Nine years later, I have no recollection of what it was about The Strokes that rubbed me up the wrong way [not intended to be a reference to the front cover of "Is This It" - ed]. But rub they did. Perhaps it was something along the lines of what seems to piss countless people off about Vampire Weekend: a sense of calculated, studied "cool", of advantage being, well, taken advantage of. What they did was, they made it all look too damn easy.
I now turn slowly towards the camera, cap in hand, and announce that "Is This It" is, and always was, a remarkably tight little nugget of a rock album: concise, full of impeccable tunage, everything (another line I have used before) in its right place. Each song produces, even in the most jaded listener, a little adrenaline rush. Nobody should be entitled to ask for more than that.
What is hard to own up to is that the criticisms I aimed at "Is This It" all those years ago, particularly the line (which I also, and I am now seeing the error of my ways there too, used in relation to The xx's "xx") about if I wanted to listen to The Ramones / Television / sundry other rock bands from the golden age of downtown NYC I would listen to the originals rather than these young upstarts, well, those very criticisms were thrown back at me, if I cared to recognise and/or admit it, by my falling head over heels, barely two years later, for LCD Soundsystem, a band that, lets face it, were for the first part of their existence nothing more than the sum of James Murphy's record collection. It's not as if The Strokes' tastes were any worse, from my perspective, than Murphy's. It's not even as if Murphy's songs were particularly better (although a couple of the early 12s would wipe the pants off anything, anywhere, anytime).
The really funny thing, though, is that at least two of the songs on "Is This It" now reveal themselves as being templates for, or predictors of, or precursors to, LCD Soundsystem's song for the ages, "All My Friends" (something I probably wouldn't have noticed if not for my peremptory dismissal of The Strokes, which at least has allowed me to listen to "Is This It" with a fresh pair of (cloth) ears). And so we see, as we so often do, a wheel turning full circle, and proceeding to run over a blogger whose opinions, like those on The Daily Show, are "not fully thought through".
