As famous music critic Winston Churchill once put it: “history gets written by the victors.” Hence only the most popular of bands are generally able to transcend their time and become hummable for the next generation of listeners, to tour on the legacy act circuit. To read Lizzy Goodman’s handy Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001–2011 is to vicariously live through an era of post-9/11 New York City where the biggest, buzziest, most stylishly tousled rock’n’roll groups emerged victorious. And yes, bands like The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Interpol definitely defined the times. But when they get lumped in with head-scratching “tourists” such as Kings of Leon and Ryan Adams (yeck!), one wonders if there might have been other bands, artists, and scenes of the 2000s that also claimed New York City (and its burgeoning borough Brooklyn) for themselves.
In the new century in NYC, the scene teemed with a wide assortment of rockers, weirdos, freaks, and outcasts filling out bills at clubs like The Cooler (RIP), Tonic (RIP), N. 6th (RIP), 285 Kent (RIP), Glasslands (RIP), APT (RIP), Cake Shop (RIP) and many many more and bringing in their self-released records and CDs to music shops like Mondo Kim’s (RIP), Etherea (RIP), and Other Music (RIP). In these spaces, CBGB’s cosplay was definitely played out. Why follow the rule breakers of the 1970s when so much more had come after?
All sounds from the 20th century were now fair game: folk, no wave, hip-hop, punk, dub, industrial, disco, Afrobeat, synth-pop, noise, all re-stitched into new patterns and configurations. In the wake of grunge, nu-metal, and rap-rock, guitars were now seen as odious, cumbersome things. You might attend a hundred concerts in the city and never once hear a guitar solo. There might still be guitars onstage, but they were less a lead instrument, more a percussive or textural element. Guitar histrionics gave way to a becalmed stage presence more in line with checking email, as laptops, turntables, drum machines, and electronics became de rigueur, even if you might never figure out just what noise they were adding to the mix.
Songs might be buried deep into a blast of noise, but just as likely, gossamer melodies were liable to sprout from spontaneous jams, circuit meltdowns, field recordings, and the like. A childlike sense of abandon informed some recordings, some serious practitioners wedded divergent sounds and sensibilities into a singular vision, while others mourned generational tragedy and found a way to set it all to music.