"A group that will save rock"

20 years ago, The Strokes released the first album - and revived a whole genre, not wanting it themselves. Why did this change the whole musical world?

The first album of the American group The Strokes “Is this it” on July 30 turned 20 years old. At the request of Medusa, the music journalist Nikita Velichko recalled the story of this work written under the influence of rock music of the 1970s, but who discovered suddenly for its participants themselves-the road to many indie groups from The Killers to The Libertines (and the inspired Billy Ailish, who also had a new album on the eve of Billy).

Twenty years ago, on July 30, 2001, the debut album of the Americans The Strokes “is this it” was released in Australia . It was the summer The Strokes. It was their year - and their newly begun millennium.

At the beginning of the zero, Brit Pop faded away, nu-metal developed in America, the first places in the charts occupied R&B, Labls were looking for new The Prodigy and Nine Inch Nails. And then an anomaly arose-a rock band of five guys inspired by The Velvet Underground. They had everything that the rest could envy: shabby elegance, wit without intellectualism, youth, beauty and laid -back coolness, behind which there was great hard work.

The collection of failures

It seemed that someone had collected The Strokes on the principle of a boy-band-so the participants complemented each other. But no, they met and became friends in childhood. The vocalist Julian Casablankas united everyone: when he was six, he studied at the school on the upper East Side with the future bassist of the group Nikolai Freitur. In 13 in the Swiss boarding school Institut Le Rosey, he met the future guitarist of the group Albert Hammond, the younger, and a couple of years later in a private school of Dwight - with guitarist Nick Valency and drummer Fabrizio Moretti.

Valency - Moretti - Casablancas listened to Nirvana, Parl Jam and Soundgarden, drank a lot and played a trio called Just Pipe. Later, Fritur joined them, and finally the group developed when Hammond Jr. moved from California to study in New York.

Hammond Jr. settled in a house located opposite the Elite Model Management model agency. He accidentally found out that the father of his former classmate - Casablancas - headed this agency. In search of friends in a new city, he went into the office and said: "I once studied with Julian, here is my number." Soon he and Julian and Nikolai got drunk in the Margarita bar, polished them with beer in the park, Alberta's houses were at home. So made friends. When they decided to rehearse together, both the group, and Albert himself was very nervous. He came to a rehearsal in a strict suit, which did not coincide with the image of four fans of the Grange.

Hammond Sr., Albert's father, became famous in the 1970s as the author-performer Pop Rok-Ballad (sang himself, wrote for Selin Dion, Tina Turner, Whitney Houston). All members of the group were from rich families, but Casablancas, for example, grew up with his mother, rarely talked with his father and did not like to discuss him in an interview, jokes : “My favorite rumor? That he is our manager. " So the success of The Strokes cannot be explained only by privilege - in addition to the successful starting point in them, there was really a rare combination of talent, hard work and style.

They looked amazing in their jackets and leather jackets, vintage t -shirts and shirts, torn jeans and conversions. There is a good quote for Casablancas about this: “I used to dress up before concerts, but it seemed to me that it was somehow wrong. Then Nick [Valency] said: “What is the problem? Get dressed every day as if you are going to play a concert. ” And this became my motto. ”

They were frankly relaxed, as befits rock stars. At the same time, before the first performance at the Spiral New York Club-September 14, 1999-they rehearsed for six months almost every evening and thought over the name of the group for several weeks (as a result, Kasablankas simply “blurted out” for no reason at one of the rehearsals-and everyone agreed). On the one hand, in early concerts they honed their songs, made them more clearly, sharply. On the other hand, dozens of these first concerts gathered only a hundred people of the audience, and the first trial records of large labels like Matador rejected. At that time, Hammond Jr. even began to collect a collection of failures.

Vocals like beloved blue jeans

How many times have The Strokes remade the demo, and Casablancas said everything - no, it is necessary. His approach, journalist Mark Spitz recalled, was extremely serious, rehearsals not resembled parties, but training before the competition. This approach justified itself when, in the first month of the XXI century, the British label Roun Trade released the three -band EP group “The Modern Age”.

The Strokes sent him by mail Matt Hike, the promoter of the prestigious Mercury Lounge club, which they dreamed of performing - and eventually played regularly on Wednesdays. He just started working as an American talent for Roun Trade. Haiki heard EP and twisted it all evening. The founder of Life Jeff Travis recalls how he heard The Strokes for the first time: "Matt called at about seven in the morning and let me listen to ten seconds on the phone, and that was it."

England went crazy first. The New Musical Express wrote : "They look and sound like a group that will save rock." And even with the love of this publication for loud statements, the decision to put The Strokes on the cover twice in three months - even before the release of their first album “is this it” - looked unprecedented. Returning to America, the group could already choose labels that were beating behind it-and stopped at RCA Records, which left the musicians the right to master-records , that is, allowed them to control the situation as much as possible.

Steve Relbovsky, who signed The Strokes on the label, did not convince the live performances of the group at first-they seemed too similar to those that he saw in one of the key punk clubs of the 1970s Maxʼs Kansas City. But a month later, Ralbovsky decided to try to go to another concert. There was a giant queue in the Bowry Ballroom club, The Strokes were already on stage - and Ralbovsky had to listen to them through the window. This was enough.

In New York, such a stir around any group has not been since Beastie Boys, and Casablancas itself has become in the United States the most discussed rock star since Kurt Kobein. As for the group, in the press the last time such a hype was raised around Oasis in the mid-1990s.

At the same time, Casablancas sang as if he was a side effect; The instruments sounded both elegant and sprinkled simultaneously. On the recording of the album “is this it”, which squeezed all the forces of the producer Gordon Rafael, the instructions of Casablancas were approximately the following: the vocals should sound like “favorite blue jeans - not completely killed, but worn and convenient.” And High-Hat is like "a rich guy at a party who does not communicate with the girls and waits for them to approach him."

Libel told the group that the record sounds very “unprofessional”, The Strokes is harmful to its career and their album will never be successful. But the musicians knew better. They generally did what they wanted - so frankly that they refused to sell for 600 thousand dollars the right to use the Last Nite song in a beer advertisement. The album was really sold not as good as he could: even then everyone rewritten music from each other and downloaded songs on the Internet. But over the years, I have not lost its relevance-in the late 2000s, IS this it entered all kinds of lists of the best in the decades, while taking the highest lines.

The founder of the New York Dreampop Galaxie 500 Dean Werham recalled that people in 2001 asked him: “What do you think about Bin Laden? What do you think of The Strokes? " On September 11, 2001, Hammond Jr. and Casablancas were in their apartment in the second Avenue between the 18th and 19th streets-and even in the evening after the attack, not knowing what to do, went with the group to rehearse. They had to remove the song “New York City Cops” from the American edition of the album - the phrase “They Ainʼt Too Smart” (“They are not too smart”), at that moment, began to sound completely inappropriate.

“Is this it”-eleven ideal songs about a naive drunken youth-made The Strokes the main rock musicians in the world and paved the way for their associates. Hearing “is this it”, The Killers decided to abandon all the songs that they had previously composed, except “Mr. Brightside ” , which has become their main hit. “We thought that we would play in bars for 30 people,” said Jack White from The White Stripes, wondering that thanks to The Strokes, the mainstream became interesting. Once they were asked to do, “What first group did you love so that you yourself wanted to play in the group?” - And he replied: "The Strokes." At the same time, The Strokes was only a few weeks earlier, and the Libertines found in 1997.

What did the group itself want? Hammond Jr. said that the goals were, in general, small-to become famous in New York, there was no talk of touring. Casablancas and Valency dreamed of playing in an indie group, like the beloved Guideed by Voices, and earn a living with music. However, Moretti claimed that they were all, of course, ambitious - and mentally prepared themselves for great success.

A look from Russia

In Russia, the love of The Strokes was instilled by the local edition of the New Musical Express, the short-lived life of which came just at the peak of the “new rock-revolution”-the so-called a wave of guitar groups that rose after The Strokes, usually with names like The ... “s.

Journalist Anya Books recalls: “Our big brother - the English version of NME - woke up giant enthusiasm in relation to The Strokes. They [British NME journalists] with their youthful maximalism and unheated global passion for uncompromising generalizations wrote that these were the saviors of rock and roll and we should all be worshiped by them. After listening to CD, we also infected with passion and love for this group.

The Strokes exuded confidence and steepness, and they had aesthetics: you work hard on everything in your life, on music and appearance, up to the smallest detail, but this is not striking. Everything was real, we did not invent anything and really fell in love with them. Since then, I have not loved a single album so much - the living and true love that you can love music at 17 years old. ”

It is difficult to evaluate how much The Strokes was popular in Russia, says the breed: “I doubt that the success was grandiose, but they were not on the radio? We lived in our rather closed world - we listened to the music that we loved very much, wrote about it and tried to share this with their readers, who bought our magazine in different cities. Therefore, you can judge by the number of copies and letters of our readers. According to my feelings, these were thousands of people, not hundreds of thousands. ”

We arrived The Strokes to Moscow only in 2006, performing enchantingly at the recreation center named after Gorbunova. They met them, according to the author’s memoirs of this text from the first row, like real heroes: bras flew onto the stage, the audience grabbed the musicians for all the available parts of the body and sang the songs from “is this it”, chanting the name of the modest bassist Nikolai, whose mother has a franco-Russian origin.

New abnormal

The Guardian has recently published material about why the groups as such are an disappearing phenomenon in music. Happy every year that in the charts, that in the lists of promising musicians there are fewer than them, and the only exception is collected as if in the incubator of the Kay-Pop Projects. Together to rehearse and go to tours is expensive and laid, and social networks contribute to individualism.

The further story of The Strokes, in which there were both excellent songs and protracted conflicts between the participants, as if confirming this conclusion. Perhaps this is the last group of several talented hardworking handsome men, which not only fell in love with the musical world, but also gave rise to a new phenomenon. Although the question of how new it was is still. It is believed that the retrovol, which the Strokes began, led the music to a dead end. In any case, inspired by a group inspired by the past, someone is unlikely to repeat its success.

But today The Strokes continue to stand on their own. They advocate collectivist values ​​and support democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Okasio-Cortes and contender for the post of mayor of the York Maya Wiley. Without changing the composition, 19 years after the “is this it”, the group received its first Grammy - over the sixth album, released on April 10, 2020. One of his huge fans - Billy Ailish - says : “Julian Casablancas is just a genius. Every time I hear his texts, I think: "It would never have occurred to me to say this." That's what I like about them - they are so sudden, but at the same time close and understandable. All songs are excellent. ”

The name of this album - “The New Abnormal” (“New Anomalous”) - quite accidentally reflected both the spirit of the time and the fact of the appearance of The Strokes themselves twenty years ago.

At the virtual ceremony of presenting awards due to problems with the connection, half a minute passed before the group found out about their victory. Nikolai, Fabrizio and Julian had to ask again several times: "Who won?"

Is this. It.

Nikita Velichko