The resurgent indie rock scene in New York on the millennium’s flip is the main target of this curiously un-nostalgic documentary, based mostly on an oral historical past of the identical title by Lizzy Goodman – and the title is in actual fact that of a music by the Strokes, impressed by lead singer Julian Casablancas’s rumoured relationship with Courtney Love.
The film revives the reminiscence of white-hot NYC bands of their pouting pomp: the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Rapture and Interpol, and contextualises them with the worldwide tragedy of 9/11 and the rising upheavals in New York and the music business itself. Bands who sang of ardour, rage, nervousness and dislocation discovered they had been proper in the midst of an undreamt-of new zeitgeist; knocked sideways by the assault on the World Commerce Heart, they discovered themselves a part of an exodus away from Manhattan to then down-at-heel Brooklyn, so kicking off the gentrification and hipsterfication of that borough.
The bands themselves additionally needed to negotiate the standard stepping stones to the longed-for fame – together with, curiously, UK excursions which had been taken very significantly. Inside a number of years, broadband web would completely exchange the mighty MTV of their lives, and gave the world file-sharing and Napster. And so the celebrity that many yearned for was arguably simpler to achieve with a better connection to the followers, however the riches had been additional means. There was, nonetheless, a brand new emphasis on the dwell expertise, because the one factor that would not be illicitly downloaded.
One other sort of documentary may need been somewhat extra dispassionate in regards to the Strokes and their nepo child background; rich showbusiness fathers loomed massive and so they met at that almost all un-rock’n’roll of locations, a Swiss boarding faculty. Nevertheless the standout star is the passionate and fierce Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a Korean-American musician for whom music was an escape from racism and sexism.
