>>PREVIEW
THE STROKES
Sunday, May 14
The Corral
Being a rock star these days doesn’t quite have the same appeal as it once did. Since the hallowed exit of Saint Kurt in particular, our modern-day rock stars have spent just as much time fretting over their fame as they spend basking in it. Julian Casablancas of The Strokes, for one, has wisened up three albums in, whether or not that record, First Impressions of Earth, seems to speak otherwise.
A somewhat more layered affair than their sorta-successful sophomore comeback Room on Fire, First Impressions of Earth sees The Strokes in reinvention mode, the likes of "Juicebox" and "Electricityscape" treading relatively, at least for them, new ground.
That said, it’s always been far too easy to fall in love with The Strokes. Opener "You Only Live Once" condenses all the lessons learned from albums one and two into near-perfect formula, while the Eastern-flirtation "Vision of Division" lashes out as their most complex rocker to date. The biggest surprise, however, comes in the album’s smallest package. Composed of little more than a mellotron and Casablanca’s voice, "Ask Me Anything" proclaims (perhaps damningly so), "I’ve got nothing to say /I’ve got nothing to give /Got no reason to live." Depending on your perspective, "Ask Me Anything" works as an easily mocked self-summation or The Strokes’ finest gesture. Either way, it certainly makes for an easy opening question.
"Well, no, I don’t think I’ve got nothing to say. The song’s about the exact opposite of what people actually do. It’s about feeling speechless," Casablancas explains. "It’s almost a weird sarcastic thing. It’s like when a rock band decides to get all political – I don’t even know the effect of it. If anyone’s trying to do something positive, I’m all for it, but sometimes it’s more like, ‘Wow, what can you say about that?’ And if you’ve got nothing to say, then why are you even talking?"
As far as mistrusting mockery goes, The Strokes (and Casablancas in particular) have already faced their share of attacks at the hands of the press. Derided as a phony egomaniac (underground rock bands don’t typically come with huge trust funds and Ivy League pedigrees), Casablancas at one point seemed stuck in the downward spiral of overwhelming stardom cliché.
"When I get attacked, I deflect and then I counterattack," he says jokingly. "But really I think that’s just the nature of my position. I don’t know who’s safe nowadays – if you put yourself out there then I guess you put yourself at that kind of risk.
"Still, when people make references to us, 80 per cent of the people don’t even know who the fuck we are. We’re just an underground pop band – the biggest of the underground. I don’t really fence it – I think people will come around. Either it’s up to us to make something good and get approved the way I hope we do, or we don’t and people can take their shots and they’ll be totally deserved."
It can’t be easy going to bed a nobody and waking up a star. The Strokes’ style of overnight success came not only with the pressures of international rock stardom, but the bizarre press-fuelled pressures of leading the revitalized New York scene and "saving rock ’n’ roll" altogether. For Casablancas, however, the biggest push comes from within.
"I have a lot of self-imposed pressure, so I think that my inner pressure is harder than the outside world pressure. Usually we seem to have come through and people still say, ‘They have failed.’ The fact that we haven’t had gigantic monster ’70s-style sized commercial success doesn’t dishearten me. It makes us strive more. We could make music that’s more superior and forward-thinking and modern and enticing and special and moving," he says.
Finding the right path, however, has not been a process without the occasional detour. Initial sessions for Room on Fire were completed with U.K. super-producer Nigel Godrich, the man behind Radiohead’s OK Computer and subsequent re-invention. The results were scrapped and the Strokes returned to New York to lick their wounds.
Casablancas recalls, "We wanted him to OK Computer-ify us. Like the beginning of ‘Paranoid Android,’ which sounds so amazing to me. We were hoping he could do that to our vibe, making everything sound so distinct and slick, but also part of a groovy, funky creature. And that’s not what happened. We walked into the room with completely different ideas, doomed from the start." While it would indeed be interesting to hear The Strokes go head-to-head with Godrich’s flotsam approach, Casablancas is set on keeping it all under wraps.
"Have those been destroyed?" he asks someone else in the room. "We should just get those destroyed. Really."
But it hasn’t all been bad. From the beginning it’s been easy to give in to The Strokes, no matter how disposable they can be. Even for Casablancas, the ride’s been an eventful one, albeit forever in the shadow of the first moment he realized his band was on to something big.
"At the start, it was a scary time. Everyone was working or in school and it almost seemed like if it didn’t work out, it just wasn’t going to work. All of the scary things were creeping up, and we were doing the Modern Age EP. Listening back the very first time, I thought, ‘Holy shit. Wow. People are going to dig this.’ And all of a sudden we were done, out of the dark, and all the crap was gone." |
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