There's a strong case to be made for the Strokes as image of the decade. Armed with leather and ample whiskey, they captivated every camera with their lack of concern for, well, anything. Onstage or off, their encompassing indifference created a charmingly endearing dirt-bag bravado. They resurrected Lou Reed's grimy façade and paired it with James Dean's rebel-without-a-cause persona. They nailed rich-boy anarchic impetuousness with economical precision. They were good kids doing bad things, which let wealthy high schoolers sing along without making the scene passé.
If timing is everything, then the Strokes are the band that has it all. Just when bubble gum pop was becoming nothing more than over-commercialized drivel and Top 40 hits bordered on smut, the Strokes provided a healthy (if not sanitary) alternative. And the world took notice.
Our first impressions of them were a surly group of youngsters who didn't bother to bathe or wash their clothes. They were young, but their music was old. They took the classic swag of Velvet Underground and Television and revitalized it with a sense of urgency. They wrecked Late Night Television sets and swore in interviews, instilling glee in millions of fanboys.
Their first impressions of us were, well, ""Is This It?""
They took authority by making it readily apparent they couldn't care less what we thought about them. They played non-single tracks on ""Late Night"" appearances, and their stage presence oozed hostility when or if it oozed anything at all. But what gave them such mass appeal was that their hostility was so benevolent. Is This It?, their landmark debut, was a doctrinization of disenfranchisement and disillusionment with coming of age in an underwhelming, overblown society, but it was also symptomatic of a debilitatingly inflated contentedness with culture. Their songs engendered a paradigmatic reversion to a kind of life whose cares and worries could be confined to a one-bedroom apartment. They were the flagship of pre-9/11 hip, and Is This It? was an invaluable reminder of a simpler, more refreshingly egoistic existence.
But what truly gives the Strokes such historic significance is the impact they had on the scope of the rest of the decade. More bands than are worth mentioning instantly employed the same The (Blank) moniker and greaseball shtick and substantiated what became a formidable resurgence of garage rock and punk. However hard they tried, though, nobody could match the crossover appeal or the smoothness of the Strokes' earnest discontentedness. The buoys of the scene didn't have the backbones to support the movement. The Strokes made indifference cool, but lifelessness loses all entertainment value without a counterpoint. And for the Strokes, the counterpoint seemed to be the exact kind of gentrification they'd suddenly helped create.
They tried to spark things up on Room on Fire, but their upbeat hooks and meandering focus couldn't fully detach itself from their crude contemporaries. Without having fully plunged into the deep end, the Strokes were faced with a need for reinvention. Is This It? was a message so strong that the Vines, the Libertines and the Dandy Warhols weren't the only ones to fall victim. By trying to reconstruct through expansion, the Strokes' third effort (and last of the decade), First Impressions of Earth, typified the tendency to comfort with style rather than substance. It was fittingly (however disappointingly) filled with flashing lights on trash cans, over-materialized means for under-developed ends from a band that always got by without any concern for aesthetic appeal. And—though it sounds better in retrospect—the messy presentation all but ruined the band that was once wickedly tight despite its nonchalance.
Regardless, though, the Strokes entered the music world at a breaking point for our generation. They provided a reprieve from commercialization and adapted it to better fit our concerns. And as they carelessly strung together a masterpiece of precision, we all sat rapt in attention. And as they bobbed around onstage in their shiny leather and matted hair, we all changed our wardrobes accordingly. And as they snarled at the camera and took another swig of whiskey, they created quite a lasting image for the decade to remember.
