Are The Strokes Back? And If They Are, What Does That Even Mean?
In 2001, The Strokes were going to reinvent rock ’n’ roll. Do you remember? How could you forget?
Reviews of their debut record, Is This It, were uniformly fawning, hailing the five-piece as messiahs of the ailing genre. The Strokes were “the best young rock band in America,” according to a Rolling Stone review. They managed to become the stuff of legend without much effort, as music press praised them with one superlative after the next. They were “Lou Reed, Television and the Ramones rolled into one,” according to The Guardian, while The Stranger likened their emergence to “the second coming of the Velvet Underground.”
Due to the flattering media narrative, The Strokes were born heavyweights: Their debut full-length had just arrived, but they’d already managed to revive the bloated corpse of rock music in one fell swoop. One of the world’s biggest cultural movements suddenly owed its life to five New York City prep-school kids, and as high as the praise for Is This It was, the expectations following the band were even higher.
But for all the hype and excitement, the critics were only half-right. The Strokes were a handsome group of guys who played some infectious rock ’n’ roll, but they weren’t really the cultural successors of New York’s underbelly. They were—and still are—a distinctly nostalgic band, and perhaps the last true rock group (read: strictly non-pop rock group) to achieve long-lasting mainstream success in the 21st century.
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