New York, a city responsible for bands such as The Velvet Underground, Blondie and Ramones, was a cultural wasteland by the late 90s and the wider music scene was pumping out shlock like Limp Bizkit and Hoobastank.
As Adam Green says in the opening scenes of Meet Me In The Bathroom, a documentary based on Lizzy Goodman’s oral history of nYc’s musical rebirth, “Maybe New York wasn’t the kind of city anymore that produces iconic bands”.
Then came The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio, LCD Soundsystem and many more over the next ten years, turning the Lower East Side and Brooklyn into hipster havens.
I remember the excitement when The Strokes, a gang of good-looking skinny boys with filthy hair and a filthier attitude, broke, in part thanks to the British music press, as I hustled for a copy of their Rough Trade debut EP Modern Age in early 2001.
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