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Finally available in a French translation, “Meet Me in the Bathroom” (2017) by American journalist Lizzy Goodman gives voice to the musicians behind the New York rock revival of the early 2000s.
And suddenly indie rock wakes up in the Big Apple. Long dormant, overtaken by stoner, rap metal, pop-punk, original rock needed a rebirth. It comes to us at the beginning of the 2000s, from the United States, and more precisely from New York, with a slew of groups nourished by the garage rock of the seventies and ready, from their beginnings, to conquer the world. Formations “hungry for youth and abandonment”as characterized by Lizzy Goodman in the introduction to Meet Me in the Bathroom. If the Strokes set things on fire in 2001 with their first single and EP The Modern Agea whole “cohort” walks behind them, in this New York if “huge and intimate”ready to provide “the soundtrack of this fragile era”. This talented generation was “looking for New York” and, as Goodman writes, “over the course of a few dizzying years, we found it”. The author then tries “to restore this feeling”.
As we explained in the article “Revival rock, and guitars became mainstream again” published in the Magic n°226, the Big Apple was experiencing a tremendous musical buzz at that time, driven by a totally DIY scene from which an incalculable number of talents emerged. Lizzy Goodman’s dense book puts simple and accurate words on this excitement. With a very effective bias: the author gives voice to those who lived, with her, this revolution and this emergence of six-string groups. In total, Goodman interviews more than 160 personalities (journalists, artists, label founders, producers, agents, costume designers, artistic directors, managers, press officers, etc.) and delivers their precise testimony. Result: here we are faced with 641 fascinating pages, which are truly devoured without difficulty, and which offer, in a successful translation by Jean-François Caro, a mine of information on this protean movement which goes from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to LCD Soundsystem in through Interpol.
Over the course of these four fast-paced parts, the story offers a series of unique, entertaining, rich anecdotes that revive memories and make us nostalgic. It also shows the evolution of music consumption in this decade where everything is moving so quickly. Lizzy Goodman writes here a classic, a monument for music lovers and takes an affectionate look at a time when rock was (perhaps) at the top for the last time. Where teenagers adored the latest rockstars. As a common thread, the work tells the story of the Strokes, who became a “timeless reference”, “a cultural phenomenon”.
It’s Albert Hammond Jr., the group’s guitarist, who perhaps best describes this total excitement in the New York of the 2000s which no longer exists today: “It was by far the best time of my life. It was something very pure. With the passage of time and excesses, we lose this innocence, then we spend a lot of time trying to find it again.. Such strong quotes, the Meet Me in the Bathroom by Lizzy Goodman is full of them. If you have experienced the rock revival at the beginning of the 21st century in any way, we have only one piece of advice: you cannot miss this precise and touching retrospective.
Meet Me in the Bathroom
Ed. Rue Fromentin, 658 pages
ruefromentin.fr
2023-11-09 17:05:41
#Book #review #York #renaissance #Magic #RPM
