Bright Lights, Big City

So I just got pinged from a friend in NYC right now. She said the first thing she bought was a copy of New York Magazine. I'm an avid reader of NY Mag's website but am not too familiar with the mag. I only own one copy of NY Mag, and it's sitting at my home in LA.

BAM!

I admit, I got this at Borders in 06 without much of an idea of what NY Mag is about. I got it cause The Strokes are one of my favorite favorite bands and this cover is great.

I felt the urge to read the feature again, written by Jay McInerney, who wrote the novel Bright Lights, BIg City (it was turned into a movie later starring MARTY MCFLY), and thanks to the net, I didn't have to call my dad up at 4am and ask him to send me the mag.

What a good feature. It's descriptive, gets the bands personality, tackles on some of the criticism they have faced, and talks shit about Simple Plan and Fall Out Boy, two of my most hated bands since the beginning of time.

HERE is the link to the feature, read it if you a fan of the band, or if you just into good feature writing.

This feature mentions some of the criticism the band faced, meaning that whole "sellout" thing I mentioned a few days ago. Only for them, it's not becuase they've become huge. They never were mainstream huge like Kings of Leon is right now in the US. They were criticised by the hardcore music snobs because they were private school educated rich kids and they're good looking.

The knock on their good looks is the stupidest. It's not like they sell their looks, many people were first drawn to their tunes when they heard that riff that opens Last Nite.

Another thing that annoys me, and even Jay McInerney takes this stance--is this notion that Room On Fire sucked. So maybe it didn't measure up to Is This It. But Is This It is one of the best rock albums this decade and helped revive good rock music instead of the shit that was on MTV TRL in 1999--Creed? Limp Bizit? Offspring's Pretty Fly For A White Guy? (offspring was bad ass before that but not in 1999).

Room On Fire was great.

Anyway. 2010...the Strokes finally will have a new album out. It's been four years.