Was That It? The Strokes and the Punk Renaissance Twenty Years Later
PLUS: A review of Ken Burns' "Muhammad Ali"
In the history of rock and roll, some years stand out as turning points, pivotal moments when some new artist or style of music burst forth and, almost overnight, seemed to render the old musical order obsolete. This first happened in 1956, the year Elvis Presley debuted on national television. It is true that focusing on that specific year obscures the in-roads Black artists such as Chucky Berry, Little Richard, and Ray Charles had made with middle-class White teenaged audiences, but it was Presley who turned rock and roll into a national craze and affirmed its status in American culture as a rebellious alternative to the staid, adult-oriented pop that ruled the charts in the mid-1950s.
The next time rock and roll upended the world of music was in 1964, when the Beatles arrived in the United States and rescued rock and roll from its “dark ages.” It is often said American artists who had charted prior to 1964 did not survive the British Invasion, although the Beach Boys and Motown’s roster of musicians are massive exceptions to that rule. The Beatles also did not single-handedly revolutionize rock and roll in the mid-60s; Bob Dylan, the Byrds, and LSD played critical roles as well. But it’s hard to argue with the claim that the Beatles set in motion an adventurous new era in rock and roll that came into full bloom in 1967 and lasted into the early 1970s.
Punk rock took Britain by storm in 1977, the year the Sex Pistols crashed the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. Punk was a rebellion against rock and roll itself, which for many had grown bloated, stale, too technical, too commercial, and too safe in the 1970s. Punk—which had originated a few years earlier in the United States, where the Ramones had established its template—sought to wipe rock and roll’s slate clean and get back to basics. By the time punk imploded near the end of the decade, many had come to regard rock and roll’s old guard as corrupted artifacts of a bygone era. The new punk rock aesthetic valued short, simple, straightforward songs that (ironically enough) hearkened back to rock’s garage rock and pre-psychedelic roots.
Punk never quite took hold in the United States, where it remained mostly underground. Instead, the next big turning point in rock and roll occurred in 1983, when Michael Jackson moonwalked across the stage during a performance of “Billie Jean” at Motown’s nationally-televised 25th anniversary concert. A few years earlier, the popularity of disco had suggested huge numbers of people were ready to embrace dance-oriented pop music, but it was Jackson (along with Prince and, just a little later, Madonna) who would turn the 1980s into a decade dominated by exuberant pop rock. That era would come crashing to an end in 1991, however, when Nirvana released Nevermind and America finally experienced its own punk revolution. Some alternative rock bands like R.E.M. had already broken through by the time Nirvana rearranged rock and roll, but after Nevermind, overtly commercial bands with popular aspirations were suddenly very uncool and lacking artistic credibility.
There are two other years that could be added to this list. The first is 1967. That was the year Jimi Hendrix debuted, the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (the first widely-recognized rock and roll concept album), James Brown upended rock and roll’s rhythmic foundations with “Cold Sweat,” and the Velvet Underground—rock and roll’s first art/punk/alternative/underground band, and probably the most important rock and roll group most people have never heard of—released their first record. Nineteen sixty-seven, however is often regarded as a peak year for rock and roll rather than as a turning point, while its truly groundbreaking events did not detonate with the leveling force characteristic of other years.
The other contender is 2001, the year the New York City band the Strokes released Is This It, which came out twenty years ago this week. The Strokes fit well into this rock and roll narrative starring Presley, the Beatles, the Sex Pistols, and Nirvana, whereby a band seemingly comes out of nowhere to rescue the music from a dead timeline and propel it forward into a new rock and roll multiverse. Arriving just a few years after the decline of alternative rock and the rise of a new pop craze headlined by Britney Spears, the Strokes’ arrival also seemed destined, as it fit a pattern of punkish/alternative bands reclaiming rock and roll from artists, producers, and industry executives who had otherwise softened the music’s edges to appeal to popular tastes. Anyone following the music scene in 2001 knew the Strokes were the breath of fresh air rock and roll needed, its Next Big Thing.
Yet twenty years on, the Strokes do not hold as prominent a place in the rock and roll pantheon as Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Sex Pistols, or Nirvana, or even Michael Jackson (who, unlike those other four artists, is probably the musician most current artists would answer with if asked whose musical world we’re living in today.) That isn’t to say the Strokes aren’t important or influential or didn’t record good music. I think it’s more of a recognition that the Strokes were the beginning of the end of something, or the exploration of the last remaining bits of some uncharted territory, rather than the start of something new.
The Strokes are certainly a bracing band. The songs on Is This It are short and punchy, kind of trashy and sloppy, but at the same time crisp and full of electricity. The roar and sludge of grunge are absent, even though the slacker attitude remains. Also unlike alternative and punk, the Strokes don’t feel confrontational; instead, it feels like they’re the ones getting pushed around and just trying to hang on to their corner of this letdown world. You can hear that in the short quick strokes of guitarists Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond, Jr., and in the way lead vocalist Julian Casablancas seems to be singing too close to his microphone.
When the Strokes broke through in 2001, they were immediately hailed as a new punk band, part of the so-called “punk renaissance” or “garage rock revival” alongside other “the” bands like the Hives and the Vines who were in-demand in the UK and Scandinavia. Many instantly associated them with the Ramones, another NYC band with roots in the dingy clubs of the sketchy (now gentrifying) Lower East Side of Manhattan. Beyond their looks—both bands had a penchant for leather jackets, skinny jeans, and Converse tennis shoes—the Strokes seemed to be working within the Ramones “3 chords, 3 verses, 3 minutes” framework. Also like the Ramones, they seemed like they were from the 1970s. The sense of déjà vu was explicable.
But it would be a mistake to think of the Strokes as a punk band. Punk bands are reductive; they break rock and roll down to its most basic elements. This is what makes punk accessible to amateur musicians. In the hands of a band like the Clash or X, punk is exhilarating. When your neighbor kids are playing it in their garage with their friends, it might not sound great but it’s admirable, even liberating if you think about it. Punk, though—as necessary as it was in the 1970s as a corrective to rock and roll’s excess—is more often than not a musical dead end, a style of music constrained by its strict aesthetic limitations.
Instead of thinking of the Strokes as punk revivalists, it is better to think of them as post-punk revivalists. After punk had shattered rock and roll into a bunch of little pieces, DIY post-punk musicians took it upon themselves to begin reassembling rock and roll. They just didn’t put it back together the way it was before. Post-punk was wildly experimental, playing around with ideas of what constituted a song or bringing more complex musical ideas to punk’s minimalist aesthetic. Its artists often published artistic manifestos to accompany their music outlining their political, philosophical, and aesthetic beliefs. Additionally, a post-punk song might prominently feature musical elements uncommon in mainstream rock, such as synthesizers, polyrhythmic African beats, or German krautrock influences. Following the lead of David Bowie, Roxy Music, and Brian Eno, post-punk musicians had greater artistic ambitions than punk musicians.
The United States had a small post-punk scene in the late-70s/early-80s centered mostly in New York City and San Francisco. Talking Heads is probably the most well-known American post-punk band (although some might classify the B-52s post-punk as well.) The Ohio bands Pere Ubu and Devo could also be considered post-punk, although they actually predate punk by a couple years. Post-punk became more established in Great Britain where, if they weren’t necessarily the biggest bands around, they were at least regarded as a serious movement by the music press. British post-punk bands included Wire, the Fall, Gang of Four (see above), Public Image Ltd., the Slits, Joy Division, and goth rock bands like Bauhaus, the Cure, and Siouxsie and the Banshees. One of the biggest bands of the past half-century—U2—also has its roots in post-punk. Post-punk would also influence the development of “new pop” and synthpop, which took the world by storm in the early 1980s when groups like the Human League, Duran Duran, Culture Club, Depeche Mode, and Eurythmics raced up the charts. (To learn more about post-punk and new pop, read Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up and Start Again. If you’re not already acquainted with the artists he writes about, Reynolds’ work—one of the best books ever written about rock and roll—is likely to change the way you listen to music.)
Listening to the Strokes today, it’s clear they owe a huge debt to post-punk. The band’s jagged guitar lines recall Gang of Four and the Fall. Additionally, the work of drummer Fabrizio Moretti often has a mechanical, European vibe to it reminiscent of the motorik beat formulated in the 1970s by the German electronic band Neu!. The guitarists sometimes chip in to help Moretti, complementing his rhythms with terse synth-like riffs that almost at times sound programmed into the track; you can hear that best during the first two-thirds of “Alone, Together,” a song sandwiched on Is This It between the singles “Someday” and “Last Nite”.
Yet the band—always alive even when they’re channeling the more sterile sound of early electronic music—remained loose and down-to-earth. Just notice on “Alone, Together” how Casablancas’ mushy vocals and the guitar squalor that explodes near the end of the song suggest the band is on the brink of a drunken breakdown. All of it taken together made the band sound smart but sleazy, remote yet relatable.
If 90s alternative rock was America’s delayed punk moment, the so-called punk renaissance that began with the Strokes was America’s delayed post-punk moment. Other NYC bands of the era borrowed in one way or another from post-punk’s artsy aesthetic, from Karen O’s fusion of fashion and rock and roll with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to the spiky, guitar-driven dance-rock heard on “House of Jealous Lovers” by the Rapture. Even if the band disputes the influence, Interpol’s lead singer Paul Banks is clearly indebted to Ian Curtis of Joy Division. James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem even goes so far as to namecheck his influences on “Losing My Edge”, compiling a list of post-punk, krautrock, synthpop, electronica, rap, garage rock, and proto-punk musicians that only someone hip enough to have moved beyond punk and rock and roll’s traditional narrative of rebellion and reaction could appreciate (or even perhaps ridicule.)
Yet the (post-)punk renaissance didn’t prove to be as revolutionary as some may have anticipated in the early 2000s. It certainly had its moments. Often portrayed in the music press as the Strokes’ greatest rival, the White Stripes—a stylish, punkish hard rock duo from Michigan that sounded like a heavy metal coffee house band—became immensely popular; “Seven Nation Army”, their most famous song, is now a rock and roll standard. By 2004, non-NYC groups like Death Cab for Cutie, Modest Mouse, Franz Ferdinand, the Arcade Fire, and the Killers had landed on the charts, signaling an appetite for independently-produced records with post-punk influences.
Beyond that, however, the movement never really found much mainstream success. Its popularity was mainly confined to college towns, hipsters, and rock connoisseurs. Maybe its growth was hampered by a music industry thrown into turmoil by the advent of the Internet and file sharing. Perhaps it was too arty or insular for mass appeal. In some ways, it may have been a victim of its own hype, burdened by expectations it couldn’t quite fulfill. Revolutions, it turns out, are hard to predict.
As for the Strokes, the band struggled with their follow-up to Is This It. Their subsequent recordings left audiences underwhelmed (although their second album, Room on Fire [2003], has recently received some newfound appreciation.) As the Lower East Side gentrified during the mayoral administration of Michael Bloomberg, many artists there gravitated to Brooklyn, where an even more idiosyncratic—if less rockist—music scene developed, one perhaps best represented by the band Vampire Weekend.
Unlike the revolutions wrought by punk and alternative rock, it seems harder to find traces of the so-called punk renaissance in popular music today. To begin with, there are simply fewer guitar bands out there, although acts like St. Vincent and the 1975 could plausibly be viewed as descendants of the Strokes and their contemporaries. In fact, a guitar band like the White Stripes—especially one anchored in the blues and punk—can sound like a dinosaur today. Yet if guitar-based rock and roll is no longer the sound of mainstream popular music and if the Strokes and their peers go down in history as the last guitar-based rock movement that achieved some measure of mainstream recognition, their influence will still be heard in every little local indie band that chooses to follow the motorik beat of their own drum machine.
The true legacy of bands like the Strokes, LCD Soundsystem, and Vampire Weekend, therefore, may be in the way they opened the nooks and crannies of post-punk to other American artists. That’s where long-shunned or largely ignored styles of music like krautrock, synthpop, and disco had been hiding. They also finalized rock and roll’s aesthetic shift from visceral, rebellious music that could move the masses to a more cerebral style that valued artistic idiosyncrasy over popular acclaim; in other words, less the Clash and Pearl Jam, and more Berlin-era David Bowie and Talking Heads.
You might call it the intellectualization of rock and roll. In its early days, rock and roll was pure id, a Dionysian response to the straight-laced structure and order of post-war American society. Rock musicians were outcasts, delinquents, rebels. By the 1970s, however, some musicians—Bowie, David Byrne of Talking Heads, the Kent State students who would go on to form Devo, which is shorthand for their theory of human devolution—began to regard mainstream society as just as depraved and irrational as the counterculture. In their view, a rock and roll rebel was not just someone who raged against the machine but who sought new experiences and enlightenment in an otherwise dull and unenlightened world. There was still room here for the Dionysian, but it was a more self-conscious release of emotion than a uninhibited baring of one’s soul. As the voices of rebellion in American society began to sound more reactionary during the last decades of the 20th century, rock and roll grew less populist and more progressive. The music came as much from the head now as it did the gut and groin. In the new century, for better or worse, it would be punk renaissance bands like the Strokes who would complete this transition.
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Columns of the Week
Some follow-ups on recent articles I’ve written:
“How Other Nations Pay for Child Care. The U.S. Is an Outlier” by Claire Cain Miller (October 6, 2021, New York Times)
“I Designed Algorithms at Facebook. Here’s How to Regulate Them” by Roddy Lindsay (October 6, 2021, New York Times)
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Vincent’s Picks
(Vincent’s Picks theme song here)
Watching clips of Muhammad Ali boasting and trash talking in Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon’s new 4-part documentary about the boxer, I couldn’t help but think Ali is who Donald Trump modeled himself after. It’s there all the way down to how both men would jut out their chin in defiance of whoever they hoped to belittle with their taunts.
But let’s not take the comparison too far. Ali, unlike Trump, had a sense of humor, a generous spirit, verbal elegance, and a moral core (although Ali, as the documentary makes clear, was no angel; he was a morally flawed man who demeaned Joe Frazier, abandoned Malcolm X at a critical moment in Malcolm’s ideological evolution, and cheated on his wives.) Today Ali is respected today as much as a man of conviction as he is an athlete: A paragon of Black pride and Black excellence, an anti-war activist who was willing to go to jail at the height of his career for his beliefs (even as knew he would certainly never have seen combat had he reported for duty), and a devoutly religious man from a faith tradition still seen as suspect by many of his countrymen. Maybe Trump is following Ali’s lead, or maybe they both simply co-opted the overwrought theatrics of professional wrestlers, but whatever similarities do exist, Trump is a mere fraction of the human being Ali was.
Muhammad Ali is one of those figures who, rather than getting swept along by the current of history, chose instead to ride atop it. History didn’t seem to happen to him; he seemed to make it bend to his will, punching back if it ever tried to get the better of him. By the time Ali became the heavyweight champion of the world in 1964, boxing had long been a metaphor for American life: Get in the ring, fight for what’s yours, mano-a-mano, take the hit and hit back harder, get bloody but don’t fall down, the toughest and strongest shall survive. In the ring with Ali, though, that metaphor was forced to accommodate ideas most of America was not yet ready to spar with.
If you enjoy Burns’ work, you’ll certainly enjoy this documentary. For the most part, it’s fairly brisk, with Burns taking time to develop key figures like the Nation of Islam’s Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Floyd Patterson, Sonny Liston (memorably characterized by mystery novelist Walter Mosley), and Joe Frazier. The series’ MVP is Michael Bentt, a former heavyweight champion and actor who Burns deploys to explain the strategy and tactics boxers use in the ring. Bentt regards the sweet science as more than a technical undertaking but as an artform, and his commentary on Ali’s fights put you in the mind of a maestro. The footage and photography Burns uses throughout the film constantly reminds the viewer just how beautiful Ali was, both as a man and as an athlete. Anyone who has ever seen Ali fight is aware of the Ali shuffle; every time it shows up here, it is damn near sublime. The documentary’s soundtrack, with original material by Jahlil Beats, is also outstanding.
Muhammad Ali is the sort of grand subject Ken Burns tends to tackle. There are other documentaries about Ali’s life, but this one will probably be considered definitive. Checking his Wikipedia page, I see Burns has projects lined up about Benjamin Franklin and Winston Churchill; last year, he aired one on Ernest Hemingway. My only wish is that Burns would turn his attention to figures whose life stories are less well-known but equally compelling, perhaps someone like Eugene Debs, Frederick Douglass, or Harriet Tubman.
In choosing Ali as a subject, though, Burns seems to be reminding us that some of the most marginalized people in our society often have the most profound insights into the condition of our society. It was easy in the 1960s for the United States to turn a Black Muslim into a villain; a decade later, America regarded Ali as a hero because, as one commentator says in the film, he’d been right all along. That, and he was one hell of a fighter.
Thanks for reading.
Exit music: “Jerk Ribs” by Kelis (2014, Food)