A snapshot of New York’s rock renaissance in the shadow of Ground Zero
[ad_1]
Meet me in the bathroom is the book by journalist Lizzy Goodman, published in 2017, which tells the New York rock scene between the end of the 90s and the early 2000s through the voices of its protagonists. The documentary of the same name directed by Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace was released in the United States.
There is talk of young rock bands at the beginning of the third millennium, but Meet me in the bathroom it begins with lines from the father of American poetry, Walt Whitman, who sings of “Manhattan crowds, with their boisterous musical chorus!” New York: the city that at the end of the century is a faded memory of that avant-garde nerve center of the 1970s. New York and its devastating wounds of September 11, 2001.
Brooklyn
It is in this dynamic background that the careers of groups born in the clubs and low-cost rentals of Brooklyn come to life, unaware of living the precise moment in which nothing will be the same: both for music and for history. Before, therefore, the attack on the World Trade Center, social networks, smartphones with built-in cameras. Meanwhile, the world was changing rapidly: in 2001 the iPod and Wikipedia made their debut, the G8 was held in Genoa, Napster was forced to close its doors. The images of Interpol members wandering bewildered among the dust and sheets flying in the moments following the fall of the Twin Towers is emblematic of all this, but Meet me in the bathroom it is a documentary that also tries to impress on film the frenzy that the turn of the century was generating. And then, here are the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a trio led by singer Karen O, a white fly in the almost all-male rock scene of that period. And, then, the style of the Strokes, the austere elegance of the aforementioned Interpol, the eclecticism of the Lcd Soundsystem, the euphoria of Rapture and the anti-folk of the seasoned Moldy Peaches; the art rock of TV on the Radio and the experiments of the Liars.
The documentary, as well as the book, succeeds in capturing a moment of great artistic freedom, favored by a cultural renewal that ended up reverberating all over the world, starting from the United Kingdom, where a host of emerging bands had remained struck by the concerts of the Strokes themselves: it is no coincidence that almost two decades later an Arctic Monkeys song would begin with the emblematic line «I just wanted to be one of the Strokes».
Although, necessarily, not as detailed as Goodman’s volume, Meet me in the bathroom returns to all fans of that music almost two hours at high risk nostomania and, most likely, the memory of a last breath of light-heartedness before the economic and, later, pandemic crises would have marked the beginning of the new millennium. For those who, on the other hand, weren’t there yet, the documentary represents an opportunity to immerse themselves in a historic moment of transition, close yet, at the same time, so far away.
[ad_2]
Source link
