I think my heart yearns to be a rock star

For my birthday, I asked my sister for a copy of the book Meet Me in the Bathroom by Lizzy Goodman. Named after a song by The Strokes, this book covers the 2000s NYC rock revival scene. AKA probably my favorite era in music. Since around June-ish, I’ve become super obsessed with the band Interpol, and whilst doing some internet research about them, I stumbled upon a video that listed this book as a source. As a big fan of The Strokes, I had heard about this book for a while, first seeing it in a random book store, which I think was in Chicago, a few years ago. I looked at it and thought, “like The Strokes song?” and then kept moving. Anyways, I figured it was probably time I read this, since a lot of my favorite bands were mentioned in it. I got it for my birthday on July 4th, started it on the 5th, and finished it last night on July 20th. 

I am obsessed with music, and I definitely have a bit too much of a complex about it, because I feel like I have to know everything there is to know about something before I’m allowed to say I love it. Like, “love” is such a strong word, and I use it sparingly. Or I try to. But I do love a lot of things. I consider listening to music a sort of hobby of mine; I love putting the effort into sitting down and listening through an album I have never heard, or repeating an album that I like a few times throughout a week until I know every song. I just love learning about a band and their journey, and why this album sounds like this, and what they were going through when they wrote this, and why fans hate this. Interpol has become one of those for me. 

“Obstacle 1” was the first song I knew of Interpol. It’s on Guitar Hero World Tour and I was playing that around 2.5 years ago, so I guess that’s where this journey started. I next knew “Evil”, and really liked it but still wasn’t struck by that “I have to dive into this” thing yet. According to Spotify I discovered a handful of other songs, mostly from their second album Antics, over the course of the next year and a half or so. There was the Arcade Fire phase, then Metric, then Panic at the Disco, then a little Lady Gaga, and The Killers, and then I finally landed on Interpol. Thinking back, this phase probably started because I knew The Killers had been influenced by Interpol, and I wanted to understand that more. Here’s one of my favorite videos relating to this specific topic, of The Killers performing a cover of “Obstacle 1”. Something I really love about many descriptions of Interpol is that they were a more “mysterious” version of The Strokes. They were stylish, and actually influenced fashion trends at the time. People were suddenly wearing button downs and business casual attire to bars and clubs (though I think it’s safe to say this was partially caused by The Strokes as well, with the addition of Converse). 

I’ve gotten really deep into early-2000s pop culture in the past year or so, which was part of my inspiration for making this website. I learned pretty quickly that Interpol were instrumental in this whole “scene” and the rock revival of this time, which is what Meet Me in the Bathroom is all about. Antics contains the first Interpol songs that stuck out to me, such as “Narc”, “Slow Hands”, and “Take You on a Cruise”, though I also really liked “PDA” from Turn On the Bright Lights, their first album. I am obsessed with the music video for “PDA”, too, by the way. It was close to what I saw in my head while listening to it before I even watched it. I then proceeded to listen through their albums in order. Back in the fall I had purchased a CD of Bright Lights at a strange second-hand store in Chicago, without having known much about it but that it was probably a cool CD to have, and by the time I actually became a fan of that album enough to pull the CD out, I realized the case was empty. 

I think so far, my most listened through album of Interpol’s is actually Our Love To Admire, their third record. And one of my favorite Interpol songs lives on this one, “The Heinrich Maneuver” (which also has a really crazy music video). I think this is generally a pretty liked album, but I think this was around the time the band started to have their classic band hardships, as did The Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. It happens to all of them eventually. I can understand why Bright Lights is so influential to the time period, and why everyone considers this their best work, but for me it gets a bit too slow and less memorable. I think the first two albums combined would be the strongest collection of their songs, because Antics is a close second for most listened through albums. And this makes sense because they wrote both of them around the same time. The first one just has some moments where I’m like, “yeah, I kinda want to skip this because I need something faster-paced”. 

Something I like doing when I’m exploring certain albums or eras of a band is look them up online and find really opinionated Reddit posts about them. Interpol fans are certainly very opinionated. I really grew to like their album El Pintor, which not only means “the painter” in Spanish but is also an anagram of the word “Interpol”. I love that. But, since this album was made after the band’s bassist left the band, people either love it or hate it. In fact, any albums that came after #3, Our Love to Admire, are pretty hated it seems. The most hated, from what I can tell, is their self-titled fourth album, even though the bassist was still involved. They got “too experimental” and it made people mad. And then on the next album, El Pintor, they went back to a more classic Interpol sound, which people hated more for not being experimental enough. And because the bassist was gone. What do you people want? It’s all Interpol. I haven’t delved into the self-titled album enough to have a strong opinion on this matter but I can tell you that the ones that I do know off of it are amazing. I also haven’t gotten into anything past El Pintor so just for the record, that’s as far as my knowledge goes. I think I have a tendency to like the less-liked albums by a band, by the way. I did this with The Strokes as well, in which I consider Comedown Machine my favorite. Now, this isn’t their least liked, but I certainly don’t hear much else besides Is This It being the best.

So, with all of this blabbing about Interpol, let’s talk more about the book. I think this book has changed my life, which I knew about ten minutes into reading it. I have an obsession with nostalgia; this is something I talk about heavily in my artwork and it is also just a function of how I live my life. I will always be longing for some period of time or thing that isn’t coming back. And lately, it’s been for things I didn’t even experience. Sure, I was alive for most of this era in music, but I was a baby. Every day I wake up and wish I could invent a time machine, but that’s just not how this works. I think this book did a fantastic job of helping me understand this time, and it also succeeded in giving me extreme FOMO. But it isn’t even a fear of missing out, it’s a knowing that I did, indeed, miss out. I feel like I need to go on an extreme hunt for any Detroit-based bands that could end up being my new favorite thing. I yearn to be part of a scene of some kind. After grunge, nobody really knew what to do with rock music. And then The Strokes just figured it out. And they were so cool that people hated them just for looking too cool and called them frauds. But they weren’t frauds at all. That’s so awesome. 

There is also a documentary counterpart to Meet Me in the Bathroom which came out in 2022. I watched it last night after finishing the book. It totally made me cry, seeing all these young people in bands who didn’t know what they were in for yet. There’s a clip of Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs in the “Maps” video, (watch if you haven’t) that did a lot for me while watching. I liked the book more, because it’s 650 pages of interviews with many early-2000s rock stars, managers, producers, club owners, whatever. The doc couldn’t have gone that in depth. In Goodman’s acknowledgements after the book, she wrote, “So, finally, thank you to everyone who was there. And to everyone who wishes they had been. This book is for you.” And here I am, thanking her for thanking all the wannabes. I can’t help my age. 

I feel like I need to elaborate more on why this changed my life. Starting this book the day after my 22nd birthday felt like the exact inspiration I needed for how to live my life. I think I started getting into the classic post-grad slump of anxiety and uncertainty, and that’s okay, because I still have a lot of time to figure things out. But one thing I did know before reading was that I need to go out and explore more. I need to go out and be young, and go decide which drinks I like, and wear my cute clothes, and see my friends, and continue establishing my status as a regular at my favorite bar. And I need to find the bands in Detroit that will make me feel like I’m seeing The Strokes at some little dive bar in New York City. This particular example is likely impossible, but you get my vision. It’s easy to get caught up in work and personal projects and just wanting to curl up in bed at 7pm at the end of the day, so I am trying to be more rebellious and stay out too late on a Tuesday night even if it means being tired at work the next day. It’s okay. And I’m proud to say that since starting to read this book, I’ve been way more adventurous. Does this mean I condone everything these rock stars were doing mentioned in this book? No. But I think it taught me that everything is so fleeting, and someday I will miss this moment in my life a lot. I just know I will. So I have to go live it so I have good stories to tell when I wind up reminiscing about it. And music is so awesome. I think my heart yearns to be a rock star but my brain knows I’m not cut out for that. That’s why I’m an artist instead. 

Sources

Meet Me in the Bathroom Lizzy Goodman