The Strokes’ debut album, Is This It, was released 25 years ago. I remember the period around its release vividly, although at the time I had very little interest in pop music and was only beginning to dip my toes into the waters of classic rock. The Strokes therefore occupy an unusual place in my musical memory: they were among the first contemporary bands I encountered through the mythology that had already formed around them.
Rock critic Steven Hyden’s Is This It: The Never-Ending Rise and Fall of the Strokes (and Rock ‘n’ Roll) is, among other things, an attempt to explain how that mythology came about. The title alone captures the zeitgeist: the Strokes were proclaimed the next big thing before many people outside the music industry and press even heard their music; a group of New Yorkers became famous in England first, where the NME perfected the art of hyping the next great guitar band before inevitably moving on to something newer; and five young men who looked as though they had been assembled to embody every cliché of rock cool were placed under enormous expectations.
Through seven chapters, Hyden interweaves the history of the Strokes with a broader account of what happened to rock music and the culture surrounding it. The result is therefore less a conventional band biography than an argument about what “rock ‘n’ roll” was supposed to mean, who had the authority to define it, and why the Strokes became such an unlikely vessel for all those competing ideas.
Is This It is predicated on the importance of rock ‘n’ roll as a cultural institution of the 20th-century. That proposition can seem strange today, but its importance is difficult to deny when considering the extraordinary global reach of the music industry during that period. The Beatles were perhaps the ultimate example of the rock band becoming a global cultural institution, but Michael Jackson provides an equally revealing example from outside the conventional rock canon. Jackson was a global pop and R&B superstar who nevertheless repeatedly drew on rock music to build his crossover appeal, drawing on everyone from Paul McCartney to Eddie Van Halen and Slash.
Indeed, Jackson’s version of rock ‘n’ roll was very different from that which was embraced by alternative music journalists. His sense of the edginess rock music presented came from the mainstream hard-rock giants: Van Halen, Guns N’ Roses and Mötley Crüe. The rock tradition favoured by critics, meanwhile, traced a line from the Stooges through punk and post-punk to Nirvana, emphasising outsider status, artistic credibility and rebellion. By the time the Strokes appeared, these competing meanings of rock were becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile.
That contradiction lies at the heart of their legend. In the pages of the music press, the Strokes were presented as heirs to a very particular New York tradition: the Velvet Underground, Television and Sonic Youth, with a heritage defined by art, literature and alternative lifestyles. David Stubbs, reviewing Is This It for Uncut in the aftermath of the hype, was consequently sceptical of the idea of a rock revival: “Problem is, with rock having been a museum piece now for some 20 years, if you’re going to revisit it you’re going to have to blow it up.”
Yet the Strokes’ actual appeal was rather less rarefied. Their photographs showed five handsome young men smoking cigarettes, drinking beer and looking impossibly cool. They appeared to embody the oldest and most commercial version of the rock ‘n’ roll fantasy: sex, drugs, youth and swagger. Their music might have been packaged as the latest chapter in an art-rock lineage, but their image belonged to a much broader tradition. Hyden is particularly good at disentangling those two versions of the Strokes.
Ira Robbins, writing for Trouser Press in 2002, accused the band of simply scanning their record collections and stitching together the pieces they liked. To Robbins, the Strokes’ sound could be traced to the familiar New York suspects— the Velvet Underground, Television and Sonic Youth—but also to the Dictators and even the New York-based British new waver Joe Jackson.
Hyden’s response is that determining influence is not quite so simple. Julian Casablancas had little interest in Television and even less in Sonic Youth. Like many listeners of his generation, he encountered groups such as the Velvet Underground and the Doors through greatest-hits compilations, hearing their poppier songs rather than those that fed the intimidating reputations constructed around them by decades of music journalism.
This distinction matters. The Strokes were not necessarily attempting to recreate the musical history that critics heard in them. They were making use of a musical past that had become increasingly available to an entire generation of listeners.
Steven Hyden’s 5X Continuum
As a Midwesterner with a confessed love-hate relationship with New York, Hyden consequently shifts the Strokes’ heritage away from the lore of CBGBs and towards what he calls the “5X Continuum”: a tradition of five-piece bands that kept rock ‘n’ roll alive through a direct relationship with their audiences despite being routinely maligned or dismissed by sections of the press. The Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Guns N’ Roses and Oasis become more important to his account than the supposedly more obvious Television and Sonic Youth.
This is also where Hyden becomes most entertainingly combative. Yancey Strickler, then a New York music journalist and later the co-founder of Kickstarter, criticised the Strokes’ lack of originality by comparing them to Picasso prints. Hyden’s book is, in part, an extended rebuttal to that kind of argument. He emphasises Julian Casablancas’ songwriting ability, his musical education and the deliberate production methods he and engineer Gordon Raphael chose that made his voice so closely resemble Lou Reed and the band itself evoke vintage Blondie.
Hyden is clearly protective of the Strokes, but his defence raises the most interesting question in the book: if the Strokes really represented a new and vital form of rock ‘n’ roll, why didn’t they become the mass-market stars that everyone had predicted? The answer partly lies in the peculiar timing of their arrival.
While Hyden acknowledges the importance of pop music cycles, rock revivals tend to work when the new generation shares something with the old one while simultaneously reacting against it. Hyden argues that Nirvana’s rise, for example, was made possible partly because grunge retained a connection to the hard-rock tradition it was supposedly overthrowing. Members of Nirvana shared Poison’s love of Aerosmith’s Rocks. Their revolution was therefore not a complete rejection of the previous generation but a transformation of some of its musical ingredients.
The Strokes, by contrast, arrived in the aftermath of grunge, when the music press was desperate for a new guitar movement to sweep away post-grunge and nu-metal. Yet the Strokes had little obvious relationship with those bands. Casablancas’ love of Pearl Jam complicates the picture, but the broader point remains: the Strokes could revive an older rock aesthetic without necessarily providing the musical bridge that would allow that revival to become a genuinely mass movement.
Their success therefore produced an amusing contradiction. The Strokes were hailed as the band that would save rock music, while many of the bands that followed them were dismissed for doing precisely what the Strokes had done: borrowing from the past.
Hyden has considerable fun with this. The “Southern Strokes” tag applied to Kings of Leon leads him to identify the Hives as the “Swedish Strokes”, the Vines as the “Australian Strokes”, Franz Ferdinand as the “Scottish Strokes”, and even to reduce Arctic Monkeys to the “British Strokes”. The joke makes a serious point. Once the Strokes had become the template for a new rock revival, the industry could endlessly reproduce it, turning an apparently spontaneous cultural movement into a series of increasingly predictable products.
This too is part of rock’s mythology. Ten years earlier, Nirvana had supposedly saved rock music, while their contemporaries were subjected to arguments over which Seattle band was the authentic bearer of the flame. Pearl Jam and Soundgarden fans could make their own claims. The story repeats itself: one band is elevated as the authentic saviour of rock, while the bands that follow are accused of misunderstanding the revolution.
The Strokes’ position in that cycle is therefore rather more complicated than either their admirers or detractors might suggest. They did not become the next Beatles, but neither did they disappear. Now, 25 years later, their music continues to attract enormous audiences, and their current streaming figures comfortably exceed those of many of the bands once presented as their successors.
The more interesting question is why the Strokes’ particular brand of rock revivalism was unable to become the cultural force the music press imagined it would be. One possible answer is that the Strokes appeared at exactly the moment when the traditional machinery of rock culture was beginning to collapse.
On the Precipice of Rock Journalism’s Obsolescence
The music press had once played an enormous role in teaching listeners how to understand popular music. A young listener could be told that the Strokes sounded like Television, then seek out Television, discover the Velvet Underground, and gradually work backward through a carefully constructed history of rock. The critic was not merely reviewing music; they were constructing a lineage and explaining why it mattered. The Strokes arrived just as file sharing was making that process increasingly unnecessary.
If the Strokes were exciting because they connected a young audience to a glorious rock ‘n’ roll past, Napster and its successors made it possible to bypass the Strokes’ own timeline entirely. A listener could hear Is This It, read that the band sounded like the Velvet Underground, and then immediately seek out the Velvet Underground. The history of rock was becoming available directly, rather than through the mediation of the music press.
This may help explain the peculiar historical position of the Strokes. They were perhaps one of the last great bands to be constructed by the old rock-journalism machinery at the precise moment when that machinery was losing its monopoly on musical discovery.
That makes Hyden’s book partly a history of the Strokes and partly a history of music journalism itself. Its greatest pleasure is the sense of a period when critics could hype, provoke and argue about music with the confidence that their arguments might actually shape the culture. The NME could proclaim the next great guitar band; another critic could dismiss it as derivative; readers could take sides; and an entire legend could develop around a group before most people had even decided whether they liked the music.
Today, the Strokes are no longer waiting to be declared the future of rock. Their place in history has already been established, albeit differently from the way their early champions imagined. What remains fascinating is that they arrived during the last great moment when the old arguments about rock music still possessed enough cultural power to make such a declaration meaningful.
In that sense, Is This It: The Never-Ending Rise and Fall of the Strokes (and Rock ‘n’ Roll) could almost have been called The Never-Ending Rise and Fall of the Strokes, Rock ‘n’ Roll and Music Journalism. Hyden’s book is an entertaining and often amusing defence of a band whose importance has always been easier to understand as a cultural phenomenon than as a straightforward commercial success.
The Strokes did not save rock ‘n’ roll in the way their early admirers promised, but perhaps that misses the point. They arrived at the end of an era in which rock music could still be treated as a cultural institution, and at the beginning of one in which the entire history of that institution was becoming available to anyone with an internet connection.
That may be the real reason the Strokes’ 2001 album, Is This It, still feels like such an important record. It was marketed as the sound of rock’s future, but it was also a record built from its past, and it appeared at exactly the moment when that past was becoming accessible to everyone.