Of course rockstar neurosis is nothing new, but there’s no sense here that Casablancas doesn’t want to be a rock star, more a general bafflement as to why his rock star dreams are coming true. Or to put it another way – some people diss The Strokes because they’re not doing anything new, but that seems a bit mean given that they spend their entire first record apologising for it.
But meanwhile there’s four other people in The Strokes. What do they do? There’s one lead guitarist and he’s the most rock and roll musician in the band – he plays lots of hooky little riffs and fashionably short, angular solos. Or rather solos that feel fashionable now because The Strokes are playing them. Everyone else in the band is playing disco – The Strokes pay more attention to rhythm than anyone else in indie right now. When I say this I’m not talking about complex rhythmic programming or micro-glitch complexity or even slamming beats: I’m saying that The Strokes understand indie as a dance music form better than anyone else, which along with Casablancas’ rock doubts makes Is This It? a terrific album.
Of course indie rock, or indie pop or punk rock or just rock, isn’t exclusively a dance music form – in fact the idea of rock music which works as a dance music is a bit debased now because mainstream rock is busy trying to be horrible and slow or hip-hop with guitars, and underground rock is generally quite knotty and forbidding and not designed for anything as straightforward as dancing. But go to an indie disco and you’ll soon be aware that underground rock has a tradition of dancefloor monsters – tracks with a simple rhythm bed, lots of familiar hooks and a propulsive use of dynamics. The Pixies’ “Debaser” does this superbly, for instance.
The Strokes flatten out the existing model of indie dancefloor dynamics – the quiet/loud thing, to be simplistic – and make it look crude. They do quiet-loud to a certain extent (i.e. they have memorable choruses) but the undercarriage of almost every Strokes track is a straight-down-the-middle beat, monotonous rhythm guitars and a clinical bassline. Three of The Strokes, in other words, are more or less robots, which enhances their album enormously: it’s hard to remember a ‘rock’ album aimed this squarely and crudely at the feet, and all but maybe two songs here would tear up any indie disco in the world. Their best (most danceable!) song, “Hard To Explain”, even uses a spluttering drum machine to up the pop-motorik ante even further, and stands with Kylie’s “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” as a track which deserves to change its genre’s game completely.
If you’ve read anything about The Strokes you’ll have read that Casablancas’ dad runs a big model agency and that this and their sudden rise to fame might not be totally unrelated. Being led by a model boss’ son might also explain why The Strokes’ image is so frustratingly dead-on, though. The way the band look is the least interesting thing about them: it’s as inert as a mainstream fashion spread, quite attractive but lacking any of the odd pop vanities and fears that you can tease out of the songs.
Speculating on rock star psychology is a dodgy game at best but all the eye-rolling about The Strokes being some kind of trust-fund play-actors might explain why the band combine their new-wave pop rigour with such sweet defensiveness. Casablancas is in an odd and frustrating position: of course he knows that people are going to call his band a rich kid’s vanity project, and of course he knows that in many ways they’re right. “All obsessed with fame / Says we’re all the same / I don’t see it that way” he sings on ‘Hard To Explain’, with deperate reasonableness.
And the question you have to ask – which maybe he’s asking too – is: what does it say about rock and roll that the band selected to “save” it this time round are a set of pretty men with fashion connections? There’s an assumption going around that The Strokes have been hyped into a position which more worthy bands should be occupying – but what if this band’s nervy good-looks good-hooks package is the only possible way ‘rock and roll’ can catch our interest in 2002? What makes The Strokes interesting is that they sound not like a band trying to turn back some historical tide but like a band who know that this time the game might just be up.