Is That It?

Apparently NME magazine feels Is This It, the 2001 debut album from those posh NYC hipsters (yes, "posh hipsters" is the best way to describe them) The Strokes is the "best album of this decade".

I'll be honest; I really don't have the energy to vehemently disagree or at least counter with my own suggestion. There has been a lot of good music in this decade if you've been willing to look, and while I was never a huge fan of these guys, I originally welcomed the wave of adulation they received with the incessantly catchy (albeit musically simple and wildly overplayed) single "Last Night". Terrestrial radio up to that point had become swarmed with the likes of Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock, and I certainly didn't mind these "five rich kids who listened to way too much Velvet Underground growing up" taking some of the former's commercial oxygen.

That said, what "impact" have The Strokes really left? Their albums since commercially have sold well, although I haven't paid much attention to them. The same kids who embraced their style at the beginning of this decade; vintage rock t-shirts and Chuck Taylors, are now in the workforce and are probably too busy with Real Life Shit (™) to spend hours each weekend at thrift stores to don themselves with the appropriate apparel while nodding along to the cheeky lyrics of late-night shenanigans in Hipster Paradise by Julian "even my real name has its own fashion identity" Casablancas. Interpol, another NYC band from a similar cloth (but different sound) is still chugging away, but they too no longer carry the aura they once did back at the dawn of the 2000s.

Worse yet, neither band's music, in of itself, is terribly memorable. Is it good? Sure, but ultimately disposable. I brought it upon myself a couple years ago to obtain and listen to the entire catalogs of both bands as well as from others, such as British imports The Libertines, and others in that same ilk, and as much as I tried...I couldn't find anything meaningful.

So there we go. The "album of the decade" is nothing more than a promising debut from guys who idolized Lou Reed, yet aren't Lou Reed, and even two albums later their most profound lyrical statement is, essentially, "dating in NYC is hard". Sweet.