Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001–2011

by Lizzy Goodman

Everybody is living through their own golden age, but you only realize it afterward, so start living it now.

Our parents were horrified that we’d drop out of college and they were horrified by where we were living, and then they saw glimpses of our apartment and were further horrified.

the junkie mentality—“It killed that guy?! It must be the good shit.” That

I like drugs, but that scene … I’m not going into a K-hole. It had a sinister vibe. Like, “This doesn’t seem nice, I’m not going to make a lot of new friends here tonight.” And also—lots of people would slap me for saying this—it didn’t seem like it was about the music. It was supposed to be about fun, but then they murdered someone.

He was like, “We are going to make a record like Can.” I was really offended by that. Can were people who worked at the Musée Arteum and the keyboard player won the best young conductor award in Europe and as his reward he traveled to New York and met the Dream Syndicate people and John Cale and it blew his mind and he went back and formed a band with the best free-jazz drummer in Europe and they played together eight hours a day in a house with no distractions. You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.

It was just, when you’re partying more than you are working—and, I mean, I think I was drunk every night—of course that’s going to alter people’s minds and paranoia sets in.

I don’t want it to just be “Are you humble? Okay, we like you.” Would we ever have Lou Reed or David Bowie if that was the rule?

Fun and sex were two things that were very much frowned upon in the indie rock world.

People were poo-poohing it but the people who were poo-poohing it were no fun. I was like, “No, no! This is retarded and awesome! Dressed-up kids and dumb little beats?! If this was 1981 you’d all be collecting the records and paying a hundred and seventy-five dollars for them, but because it’s happening now it’s not cool.”

I get the despair of the labels and the industry, and I don’t really care that much about that. I get the despair of the artist, and I care about that, but I also have a lot of optimism for breaking down bottlenecks and gatekeepers.

Brooklyn had the worst of both worlds—it was seen as both being where your grandma’s from and also a place where you’re going to get killed.

It was always pretending to be a good school. It’s just a bunch of rich people, but you know what? It prepared all of us for what the truth is: everybody is just faking it.

I don’t believe in god, I don’t believe in an order to things, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t know that there was something there with these guys that I, like, needed to be there for.

A band should be a gang, running down the street, chasing a bus, breaking windows, breaking hearts.

Yes, of course, everyone wants to make money, I’m not saying we didn’t, but money isn’t as exciting as when a song is really good and you know it and you can feel it, it runs through the crowd, and you can record it well and you’re on tour. That’s more exciting than if they just said, “You made a million dollars!”

“Remember the nineties? Remember no one had a job and everyone slept until eleven and maybe showed up for work at the coffee shop? Then they had to take off early to go to their clowning class?” “A place where young people go to retire.”

English indie rock was just boring. There were all these post-Radiohead bands. Everybody in indie rock was trying to be Radiohead but there’s only one Radiohead.

It was all taking a long time. And then our friend Dave was like, “Hey, you guys are always talking about your band that no one has ever heard of. Do you want to open up for the White Stripes at Mercury Lounge?”

A lot of times I would say things out loud that, for people who don’t know me well, might make them think I’m extremely concerned about something because of the sound of my voice. It’s usually just me thinking out loud. I talk to myself too much too.

What happened with Bush versus Gore in 2000, in combination with September 11. I mean, if you believed in institutions, if you believed in the moral arc of the universe inevitably bending toward justice, those two events are cataclysmic. Now you knew that there were no systems or institutions in place that were going to make it okay for you. Your life was going be something that you determined.

You see a band that’s become a wild success and they are right next to you. It’s not like I read this in a magazine, no, they’re sitting at the bar, living the same life right next to you, except their life is awesome and yours totally sucks. It’s hard to be in that proximity.

The thing that makes pop music so great is the way it parallel-parks on the bleeding edge of cool: nothing could be better at this moment than this beat, this feeling, this chorus. It takes something ephemeral and impossible, and for three to four exhilarating minutes, it makes it accessible and real.

“What the fuck? Who are these dudes in the Dolce and Gabbana suits? Can’t they leave anything for dorky dudes? They sound like this and they’re hot dudes that are well dressed? Fuck them.”

On the first day of school, I found these friends, who I am still friends with, who had a Guided by Voices box set. It was like, “That’s it, we’re friends.” But I remember playing them a Nas album and they looked at me like I was defiling a child. They couldn’t understand why I would listen to this if I liked something so demonstrably good. It all felt very balkanized.

You have to be better than everyone else, as well, not just because you’re first. You also have to be great.

Those people, they wanted the weird, the edgy, the marginal, the bohemian out of there so that they could start putting in the boutique and the commercialized version of what the real thing was.

It’s very tricky to find a way to write political music that isn’t seen as trite or hackneyed, because the message is always the same: “Fuck the powers that be. Fuck the liars. Fuck the rich.” Those tropes are kind of well-worn.

your past self is this cadaver that you carry around with you and there’s this sense that you need to stay true to who you were, not veer from your path in a way that will alienate your peers from you. According to Thoreau we needed to let all that go. He said that at any given moment we should be open to contradiction or self-contradiction or changing of paths.

So, in a way, the rise of “dealing with the man is bad” is connected with the entry of people who can afford to have those attitudes. Look at it this way: historically, musicians are people who are “If I can make this work, I don’t have to go work at the tuna-canning plant or pump gas at the gas station.” But all of a sudden, it became “If I can make this band work, I don’t have to go to law school.”

The idea of selling out came from a time of plenty. It’s a luxury idea, the idea that you’re avoiding your otherwise boring prosperous fate. That idea of worrying about your credibility is a luxury notion.

In a world in which music is a democratically supported phenomenon, who’s going to support it but the extreme rich and the corporate paymasters? There’s no one else.

The story of the last fifteen years is the story of the abdication of struggle. And it’s good and bad in ways that are legitimate and ways that are just nostalgic, like the struggle of finding the record, literally finding the band, going to the record store, hearing the recommendation from your friend’s older brother or sister or whatever—that’s gone, gone forever, and I have nostalgia for that, certainly.

When I picture people who consider getting fucked up on drugs or getting naked as some sort of rebellion, I picture people from my parents’ generation, and it feels deeply boring and done.

Millennials have a much more beautiful cultural homogenization going on.

The rise of these bands coincided with a rebranding of New York and the New York–ification of the world. You could argue that London has more in common with New York these days than Newcastle.