Sophia Michaels
The best scene in Meet Me In the Bathroom, the excellent new documentary on the rock & roll scene that slouched into New York in the beginning of the 21st century: a parking lot under the Williamsburg Bridge, Brooklyn, Labor Day weekend, 2002. An afternoon punk show, maybe semi-quasi-not-illegal. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are playing; so are the Liars and Oneida and the Rogers Sisters. The parking lot is packed with kids, crammed onto roofs, balconies, the nearby bridge. Neighbors stare out of apartment windows. I’m down in the crowd. In the footage here, the YYYs look impossibly young, three art-punk brats with a feral punk-scuzz guitar attack. Lead vixen Karen O, in her ripped-up red t-shirt and black miniskirt and torn fishnets, leads the fans in the band’s you-can’t-kill-New-York anthem “Our Time,” with the crowd chanting, “It’s our time! Our time! To be haaaated!”
The footage in the movie captures all the raw excitement of the day. Karen O yells, “Come on, kids!” without a shred of irony. It’s a song about 9/11, a song about roaring back to life after you’ve been tossed away and left for dead. A song about how the secrets of the universe are all in Joan Jett’s version of “Crimson and Clover.” A song about building your own trash glamor out of broken toys other people threw away. A song that makes you look around a crummy parking lot and see thousands of nobodies jumping up and down, getting charged up to go fuck with life. “It’s the year to be hated,” Karen sings. “So glad that we made it.”
A kid on the corner near the show is selling homemade backlash T-shirts, attacking the cool New York bands du jour: “Strokes Schmokes,” “No No No,” etc. I grab a fistful of them. It is the year to be hated.
Based on Lizzy Goodman’s 2017 oral history, Meet Me in the Bathroom aims to sum up this glorious NYC rock moment and the bands who were part of it: the Strokes, Interpol, TV on the Radio, the Rapture, the Moldy Peaches, the Liars, the YYYs. It’s a classic tale of how a generation of bored kids came to the Big Apple, found nothing cool going on, and decided to make their own fun. Directors Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern already told part of this story in Shut Up and Play the Hits, their excellent 2011 portrait of LCD Soundsystem and DFA Records’ madman James Murphy, the biggest star to emerge from this scene and one of the major figures in this film as well. (The documentary opened in New York and Los Angeles this past weekend, and will get one-night-only screenings in select theaters on Tuesday, November 8th.)
It’s a story that Goodman has been telling since she started writing her book back in 2011, when everybody figured this moment was a thing of the past. Most of the bands had broken up. Who wanted to hear about a bunch of pretentious kids in leather jackets and drainpipe trousers playing guitars (ugh, so declassé) in sleazy punk dives after midnight?
Yet her book hit a nerve, especially with younger — and mostly female — readers who never set foot in the Mars Bar and spent these years watching Lizzy McGuire, before Hilary Duff started hanging out at the Dark Room. Somehow Goodman’s book brought this dead firecracker back to life; it’s no coincidence that most of the bands have staged comebacks. She turned this tawdry little New York moment into one of the most exuberant, passionate, contagiously exciting rock histories ever. (Disclosure: Lizzy is one of my closest friends, we saw all these bands together back then, and I’m in the book a lot. Also, for the record, she’s wrong about Dylan’s Infidels, a great album we’ve been arguing about for 20 years.)
The movie raises the question: What the hell is it about this era that still resonates with people? “It all comes back to what makes kids come to a place like New York,” Goodman says, on an East Village afternoon at Cafe Mogador, a hangout from those days that’s still thriving. “If you’re coming here as a kid, chances are you already have a lot in common with the other people who managed to get themselves here. Probably you’ve got some ego. You’ve got some insecurity. You’ve got restlessness and a sense of wanting to live a big life, whatever that looks like. And you’re probably interested in the idea of a late night, and what might happen in places that you’ve only read about in books like Please Kill Me, or Jim Carroll poems.
“That’s the dream that brought me here, and that’s the dream that brought you here,” she adds. “These New York songs and books and movies — these dispatches from the actual livers of this other life — they’d come through to your little place, wherever you grew up. You’d hold on to them. So all of those people getting that bat signal already have a shit-ton in common. The goal for them all, once they get here, is to have equal access, to fuck up, to succeed, to do both at the same time. To meet each other, be roommates, get in fights, have sex, do drugs, be messy together.”
New York was a magnet for these kids. They all showed up expecting to find one great big Lou Reed song, but they found they had to make their own fun in a city with no use for them. “Even before 9/11 happened, there was the dot-com crash in early 2001,” Goodman says. “So people felt even more of a reason to get away with their own kind of undercover dingy joy. There’s this period of time where all this shit is going on. An election is stolen. There’s a war starting. There’s a massive technological revolution. That’s a big part of why people are so fascinated by that time. But there’s a story in there that’s as universal as ever. It’s kids coming to New York wanting to get laid and figure out what’s inside of them creatively.” She quotes an early Yeah Yeah Yeahs song, with a laugh. “They’ve got a date with the night.”
The idea of a New York rock band was not exactly a winner in those days. The Yeahs’ Karen O and Nick Zinner had a folkie duo called Unitard. “It was all dirgey goth acoustic slit-your-writsts kind of stuff,” Zinner told me back in 2006. “Then Karen said, ‘Hey, let’s have a rock & roll band!’ And I was like, Really? Pffff. Naaaah. A rock & roll band? That’s so played out!’”
That was the point, really. They gave it a bash anyway, and within a couple hours, they’d whipped up their name, their logo, and their first song, “Bang,” a punk sex anthem with Karen wailing the hook, “As a fuck, son, you suck!” But for some reason, whenever the Yeah Yeah Yeahs played that song loud, with noise drummer Brian Chase banging away, in a sleazy, sweaty room, something very weird happened — something you never saw in rock bars anywhere at the time, but especially not in New York. The girls danced.
(Believe it or not, dancing was literally illegal in New York bars at the time, because Rudy Guiliani was mayor and he thought Footloose was real life.)
Before you knew it, New York was crawling with rock bands, not to mention drunk girls taking over the floor. The Strokes were the first ones to get famous, sullen black-leather princes who carried themselves like legends, even when they were playing fleatrap dives. “The Strokes were definitely a boy band,” Goodman says. “Interpol were a boy band. There was personality there.”
Finally, here were some real rock stars, at a time when rock radio and MTV were hyping a clown car of of interchangeable major-label rap-metal gomers. (One of the movie’s funniest scenes is the infamous Courtney Love MTV marathon in early 2003, when the Hole singer stayed up for 24 straight hours on live TV, and coaxed the Strokes into coming to hang out. They dozed off in her bed. ) These bands got rave reviews all over the world, except the U.S., where they got tagged as a “revival” by media outlets who were just grumpy about all the time they’d wasted trying to make nu-metal sound like laughs and shenanigans. The Strokes flexed their pouty charisma by refusing to play encores, though honestly they just didn’t know many tunes. Actual NME cover headline from late 2001: “Strokes Write Thirteenth Song!”
Meanwhile, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs released their hilariously cheap-sounding debut EP, which sounded that way because they mastered it from a cassette that went through the laundry in the pocket of Zinner’s jeans. The bands kept on coming: Interpol, dapper boys in designer suits with their own seductive style of goth guitar. The Liars, deparved art-perv twits chanting “Gas fumes! Will kill us in our rooms!” over grimy Brooklyn skronk. The Rapture, with a cowbell-crazed 12-inch punk-funk single called “House of Jealous Lovers.” TV on the Radio, quasi-prog gearheads with R&B harmonies and jazz abrasion. The Moldy Peaches, a folkie duo with Adam Green and (his former babysitter) Kimya Dawson warbling about sex and drugs. The Hold Steady, a self-proclaimed bar band of Minnesota expats with hearts full of Catholic angst. Longwave, with blissed-out shoegaze guitars.
None of these bands ever seemed to promise more than a lost weekend of wild times and sex bruises. So it’s a surprise how much resonance they have in 2022. Twenty years after that parking lot show, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs celebrated their excellent new album Cool It Down with a hometown show at Forest Hills Stadium, making “Date with the Night” rock more ferociously than ever. The opening bands: Japanese Breakfast and the Linda Lindas, the kind of artists who grew up idolizing Karen O as a female rock star at a time when they were practically unheard of. As Karen said onstage, in an emotional moment, both bands are also led by “deeply soulful, deeply brilliant Asian-American women.” It would have been unthinkable back then. “If the young Karen O…oh man, if I saw this show I’d be fucking stoked!”
Part of the shock of seeing the YYYs do “Maps” on MTV in the early 2000s was that the Nineties explosion of female rock artists had been stopped cold. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs happened to play their first gig the year after Woodstock ’99. As Goodman says, “I wanna know how we lost the momentum of alternative rock and riot-grrrl culture, [and went] into this dead-end careening crash into a brick wall. That was what happened in the late Nineties. When I was 15, there were all different types of women in music. And you didn’t have to like them all — Bjork, the Breeders, PJ Harvey, even No Doubt. The coolest boy in my school was all into these Bjork records. It was just like those guys felt like, ‘Here’s this powerful person who happens to be female.’ But then suddenly, it was like: ‘Just kidding! The girls are gone. That’s all over.’”
For Goodman, Karen O is the heart of the Meet Me in the Bathroom story. “She’s a mystic chick. Karen’s a once-in-a-generation fucking artist, a brilliant visionary creative force who needed to express herself and happened to be in this female space, in this female body, and those female qualities are deep part of her creative self. So they had to be expressed. And there were limits on her that shouldn’t have been there. In my opinion, she’s the most important artist of this moment.”
As far as Goodman is concerned, the movie and book have nothing to do with nostalgia. “People wanna talk to me all the time about how tragic it is that Mars Bar is gone or whatever,” she laughs. “That’s just not how my brain works; the idea of being sad about the past is just not my vibe. It just makes me happy to think that Mars Bar ever happened, even for a minute. I’m just not the type of person who wants to tell you how shitty things are now and how much better they used to be before.”
But that’s what makes it a New York story. This is the city that’s always erasing itself and rewriting itself. “The story of New York is, ‘Everything comes and goes, marked by lovers and styles of clothes,’” Goodman says. “That’s Joni Mitchell — the ultimate California artist, but that’s also the nature of this place. That’s appealing when you’re young. And when you’re young, you’ve never been erased before. But coming-of-age stories are all grief stories. They’re stories of what gets lost and found and lost. You can only find yourself the first time once, and then it shifts. Your favorite bar closes. Or your old apartment becomes some fancier building. We like to tell ourselves how bad that is, but it’s just New York. The city is always telling you that you’re not who you were before.”
The Meet Me In The Bathroom moment is so full of great music, neither the movie nor the book could possibly come close to holding them all. So let’s raise a glass to Ambulance Ltd., Radio 4, !!!, Calla, Rogers Sisters, the Realistics, so many more. (Hey, at least I didn’t mention Elefant.)
And pour one out for the Fever, who hit it exactly perfect with their 2003 garage-rock blurt “Bridge and Tunnel,” one of the most ecstatic songs ever written about going out to hit the town, all lecherous guitars and can’t-hardly-wait drums. (They also did a great version of Sheila E’s “The Glamorous Life.”) Almost 20 years after that parking lot show, the long, strange legacy of the Meet Me in the Bathroom moment is still going strong. The documentary reminds that now, more than ever, it’s the year to be hated. So glad that we made it.
