Vampires and Failures: Musings on the Garage Rock Revival Scene of 2001-2004

Back in 2001, it was thought that a quintet of baby-faced, scruffy New York hipsters would leave a huge imprint on our popular culture. Their method was solid – look cool, sound cool and get great write-ups from the British press, who still insist on hyping everything to the moon as completely life-changing. They did it for Dinosaur Jr. and Mudhoney before Nirvana took the big prize. They did it for the Clash before they even had an album out or any songs on the radio. Even with their absolutely bombarding praise of similar groups before, America was always slow to pick up on these new flavors of rock and roll. Often, enormously praised groups in England would be regulated to mere college radio/cult group status here. None of that matters though; this was supposed to be the big one and America was expected to finally care. The best rock group since the Rolling Stones. The new scene leaders who were going to bring back the glory days of grunge when radio supposedly had higher quality. The ultimate fruition of everything tastemakers copping riffs from the Velvet Underground and the Stooges for the last thirty years had worked towards.

Yes, the Strokes were supposed to be the biggest thing in your life since your mom introduced you to cow’s milk. From what started in NME and Melody Maker, temples of lofty praise and scathing decrements, a wordy arena of musical Who’s Hot and Who’s Not, eventually became entrenched in Uncle Sam’s flagship musical publications – our Rolling Stone, our SPIN, even our precious Entertainment Weekly. Suddenly, on the basis of 500 days as an active band, a few gigs opening for Guided By Voices, and a handful of singles deemed exciting by critical consensus, this young group was expected to conquer the world and slay a few nasty musical dragons (nu-metal, pop-punk), thus making the upper frequency airwaves safe for music snobs of all colors and creeds.

It did not happen. Mainstream rock evolved from Nu-Metal into its current, less hateful yet somehow whinier form. Teen pop pulled country and Americana into its slimy center and even extended its centre of control to the television airwaves. As we know, American Idol is the most significant musical happening of the past decade, a way to let the public manufacture their own pop stars by choosing them from a shallow pool. Pop-punk persists and, along with heavy metal, is the drug of choice for aspiring teen-age musicians that don’t consider themselves “left of center” enough to go the indie kid route. Even willowy underground music – The Shins, Bright Eyes, the Postal Service, to name a few – had a greater impact on this decade’s music, inspiring many musicians to put their whiny voices, $50 acoustic guitar lessons, and bedroom poetry to great use, selling in record numbers and reaching an unheard of legion through the Internet, as well as greater exposure afforded by hip television programming.

But the Strokes? Those lucky chosen five who were going to save us, along with their supposedly willing vassals – the Hives, the White Stripes, the Vines, the Donnas, the Von Bondies, and Jet. What are they to us now? The perception many have is that they entered our lives with a lot of noise and critical kudos, only to fade away in a few years like the incorporeal smoke it was. The legacy: huge sales for Is This It?, Room On Fire, Vedi Vini Vicious, White Blood Cells, Elephant, Highly Evolved, and Get Born; radio staple status for “Last Nite,” “Hate To Say I Told You So,” “Seven Nation Army,” and “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?”; and a general annoyance with so many bands having “the” names. Even that last item seems temporary, people talking about it in the same tone as they disparage Vanilla Ice. Besides, the annoying trend of today is indie bands with animal names.

So why did a supposed revolution fall so far to the wayside in so little time? Was it a dud? Not entirely. Artistically, Is This It? and Elephant are highly regarded classics of the modern decade, the former given new legs now that years have passed to separate the music from the hype and shoddier groups have come in the Strokes wake, the latter because “Seven Nation Army” is simply one of the great American rock singles of the ’00s, a rare specimen that nearly everyone knows and perhaps this decade’s closest thing to a standard. Realistically, most of these bands are still around: the White Stripes have remained consistently popular, the Strokes are back recording another album after a long hiatus, the Hives and the Vines continue to put out material despite significantly declined global popularity.

But as a revolution? Totally disappointing. To start, excepting “Seven Nation Army,” none of these bold new songs were any different than what listeners were accustomed to before. The Strokes have admitted that “Last Nite” is a cop from Tom Petty’s “American Girl,” but it also has huge similarities to “No One Knows” by the vastly more popular Queens of the Stone Age, even to the point where some mistook it for a new single of theirs. “Hate To Say I Told You So” is just screeching hardcore punk – an American invention, I dare say – spit back to us by hip Swedes, like something Blur might have done if they had a little more venom. Of course, much has been made of the Vines being pale Nirvana clones, something radio audiences had their fill of over that past 10 years, and of Jet’s “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” being a rather obvious cop from Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life.”

Perhaps worse was a perceived lack of depth. Though Is This It? boasted several songs that would’ve made able singles, the bands lack of stylistic diversity perhaps equated to “all their songs sound the same” for many. Not to mention that their lyrics were the usual fare: girl problems. Meanwhile, the Hives reliance on bratty style over any type of musicality made it seem like they were running on fumes. Oddly, the Vines were rather Brit-Pop on their albums, something their singles never even hinted at, yet this too was complicated as those expecting “the new Nirvana” were subjected to 40 minutes of strummy, vaguely psychedelic nasal gazing. Blame the publicists for that one. Of course, there was always the perception that the White Stripes biggest albums were strewn with filler that could never hope to live up to their radio singles.

Perhaps the sticking point was a perceived lack of emotional sincerity in a nation that was then (and perhaps still is) crying out for it. No one forgets that grunge opened the doors to darkness and longing after years of heavy metal being a long, vapid, coke party full of macho bravado and sappy love ballads. The hook of the supposed garage rock revival was a throwback to a time when rock meant a snotty attitude and a cocky swagger. However, like all obvious retro put ons, there’s only so much mileage. We knew the Strokes were preppy kids, not street lifers like the Velvet Underground or the Ramones. We knew that the Hives silly costumes and rock star preenings were a kitschy one note act. We know that when Craig Nichols screamed he wanted to get free that his statement was entirely meaningless, just something a tough rock band is supposed to say. There was no message whatsoever to latch onto and people like messages.

That’s why the garage rock revival was cut off at the knees by a more homegrown one that had quietly brewed in the darkness, bypassing the hipsters, the holier-than-thou cultural elites, the vacant twenty-somethings, and had plunged deep into the heart of the kiddies. In Fall 2001, the big change was supposed to be Is This It?. Let’s be frank: the real story was with another band that had slightly altered their album for the sake of sensitivity to the events of September 11th. That band was Jimmy Eat World and their song was “The Middle.” The banner they led was the emo banner. The song was a smashing success. Months later, the unprecedented sales and popularity of the Dashboard Confessional and New Found Glory would follow. The message was clear but never acknowledged: the ’00s would be the decade of Emo’s mainstream love affair and all opposed could suck on it.

The dichotomy between the two trends, neither acknowledged as battling the other, couldn’t be greater. Strokes: upper class, pretty, sleeping with supermodels, overnight sensations, critical darlings making music derivative of older critical darlings. Jimmy Eat World: working class, dull looking, married with families, seven year veterans of the American underground with a slow slog towards success, drew off music critics didn’t care for, but America’s teenagers held as essential.

Simply put, the Arizona quintet had their New York brethren beat in several areas; they were more accessible, their music had roots in what the vast majority of Americans already liked, and their message was easy to understand. “The Middle” was perhaps a tacky cheerleading song, yes, but ultimately easy to wrap your mind around, the pep anthem that so many dour teenagers needed to fuel their dreams of kicking field goals and acquiring the girl of your dreams. Julian Casablancas, on the other hand, sounded detached as always, observing problems without ever seeming invested in them, pleading sometimes but never at any expense. The appeal of grunge was that the musicians seemed like members of the audience. Emo ran with that and came with a ready-made and completely uniform style and ideology. Meanwhile, the Garage Rock Revival seemed made up of privileged hipsters and gimmicks, something cool because all the magazines and media personalities said so.

Also, the confessional mentality of emo perhaps had a greater impact on the underground in its own quiet way. Notice how its dramatics and forlorn state of mind has manifested in literate-minded singer-songwriters (Bright Eyes), instrumental post-rock bands that always go for the grandiose, heart tugging effect (Explosions in the Sky, Saxon Shore), and its continued presence in hardcore punk (The Forecast). Check your indie pop music too; notice perhaps how it grew a bit weepier post-2000? Heck, it’s even influenced the original 20th century sad bastard music: country. Check out a Lucero record for evidence. Even runaway indie successes like the Shins and the Arcade Fire were wussier than their ’90s counterparts and put a greater emphasis on grandiose musical flourishes and introspective lyrics. Furthermore, emo has been relevant enough to prompt an actual backlash movement. “I hate emo” t-shirts exist. Governments have taken steps to curb emo fashion, much like the Goths were subject to a crack down. Of course, like grunge before it, a sanitized version saturated the mainstream (My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Panic At the Disco) and any connections to, say, Sunny Day Real Estate and Pedro the Lion seems all but completely severed.

Emo is considered present tense. The Garage Rock Revival is now the subject of “hey, remember when…” conversations. The hype behind the Strokes isn’t an engrained part of our musical life like Nirvana’s chosen reject story resonated and remained just ten years before. Instead, we divorce the hype from the music, write it off as complete silliness, and either dislike the Strokes for being lame or cherish them for simply being a good band. Few are loathe to admit anymore that “Last Nite” lights up a dreary day of radio. When it’s not an “does the emperor have any clothes” test, it’s revealed to be the derivative but fun and memorable piece of rock and roll it really is: just like the style of ’60s garage rock it was supposed to be reviving. Though this revival may go down as an also-ran against the striped shirt/black rimmed glasses crowd at best or a media/hipster fantasy of world domination at worst, the bottom line is that the trend allowed some fun songs to get on the radio and at least temporarily shook up the music world. No frills rock and roll will always have its place, whether its on the red carpet or down in the gutter.

Related posts:

1. Revival or Renewal: The cultural influence of O Brother, Where Art Thou?
2. The Ultimate Collective: How Broken Social Scene Changed the Communal Aspect of Music
3. Top 11 Hard Rock Releases of 2009
4. Top 11 Independent Releases of 2009
5. Michigan Seems Like A Dream: Sufjan Stevens’ Postmodern Dilemma

Tagged as: 2009 Year End