Phrazes for the Young

From the beginning: I read a review of Is This It, which my father handed me. It said, “put on the Strokes. Bounce” and I did. I saw the band live at the Avalon in Boston that year; Julian Casablancas, their lead singer, had dirty, long hair and a leather jacket. The girls were in love. There were too many bands called “The [somethings]” (White Stripes, Hives…) that year. Walking from the Cha rles River up to the Quad in 2003, I listened to Room on Fire with my friend Will, and he convinced me it was better than the original. I lost interest. I moved to New York, where there were many other rock bands with lead singers in leather jackets. Bounce gave way to bombast, then to whispered finger-picking, then to haunted electro dreams. The efforts of various members of the band, on their own, to recreate the Strokes moment seemed admirable, but a little thin. Apart from a few songs, I didn’t take much interest. I saw the drummer Fabrizio Moretti with Drew Barrymore at a bar near Union Square. My friends didn’t believe it was them; Moretti said “it’s not me”. Did they release a third album? I moved away from New York.

As a musical reference point, people have the Eighties all wrong. Comparing new music to an entire decade is a pretty careless move to begin with, but the new artists that attract the comparison tend to be a world away from the spirit of synthpop, the genre that supposedly defines the period. Just because Little Boots, for example, uses some keyboards, it doesn’t make her music ‘Eighties’.