjan Stevens, who was hanging with those crowds at the time, and whose reliably strange perspective likely would have added an entirely different take on the events.
Also, the conclusion comes too soon. The book ends with LCD and the Strokes’ first shows at MSG, which took place on back-to-back nights. You know, the once-legendary “final” LCD show. The book ends there, yet we know both bands, plus Interpol and the YYYs, are still around slugging it out, trying to reach, or intentionally not reach, the pop summit none of them quite did.
So, back to the context I didn’t have as a midwestern high school/college student listening to this stuff 10-15 years ago. All these artists, separately monolithic in my mind, knew each other, collaborated, loved/hated/dated each other. That changes everything! But the real surprise here mainly this: they all lived hard, used and abused alcohol and drugs, loads and loads of drugs, all kinds. With the exception of the Strokes, none of these bands seemed particularly hedonistic, and certainly weren't marketed as such. The Strokes were so characteristically casual and cool about it that it seemed somehow irrelevant. They were indestructible. No people with such perfect birthnames as those could ever die. However, apparently everyone in that scene was, to some degree, a fucked up dirtbag, so much so that I frequently wondered how all of them survived. How did these people live, and yet so many of the icons of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s wound up dead? I’m guessing the availability and social acceptability of recovery programs is a big factor. Destigmatization.
Perhaps the most disheartening, disappointing takeaway is the book’s revelation that DFA/LCD kingpin James Murphy, long held up as the Kind Uncle of Indie Rock, is, in fact, not kind. At all. No, the dude comes off here as an entitled, vindictive monster, a petulant genius baby willing to completely sever ties with and/or destroy anyone who stood/stands in his way, no matter how strong those friendships had previously been. He ruined multiple careers and takes no responsibility for it. People openly refer to Murphy as a sociopath. This would be more difficult to handle if his music was just a little less than absolutely, transcendently perfect, which it isn’t, and so we’ll probably just continue to accept and forgive the artistic fascism required for this particular man to achieve that world-beating level of creative work. And, honestly, the fact that Murphy was able to successfully design, cultivate, and maintain this image probably means that he's an even bigger genius than we previously assumed.
Meet Me in the Bathroom rules. It’s gossipy, dirty, and addictive. I blew through it in less that 48 hours. If you consider yourself a fan any one of the bands mentioned above, this is required reading.
One last note: the book ends with a funny quote from Julian Casablancas, uttered on stage at a huge show in southern California. When he said that, this is the truth, and I mention it with equal parts pride and irony: I was there.
November 7, 2018
love the music, but these people are assholes. right?
December 28, 2017
while i give the author credit for the amount of work that obviously went into this, it is ultimately a lot of wealthy white NYC transplants making sweeping statements about "new york culture" and speaking with great disdain about the people who actually make new york culture; the number of references to "junkies and trannys" made my skin crawl. that dynamic alone made it difficult for me to enjoy this.
more importantly, this book describes a scene that ended far too recently to unpack with any confidence, and in the long run will likely not warrant a 600-page oral history. how can we really know the impact of this music without the benefit of at least a few decades of hindsight?
the author says the true subject of this book is new york, but if that's the case than this book doesn't do its true subject any justice. it doesnt tell you much of anything about new york.. at least not outside the lens of people who moved here largely bankrolled by their parents money, fetishized the "junkies and trannys" who populated their neighborhoods, who seem to think doing a lot of cocaine makes them interesting.
what a mess.
more importantly, this book describes a scene that ended far too recently to unpack with any confidence, and in the long run will likely not warrant a 600-page oral history. how can we really know the impact of this music without the benefit of at least a few decades of hindsight?
the author says the true subject of this book is new york, but if that's the case than this book doesn't do its true subject any justice. it doesnt tell you much of anything about new york.. at least not outside the lens of people who moved here largely bankrolled by their parents money, fetishized the "junkies and trannys" who populated their neighborhoods, who seem to think doing a lot of cocaine makes them interesting.
what a mess.
January 17, 2023
Where is the bathroom
May 29, 2017
The low rating is based on two factors:
1). I love oral histories but the actual structure used in this book is extremely hard to follow. People pop in and out without any reintroduction or explanation for why they are there. Some anecdotes are placed right in the middle of longer overarching stories with no point or connection.
2). The people covered in this story are just not that compelling. As opposed to say Please Kill Me, or Other Hollywood, a lot of the stories told are thorough snore feats that alternate between doing too much coke, or having too much sex. I guess that is cool, but that won't sustain a 600 page book.
If you are a super fan of the Strokes, or Yeah Yeah Yeahs, or Jonathan Fire*Eater, this book. If you are looking to read a compelling oral history I would check elsewhere.
1). I love oral histories but the actual structure used in this book is extremely hard to follow. People pop in and out without any reintroduction or explanation for why they are there. Some anecdotes are placed right in the middle of longer overarching stories with no point or connection.
2). The people covered in this story are just not that compelling. As opposed to say Please Kill Me, or Other Hollywood, a lot of the stories told are thorough snore feats that alternate between doing too much coke, or having too much sex. I guess that is cool, but that won't sustain a 600 page book.
If you are a super fan of the Strokes, or Yeah Yeah Yeahs, or Jonathan Fire*Eater, this book. If you are looking to read a compelling oral history I would check elsewhere.
June 5, 2017
3.5 stars
I'm a huge Strokes fan, so when I heard this book was coming out, I knew I had to read it. I also really like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The White Stripes, and TV on the Radio, while being a casual fan of most of the other bands featured in this book.
I enjoyed it for the most part, but I did have some issues, the format being the main one.
It's told in an interview style, where the person's name precedes their quote. For example:
Julian Casablancas: quote.
Karen O: quote.
This wasn't a huge issue when I knew who the people were, but there were a ton I'd never heard of before, like many of the journalists and members of band I wasn't as familiar with. There is a cast of characters at the beginning, but it was a pain to keep going back to look who everyone was five times every page, so I eventually just stopped doing it.
I think the format worked well at some points, because we were able to hear everything directly from the people who had the experiences. But in the cases of the people I wasn't familiar with, I wasn't really able to get a good idea of who they were as people.
There were a lot of times when I wasn't incredibly interested in what was happening, usually because, again, I wasn't familiar with everyone. This is much more my fault than Goodman's.
I think if you're a fan of some of these bands, I would recommend checking it out from the library and read until you get kind of bored, at which point you should go to the index to find something that you will find interesting. That's a good thing about this book: it's easy to skip around and only read small sections and not be confused.
I'm glad I read it, but I'm not sure how often I'll pick it back up. I did buy this the day it was released at full price, and I kind of wish I had just borrowed it from the library.
I'm a huge Strokes fan, so when I heard this book was coming out, I knew I had to read it. I also really like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The White Stripes, and TV on the Radio, while being a casual fan of most of the other bands featured in this book.
I enjoyed it for the most part, but I did have some issues, the format being the main one.
It's told in an interview style, where the person's name precedes their quote. For example:
Julian Casablancas: quote.
Karen O: quote.
This wasn't a huge issue when I knew who the people were, but there were a ton I'd never heard of before, like many of the journalists and members of band I wasn't as familiar with. There is a cast of characters at the beginning, but it was a pain to keep going back to look who everyone was five times every page, so I eventually just stopped doing it.
I think the format worked well at some points, because we were able to hear everything directly from the people who had the experiences. But in the cases of the people I wasn't familiar with, I wasn't really able to get a good idea of who they were as people.
There were a lot of times when I wasn't incredibly interested in what was happening, usually because, again, I wasn't familiar with everyone. This is much more my fault than Goodman's.
I think if you're a fan of some of these bands, I would recommend checking it out from the library and read until you get kind of bored, at which point you should go to the index to find something that you will find interesting. That's a good thing about this book: it's easy to skip around and only read small sections and not be confused.
I'm glad I read it, but I'm not sure how often I'll pick it back up. I did buy this the day it was released at full price, and I kind of wish I had just borrowed it from the library.
May 7, 2018
I'm from NYC and, even though I loved the music that came out of this scene, I always had the feeling a lot of people at the heart of it were self-important rich kids who saw NYC as their personal adult playground. Well, in this book the artists, venue owners, and label reps describe firsthand how they descended from the suburbs (or from their Upper West Side private school) onto Williamsburg and the LES, completely secure in their entitlement to treat these neighborhoods as blank slates to colonize and remake in their own narcissistic images. Pretty much everyone in this book is insufferable and so much less interesting than they think they are. I got sick of spending time with them and gave up.
August 7, 2017
Message to Julian Casablancas and Ryan Adams: set a date somewhere chill, roll countless joints, smoke them, kiss and make up.
Now, the book . . .
"Meet Me in the Bathroom: Or How to Be Hypocrites and Pick on Ryan Adams," by Lizzy Goodman has everything an oral history needs to be spectacular but instead it falls for the gossip, the drugs, the sex, the weirdness, the hipster bickering. And it does this while ignoring any valuable information on the music these (mostly) great bands made. If you're a teenager or enjoy reading about the sex and drugs parts of your music heroes, you may love this book. For the book's many faults, the one thing it unarguably does well is transport the reader to that place, that particular time in rock history. But what did I take away from this book? That Carlos D likes to strut around with 9 curvy women while high on ecstasy and talking shit to Kings of Leon? That all these bands came close to breaking up for similar reasons? I didn't take a single thing of import from this book save a few interesting asides about musicians I like. But if you were in a band around this time and you by all accounts kicked a large number of asses (TV On the Radio, The Walkmen, etc.) but never succumbed to the party lifestyle well then in Lizzy Goodman's eyes your band barely exists. Even Ryan Adams who was at his worst during this time period is treated as a pariah. By the time I turned to page 500 I had realized that I still hadn't learned or heard a thing about "It's Blitz", "Our Love to Admire", "Dear Science" and the list goes on, and while some of those bands and albums get a passing mention it's only that, in passing, and these are some of the best albums of that period, completely ignored because the band members weren't doing blow with Courtney Love or were a bit late to the game.
So sure you may have a blast reading this and hearing about the drug and sex habits of your favourite musicians but if you're interested in the music they made, this book is the complete opposite of that and should be avoided--if a book exists similar to this that focuses on music, please tell me, I'd love to read it.
One last thing: Gideon Yago, "You're just the afterbirth that slithered out on your mother's filth . . . they should've put you in a glass-jar on a mantlepiece. Where were you when everyone was making such great music, where were you Gideon? That scene's been had, it's gone, you lose, taaaaaalent Gideon, talent you boy . . . "
Now, the book . . .
"Meet Me in the Bathroom: Or How to Be Hypocrites and Pick on Ryan Adams," by Lizzy Goodman has everything an oral history needs to be spectacular but instead it falls for the gossip, the drugs, the sex, the weirdness, the hipster bickering. And it does this while ignoring any valuable information on the music these (mostly) great bands made. If you're a teenager or enjoy reading about the sex and drugs parts of your music heroes, you may love this book. For the book's many faults, the one thing it unarguably does well is transport the reader to that place, that particular time in rock history. But what did I take away from this book? That Carlos D likes to strut around with 9 curvy women while high on ecstasy and talking shit to Kings of Leon? That all these bands came close to breaking up for similar reasons? I didn't take a single thing of import from this book save a few interesting asides about musicians I like. But if you were in a band around this time and you by all accounts kicked a large number of asses (TV On the Radio, The Walkmen, etc.) but never succumbed to the party lifestyle well then in Lizzy Goodman's eyes your band barely exists. Even Ryan Adams who was at his worst during this time period is treated as a pariah. By the time I turned to page 500 I had realized that I still hadn't learned or heard a thing about "It's Blitz", "Our Love to Admire", "Dear Science" and the list goes on, and while some of those bands and albums get a passing mention it's only that, in passing, and these are some of the best albums of that period, completely ignored because the band members weren't doing blow with Courtney Love or were a bit late to the game.
So sure you may have a blast reading this and hearing about the drug and sex habits of your favourite musicians but if you're interested in the music they made, this book is the complete opposite of that and should be avoided--if a book exists similar to this that focuses on music, please tell me, I'd love to read it.
One last thing: Gideon Yago, "You're just the afterbirth that slithered out on your mother's filth . . . they should've put you in a glass-jar on a mantlepiece. Where were you when everyone was making such great music, where were you Gideon? That scene's been had, it's gone, you lose, taaaaaalent Gideon, talent you boy . . . "
February 18, 2018
Literally pages and pages and pages of one-liners from mostly men about the rock scene in New York City from 2001-2011. As usual, women have a tiny sliver of representation and when they are quoted, they are mostly talking about other male musicians. What a huge disappointment.
February 19, 2018
Last spring, I had my wisdom teeth removed. My oral surgeon was young-ish, and he was playing a Vampire Weekend album in the operating room. As the anesthesiologist did her thing, we began to discuss I launched into a monologue on my very complicated feelings about that band, and the next thing I knew I was waking up, no surgeon in sight, completely, fully, even ragingly, ready to complete my train of thought. It was definitely a mental coitus interruptus situation and I'm still mad about it. I am also still mad that the surgeon told me wisdom teeth removal is a "young person's game."
A few weeks ago, I caught Henry Rollins on his latest tour. Before that night, I had no idea how wild the story of how he became Black Flag's frontman is. He had driven from D.C. to New York for one of their shows, and they invited him onstage to sing one song. A few days later, he got a call from the band asking him to audition, and the rest is musical and spoken word history.
Meet Me in the Bathroom is about SO many things. The author herself claims it's really about New York City, and that's not wrong, but so are thousands of other novels, records, films, paintings, lives—it's New York, you can't turn over a cobblestone without finding 37 riveting stories beneath it. The reason I related those seemingly unrelated anecdotes above is because to me, the main characters are the incredibly complicated dynamics of one's personal musical taste and Lady Luck. Some of these bands were just at the right place, at the right time.
I am the target demographic of this book, and I'm not sure if I've ever experienced being such a...bullseye. I remember being a stuck in the backseat of a car. A friend of mine was going on and on about the Strokes and how they were so fucking cool and how he was going to dress just like them. Then he smoked weed out of a bowl using an actual button as a filter, like a plastic button from a coat, so his opinion didn't really hold a lot of weight. Another friend of mine latched onto the Karen O persona like a barnacle. You guys, I witnessed so many terrible haircuts that Karen herself could barely pull off. I've always been a little "oh it's more about the music, not the look" (which I realize has its own issues), so I didn't really get sucked into that vibe at the time. However, something that has always been a potent drug to me is the allure of a "scene." (FOMO is real you guys.) So I wanted to read this book.
(Sidenote on FOMO: this book gave it to me. Hard. I lived a mere 2.5 hours north of this scene and missed it completely. Oh, I listened to the music and did my own thing, but you know what I mean.)
Anyway, back to this music scene, in this place, at this time. One of the most interesting aspects of Meet Me in the Bathroom is how Lizzy Goodman introduces contributing factors I had never considered. For example, it was right on the cusp of the internet takeover. That sentence alone encapsulates: the onset of Napster and the eventual complete reconfiguration of the entire music industry; a new spotlight on the opinions of bloggers, who would become the top tastemakers; and the dismantling of established journalistic structures (including factoring in who was prescient enough to jump on the bandwagon re: online content). The theme of internet as catalyst is huge. We're all cozily set in our current media consumption ways, so it's easy to forget just how fucking different it was! If you even remember a time pre-internet! I mean, I watched a movie from 5 years ago and I noticed they were using Facebook wrong. The way we get information changes drastically and quickly these days—we're used to it. But the early 2000s were a time of enormous change in this regard. Enormous. Some people like change and roll with it; some people don't. Aside from the internet, this was a pre, during, AND post-911 New York. It was a New York dealing with a lot of political and economic change: gentrification, getting "cleaned up." Even small things like stringent new cabaret laws added spice to the stew. One claim I have a hard time getting behind though is that there was no real New York music scene for years before this one. I'm sure there was, it just wasn't yours.
Ok, so there's those huge themes. Huge themes like that are invariably accompanied by dozens of smaller themes. And what I LOVED loved loved about Meet Me in the Bathroom is the way Goodman structured the interviews to unveil everything she wanted to include. Seriously, it is a monstrous editing feat. Major Russian nesting doll status. Props to Lizzy and her team. You get the story of the Strokes and how they revitalized the scene, plus the contrast of the whole DFA/LCD thing. Those are the two major story arcs, and they are red-carpet-unrolled against the backdrop of the aforementioned climate of 2000s New York. Once that trunk is established, the other branches blossom: the tales of the YYYs, Interpol, TV on the Radio, and many others. The whole thing is so incestuous that it has to be this way. And THEN, within that context, the tidbits of hedonism, relationships, good feelings, bad feelings, praise, jealousy, ego-tripping—that all comes out. People fucked each other over just as often as they helped skyrocket careers. I read somewhere that Julian Casablancas said he didn't love this book because there were too many non-insider opinions. But I appreciated the takes of journalists, managers, publicists, bloggers, and Gideon Yago. They added a fullness I would've missed had their voices been omitted. Even the descriptions of drugs and general hedonism opened up space to read between the lines, letting you form your own opinion on what constituted cool, what made a rock star, what made a scene.
Which brings me to Vampire Weekend. I have complicated feelings! There's probably a band you feel a type of way about too. When I first heard them, I definitely scoffed. Like, what are they even. Now I kind of love them? That whole discussion with the hipster oral surgeon was about holding a mirror to your musical tastes. Of dissecting the roots of what makes you love music, letting yourself like something that doesn't necessarily fall into the established wheelhouse of what you THINK you should like, and everything that stems from that thought process. I remember being like, "it forced me to admit to myself that...I could be wrong about cool things, you know?" (Yoooo, nitrous though.) Towards the end of the book, specifically during the Vampire Weekend sections, something super interesting is brought up: that millenials, unlike those from the generations right before, don't hold such a die-hard loyalty to a specific style. They (THE INTERNET) had access to a huge variety of music, and no one told them only these one or two things were cool. And by this point, they knew how to use it to their advantage. Ezra Koenig is no joke.
Which brings me to Ezra Koenig. My other favorite thing about this book was cobbling together character profiles from the interviews. Ezra was one of my faves. Cerebral, fresh, and just...Ezra is going to do what he is going to do, and very cleanly and successfully at that. Tunde and Jaleel from TV on the Radio were my other faves. They were so real and funny. I left this book with a whole new opinion of Julian Casablancas, too (in a good way). Oh, and I loved Paul Banks from Interpol. Most of these characters are eloquent and funny. The stories ABOUT Carlos from Interpol were also pretty great. OH and I did laugh a lot at what the Kings of Leons guys had to say. And James Murphy, omg. I love LCD and could write several paragraphs on him after reading this but I'll spare you guys. He is one of those assholes I could easily be really good friends with.
That's the other thing about Meet Me in the Bathroom. It's super fun to read. I wanted to include all of the above overanalytical bullshit to counteract some of the claims that it's just about sex and drugs and being cool. It's not. But that stuff is in there, and fuck yeah it's fun to read about. Each chapter ends on on a mini-cliffhanger, and it just keeps you flipping pages. Pretty soon you're lugging around a 500-page hardcover, and gladly.
A few weeks ago, I caught Henry Rollins on his latest tour. Before that night, I had no idea how wild the story of how he became Black Flag's frontman is. He had driven from D.C. to New York for one of their shows, and they invited him onstage to sing one song. A few days later, he got a call from the band asking him to audition, and the rest is musical and spoken word history.
Meet Me in the Bathroom is about SO many things. The author herself claims it's really about New York City, and that's not wrong, but so are thousands of other novels, records, films, paintings, lives—it's New York, you can't turn over a cobblestone without finding 37 riveting stories beneath it. The reason I related those seemingly unrelated anecdotes above is because to me, the main characters are the incredibly complicated dynamics of one's personal musical taste and Lady Luck. Some of these bands were just at the right place, at the right time.
I am the target demographic of this book, and I'm not sure if I've ever experienced being such a...bullseye. I remember being a stuck in the backseat of a car. A friend of mine was going on and on about the Strokes and how they were so fucking cool and how he was going to dress just like them. Then he smoked weed out of a bowl using an actual button as a filter, like a plastic button from a coat, so his opinion didn't really hold a lot of weight. Another friend of mine latched onto the Karen O persona like a barnacle. You guys, I witnessed so many terrible haircuts that Karen herself could barely pull off. I've always been a little "oh it's more about the music, not the look" (which I realize has its own issues), so I didn't really get sucked into that vibe at the time. However, something that has always been a potent drug to me is the allure of a "scene." (FOMO is real you guys.) So I wanted to read this book.
(Sidenote on FOMO: this book gave it to me. Hard. I lived a mere 2.5 hours north of this scene and missed it completely. Oh, I listened to the music and did my own thing, but you know what I mean.)
Anyway, back to this music scene, in this place, at this time. One of the most interesting aspects of Meet Me in the Bathroom is how Lizzy Goodman introduces contributing factors I had never considered. For example, it was right on the cusp of the internet takeover. That sentence alone encapsulates: the onset of Napster and the eventual complete reconfiguration of the entire music industry; a new spotlight on the opinions of bloggers, who would become the top tastemakers; and the dismantling of established journalistic structures (including factoring in who was prescient enough to jump on the bandwagon re: online content). The theme of internet as catalyst is huge. We're all cozily set in our current media consumption ways, so it's easy to forget just how fucking different it was! If you even remember a time pre-internet! I mean, I watched a movie from 5 years ago and I noticed they were using Facebook wrong. The way we get information changes drastically and quickly these days—we're used to it. But the early 2000s were a time of enormous change in this regard. Enormous. Some people like change and roll with it; some people don't. Aside from the internet, this was a pre, during, AND post-911 New York. It was a New York dealing with a lot of political and economic change: gentrification, getting "cleaned up." Even small things like stringent new cabaret laws added spice to the stew. One claim I have a hard time getting behind though is that there was no real New York music scene for years before this one. I'm sure there was, it just wasn't yours.
Ok, so there's those huge themes. Huge themes like that are invariably accompanied by dozens of smaller themes. And what I LOVED loved loved about Meet Me in the Bathroom is the way Goodman structured the interviews to unveil everything she wanted to include. Seriously, it is a monstrous editing feat. Major Russian nesting doll status. Props to Lizzy and her team. You get the story of the Strokes and how they revitalized the scene, plus the contrast of the whole DFA/LCD thing. Those are the two major story arcs, and they are red-carpet-unrolled against the backdrop of the aforementioned climate of 2000s New York. Once that trunk is established, the other branches blossom: the tales of the YYYs, Interpol, TV on the Radio, and many others. The whole thing is so incestuous that it has to be this way. And THEN, within that context, the tidbits of hedonism, relationships, good feelings, bad feelings, praise, jealousy, ego-tripping—that all comes out. People fucked each other over just as often as they helped skyrocket careers. I read somewhere that Julian Casablancas said he didn't love this book because there were too many non-insider opinions. But I appreciated the takes of journalists, managers, publicists, bloggers, and Gideon Yago. They added a fullness I would've missed had their voices been omitted. Even the descriptions of drugs and general hedonism opened up space to read between the lines, letting you form your own opinion on what constituted cool, what made a rock star, what made a scene.
Which brings me to Vampire Weekend. I have complicated feelings! There's probably a band you feel a type of way about too. When I first heard them, I definitely scoffed. Like, what are they even. Now I kind of love them? That whole discussion with the hipster oral surgeon was about holding a mirror to your musical tastes. Of dissecting the roots of what makes you love music, letting yourself like something that doesn't necessarily fall into the established wheelhouse of what you THINK you should like, and everything that stems from that thought process. I remember being like, "it forced me to admit to myself that...I could be wrong about cool things, you know?" (Yoooo, nitrous though.) Towards the end of the book, specifically during the Vampire Weekend sections, something super interesting is brought up: that millenials, unlike those from the generations right before, don't hold such a die-hard loyalty to a specific style. They (THE INTERNET) had access to a huge variety of music, and no one told them only these one or two things were cool. And by this point, they knew how to use it to their advantage. Ezra Koenig is no joke.
Which brings me to Ezra Koenig. My other favorite thing about this book was cobbling together character profiles from the interviews. Ezra was one of my faves. Cerebral, fresh, and just...Ezra is going to do what he is going to do, and very cleanly and successfully at that. Tunde and Jaleel from TV on the Radio were my other faves. They were so real and funny. I left this book with a whole new opinion of Julian Casablancas, too (in a good way). Oh, and I loved Paul Banks from Interpol. Most of these characters are eloquent and funny. The stories ABOUT Carlos from Interpol were also pretty great. OH and I did laugh a lot at what the Kings of Leons guys had to say. And James Murphy, omg. I love LCD and could write several paragraphs on him after reading this but I'll spare you guys. He is one of those assholes I could easily be really good friends with.
That's the other thing about Meet Me in the Bathroom. It's super fun to read. I wanted to include all of the above overanalytical bullshit to counteract some of the claims that it's just about sex and drugs and being cool. It's not. But that stuff is in there, and fuck yeah it's fun to read about. Each chapter ends on on a mini-cliffhanger, and it just keeps you flipping pages. Pretty soon you're lugging around a 500-page hardcover, and gladly.
January 14, 2022
Definitely an engrossing read -- Goodman did an insane amount of interviews with almost every good band from NYC at the time, and the "oral history" format is actually very effective when done well.
There were so many interesting bits of information, like that Pharrell Williams was the "kid[s] who are coming up from behind" mentioned in LCD's Losing My Edge -- I'd always guessed it was German DJs or something? -- or Murphy's experience with MDMA as turning him onto the possibilities of dance music, or the unsurprising news that everyone hates Ryan Adams (how could you not?).
But there are a number of issues; first of all, I get that the Strokes had a huge influence on various UK + US bands, and LCD is great, but Goodman overstates the importance of this scene. It's fair to say that 1999-2002 was quite a run (seminal work by Fischerspooner, Liars, Strokes, Interpol, YYY, TVOTR) but the later albums by almost all of these bands were just terrible. And even during their peak, YYY, if we're being generous, had two good songs ('Art Star' and 'Maps'); and I think Cookie Mountain is a bit underrated but TVOTR never made anything as good as Young Liars. Only LCD actually stayed good past, like, 2004.
Most importantly there's a whole world of music out there that Goodman and Pitchfork et al. are just unaware of (this is also a problem among most of my peers, frankly -- stop relying on Pitchfork, ffs), and this NYC scene was just not a huge deal outside of hipster-blog-land. Incidentally, my favorite thing about the annual 'best albums of the year' lists from Pitchfork / Gorilla vs. Bear / et al. is learning that only three music genres exist (pop, rap/hip-hop, rock/indie, and maybe a single ambient or techno album).
Another issue was that there were too many names in this book (the glossary helped but come on, dude), and most of the filler was vague rambling from Goodman's social-climbing journalist/blogger scene friends. It was not at all surprising to me to discover that Julian Casablancas described the book as "lot of kind of not insiders, maybe like talking as insiders? . . . she didn’t interview my wife who was basically the Strokes’ co-manager for like 10 years.”
This is related to the issue that the book is 600 pages long, and should have been 300 at most; cutting the 200 pages of Goodman's friends emoting about blogging or whatever would have been a good start. Goodman's posturing in the introduction was just cringe-worthy and I got the sense that she was one of those social-climber types, rather than someone who really loved music, due to the fact that her interviews focused almost entirely on precisely what sort of heroin was being used at the coolest East Village bars in 1998 or whatever; I mean, who cares? Even the musicians didn't really care at any deep level, as you can tell from their answers (except for the Rapture, who seem like douches).
Can you imagine sitting down with James Murphy and Julian Casablancas and grilling them about social hierarchies at loft parties rather than, I don't know, any sort of detailed information about their recording process or how they understood themselves in relation to earlier music? A book about musicians shouldn't be 60% anecdotes about cocaine (20-30% seems reasonable).
There were so many interesting bits of information, like that Pharrell Williams was the "kid[s] who are coming up from behind" mentioned in LCD's Losing My Edge -- I'd always guessed it was German DJs or something? -- or Murphy's experience with MDMA as turning him onto the possibilities of dance music, or the unsurprising news that everyone hates Ryan Adams (how could you not?).
But there are a number of issues; first of all, I get that the Strokes had a huge influence on various UK + US bands, and LCD is great, but Goodman overstates the importance of this scene. It's fair to say that 1999-2002 was quite a run (seminal work by Fischerspooner, Liars, Strokes, Interpol, YYY, TVOTR) but the later albums by almost all of these bands were just terrible. And even during their peak, YYY, if we're being generous, had two good songs ('Art Star' and 'Maps'); and I think Cookie Mountain is a bit underrated but TVOTR never made anything as good as Young Liars. Only LCD actually stayed good past, like, 2004.
Most importantly there's a whole world of music out there that Goodman and Pitchfork et al. are just unaware of (this is also a problem among most of my peers, frankly -- stop relying on Pitchfork, ffs), and this NYC scene was just not a huge deal outside of hipster-blog-land. Incidentally, my favorite thing about the annual 'best albums of the year' lists from Pitchfork / Gorilla vs. Bear / et al. is learning that only three music genres exist (pop, rap/hip-hop, rock/indie, and maybe a single ambient or techno album).
Another issue was that there were too many names in this book (the glossary helped but come on, dude), and most of the filler was vague rambling from Goodman's social-climbing journalist/blogger scene friends. It was not at all surprising to me to discover that Julian Casablancas described the book as "lot of kind of not insiders, maybe like talking as insiders? . . . she didn’t interview my wife who was basically the Strokes’ co-manager for like 10 years.”
This is related to the issue that the book is 600 pages long, and should have been 300 at most; cutting the 200 pages of Goodman's friends emoting about blogging or whatever would have been a good start. Goodman's posturing in the introduction was just cringe-worthy and I got the sense that she was one of those social-climber types, rather than someone who really loved music, due to the fact that her interviews focused almost entirely on precisely what sort of heroin was being used at the coolest East Village bars in 1998 or whatever; I mean, who cares? Even the musicians didn't really care at any deep level, as you can tell from their answers (except for the Rapture, who seem like douches).
Can you imagine sitting down with James Murphy and Julian Casablancas and grilling them about social hierarchies at loft parties rather than, I don't know, any sort of detailed information about their recording process or how they understood themselves in relation to earlier music? A book about musicians shouldn't be 60% anecdotes about cocaine (20-30% seems reasonable).
June 19, 2017
Oral history in the style of Please Kill Me hyping up a more recent New York music scene. Not nearly as iconic or fun to read about as the 70s punk scene in Please Kill Me, but still an entertaining and nostalgic look back on a time (not that long ago) when rock music still mattered. Right from the beginning I was not feeling the over the top glorification of New York City (THE ONLY PLACE IN THE WORLD that matters for cool people apparently), nor did I think the long page count was justified. I picked this up because of The Strokes, so I enjoyed following the career trajectory of this band along with the gossipy commentary. Made me appreciate The Yeah Yeah Yeahs a little more, but still couldn't convince me to care about Interpol!
February 23, 2024
A fun, catty, gossipy oral history of some of my favorite bands.
There’s a great meta quality to reading this knowing that a lot of the interviewees still hate each other’s guts and are telling conflicting stories. Then there’s well documented pathological liars like Moby included so parsing out what’s probably bullshit is a good time.
It’s not all residual bitchiness either there are genuinely sweet and sad peeks behind the curtain that’ll stick with me when I revisit old Strokes/YYYs/Interpol/LCD records.
Don’t let the length intimidate you it’s a breeze.
There’s a great meta quality to reading this knowing that a lot of the interviewees still hate each other’s guts and are telling conflicting stories. Then there’s well documented pathological liars like Moby included so parsing out what’s probably bullshit is a good time.
It’s not all residual bitchiness either there are genuinely sweet and sad peeks behind the curtain that’ll stick with me when I revisit old Strokes/YYYs/Interpol/LCD records.
Don’t let the length intimidate you it’s a breeze.
December 20, 2022
don’t love the idea of mythologizing a time in history to be like “boo hoo it will never be as good as that time you weren’t present for…” but god damn i love the strokes i love LCD soundsystem I love vampire weekend i love the hives i love franz ferdinand, how could i not love this??
August 14, 2017
white privilege: the oral history
June 6, 2019
This was great fun - I couldn’t put it down. If you were a fan of any of these bands or the overall scene, you might want to pick this up. From what I understand, Goodman conducted at least six years’ worth of interviews so she had a really big job picking apart narrative threads to weave together. And I think she succeeded. Yes, some voices are missing - some folks, like Meg White, have left completely and apparently declined to be interviewed. But Goodman managed to get ahold of most of the major players, and I’m sure that the fact she was literally there from the beginning, in 1999, and was roommates with Ultragrrrl helped a lot. She managed to get people talking about things they never talked about before.
The major unifying force here is The Strokes. What people have forgotten or maybe don’t understand is that the Strokes’ success broke through everything, back in 2000-2001. The musical landscape was completely different then. They changed that with Is This It?, which for me is still a completely monumental album. They inspired so many bands to follow in their footsteps and they made record labels sit up and look at the garage rock revival that was happening in NYC. I still have the magazines from that time period, when they were on the cover. I still have the SPIN cover with Julian on it, because SPIN released an issue with collectible covers of each member and you tried to get your favorite Stroke. I was very active on the Strokes message board - this was pre Facebook, pre MySpace, pre everything (they eventually wiped this board and the entire site in the mid 00s). I learned about new bands to listen to from that board, I visited Geocities fan pages, I read shesfixingherhair for news, I was downloading music from Livejournal indie communities. They were popular to a point, but never as successful as their successors - but they still sell out stadium shows in 2019 which is incredible. Their fan base is amazing. I could go on about this forever, but I won’t.
I hope Lizzy Goodman is able to compile another book. Supposedly there’s talk of a docuseries which I would watch the hell out of. I’d also love to see something that interrogates the racism and misogyny of this time period; some of these musicians are people of color (Karen O, Kele Okereke of Bloc Party, TV On The Radio for example) and that’s hinted at, but never given a chance to explore. The biggest champions of these bands were mostly women and girls, and I’d love to see more attention given to that as well.
It was fun to both live the parties in NYC and to relive this era in general. I love the early 2000s. It was a mess. But it was wild and scrappy, too. It was optimistic. And I still think some of the records and EPs that came out of this era are some of the best records ever made.
The major unifying force here is The Strokes. What people have forgotten or maybe don’t understand is that the Strokes’ success broke through everything, back in 2000-2001. The musical landscape was completely different then. They changed that with Is This It?, which for me is still a completely monumental album. They inspired so many bands to follow in their footsteps and they made record labels sit up and look at the garage rock revival that was happening in NYC. I still have the magazines from that time period, when they were on the cover. I still have the SPIN cover with Julian on it, because SPIN released an issue with collectible covers of each member and you tried to get your favorite Stroke. I was very active on the Strokes message board - this was pre Facebook, pre MySpace, pre everything (they eventually wiped this board and the entire site in the mid 00s). I learned about new bands to listen to from that board, I visited Geocities fan pages, I read shesfixingherhair for news, I was downloading music from Livejournal indie communities. They were popular to a point, but never as successful as their successors - but they still sell out stadium shows in 2019 which is incredible. Their fan base is amazing. I could go on about this forever, but I won’t.
I hope Lizzy Goodman is able to compile another book. Supposedly there’s talk of a docuseries which I would watch the hell out of. I’d also love to see something that interrogates the racism and misogyny of this time period; some of these musicians are people of color (Karen O, Kele Okereke of Bloc Party, TV On The Radio for example) and that’s hinted at, but never given a chance to explore. The biggest champions of these bands were mostly women and girls, and I’d love to see more attention given to that as well.
It was fun to both live the parties in NYC and to relive this era in general. I love the early 2000s. It was a mess. But it was wild and scrappy, too. It was optimistic. And I still think some of the records and EPs that came out of this era are some of the best records ever made.
September 22, 2023
Really enjoyed this book - even though it took me a while to get through it.
Firstly, I read this on a Kindle which was actually quite frustrating at the start when you’re flicking between the chapters and the list of individuals at the start if you’re like me and not familiar with all of the characters. This is definitely a book that’s better read in a physical format! There’s some great pictures as well which I’m sure are probably better on paper than viewed through a screen.
Lizzy Goodman does an amazing job at covering lots of aspects of the music scene coming out of New York from the late 80s all the way through to the early 2010s. It really helps add in the detail around how some of these bands came into existence, their influences and what shaped the scene more broadly. It also helps to tell the narrative of how the city and the music industry changed in quite a short space of time.
I’d count myself as quite a big music fan, particularly of some of the bands heavily featured in this book and I learned loads that I didn’t know about. Lots of the contributions are equally funny, outlandish and insightful - I particularly enjoyed Sarah Lewitinn’s thoughts and that of James Murphy as well.
What Lizzy has done exceptionally well in my opinion is get to the heart of how the Garage Rock revival was really one of the last great ‘scenes’ of band music, with a lot of the fundamental changes in the industry signalling a huge change in how artists create their music. I came away with a bit of new found respect for bands like The Killers and Kings of Leon, who might not be considered as particularly ‘underground’ but their stories speak a lot to how bands not in that scene really took their opportunity and became global superstars, with bands at the forefront (The Strokes, Jonathan Fire*Eater/The Walkmen, The Rapture etc) probably not reaching their potential.
More importantly, I’ve rediscovered some back catalogues I haven’t given a lot of love to, as well as added some more albums to the list of my regular rotation.
Firstly, I read this on a Kindle which was actually quite frustrating at the start when you’re flicking between the chapters and the list of individuals at the start if you’re like me and not familiar with all of the characters. This is definitely a book that’s better read in a physical format! There’s some great pictures as well which I’m sure are probably better on paper than viewed through a screen.
Lizzy Goodman does an amazing job at covering lots of aspects of the music scene coming out of New York from the late 80s all the way through to the early 2010s. It really helps add in the detail around how some of these bands came into existence, their influences and what shaped the scene more broadly. It also helps to tell the narrative of how the city and the music industry changed in quite a short space of time.
I’d count myself as quite a big music fan, particularly of some of the bands heavily featured in this book and I learned loads that I didn’t know about. Lots of the contributions are equally funny, outlandish and insightful - I particularly enjoyed Sarah Lewitinn’s thoughts and that of James Murphy as well.
What Lizzy has done exceptionally well in my opinion is get to the heart of how the Garage Rock revival was really one of the last great ‘scenes’ of band music, with a lot of the fundamental changes in the industry signalling a huge change in how artists create their music. I came away with a bit of new found respect for bands like The Killers and Kings of Leon, who might not be considered as particularly ‘underground’ but their stories speak a lot to how bands not in that scene really took their opportunity and became global superstars, with bands at the forefront (The Strokes, Jonathan Fire*Eater/The Walkmen, The Rapture etc) probably not reaching their potential.
More importantly, I’ve rediscovered some back catalogues I haven’t given a lot of love to, as well as added some more albums to the list of my regular rotation.
April 17, 2017
I feel exhausted after reading Lizzy Goodman’s compelling oral history of the aught’s music scene in New York City, Meet Me in the Bathroom. I read the book in mostly one sitting, and it took me, I’d estimate, a little more than 10 hours to get through. There’s 640 pages in the book, according to the publisher’s information (my copy was downloaded on the Kindle), and, man, do you feel it. Practically no stone is left unturned in this account of what it was like to be a musician in the 2000s in New York.
The book largely focuses on the careers of bands such as the Strokes, Interpol, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and LCD Soundsystem. I found the book to be fascinating, even though I only was really a fan of LCD and only familiar with their work. I really felt a sense of nostalgia in reading this book, what it was like for me to be post-university degree and still regularly consuming music. (I haven’t listened to an album in months, and I’ve turned more into a reader.) The book also touches on the copycat bands that came from elsewhere in the wake of the Strokes’ success — and had far more success than the Strokes themselves did — but also takes some detours into how technology and file sharing really impacted how major labels scooped up bands. There’s also an insightful chapter on bloggers and the role they had in popularizing these bands, and these blogs actually had a much bigger role than I would have imagined.
Read more here: https://festivalpeak.com/a-review-of-...
The book largely focuses on the careers of bands such as the Strokes, Interpol, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and LCD Soundsystem. I found the book to be fascinating, even though I only was really a fan of LCD and only familiar with their work. I really felt a sense of nostalgia in reading this book, what it was like for me to be post-university degree and still regularly consuming music. (I haven’t listened to an album in months, and I’ve turned more into a reader.) The book also touches on the copycat bands that came from elsewhere in the wake of the Strokes’ success — and had far more success than the Strokes themselves did — but also takes some detours into how technology and file sharing really impacted how major labels scooped up bands. There’s also an insightful chapter on bloggers and the role they had in popularizing these bands, and these blogs actually had a much bigger role than I would have imagined.
Read more here: https://festivalpeak.com/a-review-of-...
July 16, 2020
They're not overselling the comparison of this to other music oral histories in the intro - I enjoyed it every bit as much as Our band could be your life and Can't stop won't stop, and ALMOST as much as Please Kill Me. It sent me to spotify again and again to relisten to stuff I hadn't listened to in a while, and stoked my already burning LCD Soundsystem fire.
What's funny is, though James Murphy comes across as a dick, his dickishness is kind of awesome and I love him all the more. Ryan Adams, also comes off as a dick, and I still don't like him. I think the difference is : the other people AROUND James Murphy (with the exception of Goldsworthy and Holmes) seem to be on his side, while the people around Ryan Adams in his "lost years" don't have a lot of good things to say. I think it's the difference between "Yeah, that guy is kind of an asshole, but he's my asshole" and "God that guy again? He's such an asshole."
What's funny is, though James Murphy comes across as a dick, his dickishness is kind of awesome and I love him all the more. Ryan Adams, also comes off as a dick, and I still don't like him. I think the difference is : the other people AROUND James Murphy (with the exception of Goldsworthy and Holmes) seem to be on his side, while the people around Ryan Adams in his "lost years" don't have a lot of good things to say. I think it's the difference between "Yeah, that guy is kind of an asshole, but he's my asshole" and "God that guy again? He's such an asshole."
January 19, 2023
An excellent, incredibly dense reading of the zeitgeist in early 2000s New York. Its presentation as an oral history introduces a near Tolstoyan cast of narrators (which will leave you flipping back and forth between unless you can remember the name of TV on the Radio’s drummer or that one Pitchfork writer) but the immense amount of personal history bled into the larger framework makes for an entertaining read.
December 29, 2021
Nostalgia for the remembered noughties. Will make you feel all of 36 and unfavourably compare yourself to Ezra Koenig. Still kind of glad to not be Ryan Adams though.
If you wore bootcut denim in 2001, you'll want to pick this one up.
If you wore bootcut denim in 2001, you'll want to pick this one up.
October 5, 2017
Everyone feels like their college music scene was the most special, but ours at least now has a killer book to go with it. This book was everything I wanted it to be.
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April 30, 2022i don’t mind…… it’s true
August 23, 2017
I really enjoyed this book and its trip down memory lane (or at least as many memories as we could possibly retain from that era), but can't say how much of that was because I remember half these people and places first-hand. Like: seeing Interpol at Brownies, or Mooney Suzuki at Tiswas, or being at Mercury Lounge for a Delays show next to Sarah Lewitinn, or reading every week about Misshapes on some blog. Even Lit, a bar I used to go to all the time but have already nearly forgotten about, loomed large on many pages. Being there brought these pages more to life for me. Honestly I skimmed much of the LCD Soundsystem stuff because it was so not a part of the NYC I remember. Still: a great & complete oral history of everything that spun out of that time and place.
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