From Rolling Stone Magazine (Germany), massive thank you to nachossj1 & justanotheeeredditor for the help. Very long feature with very interesting stuff about the new Album.
The far in winter. A friend had separated from me. And I had also sold my complete vinyl collection, the 30 volumes of Brockhaus that I had from my parents for my 18th birthday, and the binoculars I had received from my aunt for my 16th birthday in Berlin for drugs. For some time, I no longer spoke to my parents.
I was looking for a job. I googled "Berlin men's line". I thought I could get down for 50 euros. But then I read that the Blue Boy Bar, a hustle and bustle meeting, was having problems with knife sticks. I pulled the Brockhaus into seven parcels on a sled that I found in the basement of my apartment building on Danziger Strasse to the post office through the snow. I sweat. And at the same time I was cold. An antiquarian bookshop in Leverkusen had bought all of my volumes for 1,500 euros. I heard "Is this It" from the Strokes on the headphones of my phone.
I slept with as many people as I had never done before. I stayed with someone else every other day. Sometimes I stole something to eat from the fridges when I snuck out of the strange apartments with a hangover in the morning and broke completely.
And now I'm married. I have two children. We bought a house. And the strokes release a new album. The fact that the strokes exist still feels like news. And then I realized that I had to be washed up. The strokes have been around for 22 years.
The new album is called "The New Abnormal" and was produced by Rick Rubin. The cover is a picture of Jean-Michel Basquiat, an African-American artist who died in New York in 1988 at the age of 27 from a heroin overdose. Basquiat was sponsored by Warhol. Warhol produced The Velvet Undergrond. And the music of the strokes happens right in between. Between the undergroud, the upper class between endless neighbors and valid decisions. Above all, the strokes survived. Albert Hammond Jr., the guitarist, overcame his heroin addiction. Casablancas defeated alcoholism.
You look so fresh now. They wear Hawaiian shirts on the press photos.
That evening you play a concert in the Columbiahalle in Berlin. A surprise concert that was announced just a few days in advance. It was sold out in seconds. And the record label invited some journalists to hear "The New Abnormal" in advance. The whole thing will take place before the concert in the Silverwings Club, the former officers' casino of the U.S. based Berlin. Air Force opposite Columbiahalle, instead.
Chefs roast burgers for the journalists, along with chicken skewer and vegan spring rolls. Beer and white wine are drunk. Old strokes songs are playing in the background. Now "Reptilia".[EDIT 1]
A woman from the record company from Munich announces the new album. The journalists applaud. A technician presses "Play". The first song is called "The Adults Are Talking".
But another strokes song is playing in the background. The journalists and the woman from the record company don't notice that. You toast yourself. I go to the mixer and tell the woman that there is another song running. And she looks at me. And after a short puse, says: "It was just a test to find out if you were listening." She beckons the technician. It makes up the old song. You play "The Adults Are Talking" again from the beginning. [EDIT 2]
It's such an eighties roller disco song. I think of the mall from "Stranger Things". To Miami. On cocaine. On the unshaven armpits of a young woman. I'm thinking of getting away with a stolen Ford Mustang and driving through the night. The guitars play a dü-dü-dü-dü sing-along tune, the drums sound like a spray can, the verse consists of palm-muted chords. And Casablancas sings so shot, with a thin, slightly distorted and shattering voice of the terror of adulthood and the awareness that you can never get out of it. [EDIT 3]
The song "Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus" goes in a similar direction. It sounds like the song "11th Dimension" on Julian Casablancas' first solo album, only a little faster. Like a night at the Arcadium when the vending machine cowboy wants to set a new Pac-Man record.
After the fifth song the music goes out. After each song, the journalists applauded like tourists when the pilot hit the runway in Palma. The woman from the record company plays an old strokes song again. And a radio host dances expressively. [EDIT 4]
She wears black Doc Martens and a top from some band. I had seen this garment on Nina the last time in tenth grade. Nina's breasts were the first ever to be chamfered. That was in the meadow behind the bus station. And she also wore a top like that. Most women I know today wear dresses or blouses or t-shirts or shirts or sweaters. But I haven't seen the top garment, that is, a shirt that fits tightly over the upper body. The radio host's long blond hair flies around the room.
And I give again to the woman from the record company. And say that four songs are still missing. And she says "Oh yes", then she pauses, and then she says "But I'm going to finish the song now because Anja is still dancing." [EDIT 5]
"At the Door", the first single for the new album, was released three days before this evening. The video was made by Mike Burakoff, a guy who made MGMT's "When You Die", "At the Door" is perhaps the most untypical strokes song. It is five minutes and thirty-three seconds long. There are no drums and almost only synthesizer tones. The reef is from the Strokes guitar technician. He had played the band in the rehearsal room. It sounds like chamber music from the future when the universe is on fire. The video is an apocalypstic cartoon in the style of the 80s. Future space Ninka Turtle Heavy Metal, F.A.K.K. (…skip). [EDIT 6: nachossj1 collab]
The concert begins sometime after nine. The Strokes begins with "Heart in a Cage" followed by "You Only Live Once" and the third song they play is "NYCC". Everything is too loud. Exactly right. And the 30- to 40-year-old fans form a moshpit. Those who won, the creative directors, the music managers, the fashion designers are again or still sixteen. They are children who are afraid to die. They are children in adult bodies.
Julian Casablancas wears a kind of Nazi leather coat. Plus chucks. He climbs on the pedestal of drummer Fabrizio Moretti. He´s really called like the Italian beer company. Casablancas spits on Moretti's drums. He pours the red cups with drinks, more by mistake than on purpose. One remains. He drinks from it. In the second pause in the song .. "Automatic Stop" he drops the microphone, misses his use.
He looks at guitarist Albert Hammond Jr., who, like the rest of the band, plays absolutely machine. Albert Hammond Jr laughs, Casablancas laughs, Casablancas makes announcements like: "I thought someone was dead in the first row. Someone dropped his phone". Sometimes he leaves the stage. He often sings to the audience with them jerking. Then he knocks the microphone stand over. Pick it up again. He says: "..in not angry at you mic stand." He looks into the audience and says: "we have a complicated relationship." [EDIT 7: collab w/ justanotheeredditor & nachossj1 & me]
It is this complete refusal of a show which is of course the opposite of that, namely a performative act that makes the strokes so special. This is .. Permanent Vacation, by Jim Jarmusch, this is Lou Reed again.
Next to me, someone is filming the concerts on her cell phone. Almost 50 scars of a woman flash in black light on her left arm. I think of Nadja, who also had these scars everywhere. In a small village in Bavaria. Growing up is hard everywhere. In Berlin, in New York. Nowhere. Paramedics contribute to .. "Take it or Leave it" a woman from the hall. For "Last Nite" Casablancas is in the middle of the audience, he says: "I want you to kick the shit out of me".
The strokes play 15 songs. Only two of them from the new album. "The Adults Are Talking" and "Bad Decisions". The melody of the refrain from "Bad Decisions" is that of Billy Idol's "Dancing with Myself". Idol is even named in the song credits as the author of "Bad Decisions". "Bad Decisions" otherwise kills more like Joy Division.
The sound of the new Strokes album is an almost Afro-futuristic odyssey to Wetall. The band samples and remixes the motifs. Basquiat on the cover, the dystopian future fit in the lyrics, new living spaces in space in the video "The New Abnormal" poses the big questions of our time: Who are we as a postmigration company? What identity do we still have? Where is the ram ship heading for? But the concert remains in the band's past. The dark soul of "The New Abnormal" doesn't come out. In Berlin the strokes 20 year old white garage skirt.
The backstage area of the Columbiahalle. The varlassene kitchen area. A fridge with cola, fanta and Turkish water, a couple of yogurt drinks. A gasher. No cooking marks. Gordon Raphael, the producer of the first two strokes albums, is running ahead of me. One wobbles in a way no longer knows whether it is Gordon Rapahael, Ozzy Osbourne or Slash. Men with long hair, who go wide in old age and still want to be rock types, look equally fluent in gender and personality.
"I am Julian", introduces Julian. We go to a ram for two. Completely dark. A leather sofa and an armchair, with a chair in between. "I want to sit on your lap," says Julian. I think of Lou Reed again. How a journalist once told him where he got his creativity from. And like he said "I masturbate every day". I think Adam Green, who once sat on my lap and offered me ectasy, and how Macaulay Caulkin came in then. And then I think of it as the New York test. This totally polite type of provocation, which is not hollow, but epistemological. Because it doesn't happen because of the provocation, but to find out how the other person reacts. And which is based above all on honesty. Honesty is the greatest provocation. In addition, a good provocation is always a social science attempt to build up knowledge that generates knowledge from the reaction of the provoked opponent.
"Of course you can sit on my lap," I say. And I tell him that I have all my plates for drugs. chewed.
He asks: "Do you miss your records?"
And I say no and that I'm surprised to be sitting here now. Sober. With family and everything. And I ask him if he can do the same. I ask him "Are you surprised who you are now?" And he says: "I mean, I get you get used to yourself. Surprised? I guess so. I'm pretty suprised." Julian pats his heart with his right hand and makes a peace sign. And he says, "Hashtag blessed."
We're talking about what's hot to find out who you are. When you are. How to be woman is one. Julian says the problem is that you don't know for a long time. “You’re playing basketball until your twenties, and then I actually found out I like baseball and soccer. You just grow up, you know.”
In one way, of course, it's banal; in another way, sentences like from a Great American Novel, Von Salinger., Von Roth, or Capote are snapped up and written down somewhere. Sentences that a man says who cannot yet understand the depth of his surface.
We are talking about the cover, about the artist Basquiat. Julian saw Basquiat's work in Paris for the first time. “I felt the whole range of rainbow emotions.” he says. Then silence again. Sometimes I don't know if he's tired. Whether he's gone to another world. Whether he's lonely. About what he really is.
I ask "The abnormal has become more normal. Can there be normality in a society based in individuality?”
He looks at me.
I say that the range of normality is washed by the normalization of abnormality. You can now be a Porsche driving communist or a trans man who loves bowling, and that’s okay. Julian laughs to himself. “The trans bowling guy, that is my favourite.” Then he says that "the new abnormal" is a quote from television. Julian was watching CNN and the governor of California stood there and commented on the wildfires that were now "the new abnormal".
Julian speaks of a power greater than that of the cherry or of monarchies. And from the fact that such a large retro and nostalgia wave would determine our aesthetics. It is the longing for the good old days when companies were not yet in charge. [EDIT 8: collab from justanotheeredditor]
In February, The Strokes performed at a rally event by demoscratic candidate Bernie Sanders. Julian wrote in a message from the band shortly before: “As the only truly non corporate candidate, Bernie Sanders represents our only chance to overthrown corporate power and help return America to democracy".
Julian Casablancas' father was John Casablancas, the founder of the American model agency Elite Models. He discovered Giselle Bündchen, his slogan was: "We don’t wake up for less than $ 10,000 a day." In the 1980s, his agency made about $ 100 million a year. Today that would correspond to about 313 million. Julian's father was that Corporate America.
"Do you think onstage." I ask.
"Yeah," he replies.
"Do you remember what you thought onstage tonight?"
"Yeah." he says.
"Would you like to share your thoughts with me."
"No. Sorry but it's a good question."
A conversation with Casablancas often leads to nowhere. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't lead to anything. Existing as nothing is something and not nothing, and I mean that in a David Lynch-est way. Here, the absence of being is a prerequisite for becoming something.
Casablancas can no longer remember why they made the album. Whether Rick Rubin asked the Strokes or the Strokes asked Rick Rubin.
“I was thinking how ironic the difference between pop art and pop music is", said Casablancas at the beginning of the conversation. We were briefly at Basquiat and Warhol. Now he says: "I mean, Rick Rubin was like next level mind and human king. But I think he kind of is more like a pop mind. And I am kind of drifted further into art things."
Albert Hammond Jr. arrives in the room. He brings with him a red heart shaped balloon. The woman from the Munich label had brought five hearts with her. We still have two minutes for the interview.
Julian Casablancas and I talk about our children in the remaining time. Two and a half years and eight months is a bleak age, says Julian. And then he hugs me. He really holds me close. I can feel his three necklaces on me.
It is just before midnight. And the winter is over.
https://preview.redd.it/i8s9jcj4oop41.jpg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=42a4fce3d4df1a491b0d69daefb50ec0a7b7dad7
submitted by fvidalp to TheStrokes [link] [comments] The far in winter. A friend had separated from me. And I had also sold my complete vinyl collection, the 30 volumes of Brockhaus that I had from my parents for my 18th birthday, and the binoculars I had received from my aunt for my 16th birthday in Berlin for drugs. For some time, I no longer spoke to my parents.
I was looking for a job. I googled "Berlin men's line". I thought I could get down for 50 euros. But then I read that the Blue Boy Bar, a hustle and bustle meeting, was having problems with knife sticks. I pulled the Brockhaus into seven parcels on a sled that I found in the basement of my apartment building on Danziger Strasse to the post office through the snow. I sweat. And at the same time I was cold. An antiquarian bookshop in Leverkusen had bought all of my volumes for 1,500 euros. I heard "Is this It" from the Strokes on the headphones of my phone.
I slept with as many people as I had never done before. I stayed with someone else every other day. Sometimes I stole something to eat from the fridges when I snuck out of the strange apartments with a hangover in the morning and broke completely.
And now I'm married. I have two children. We bought a house. And the strokes release a new album. The fact that the strokes exist still feels like news. And then I realized that I had to be washed up. The strokes have been around for 22 years.
The new album is called "The New Abnormal" and was produced by Rick Rubin. The cover is a picture of Jean-Michel Basquiat, an African-American artist who died in New York in 1988 at the age of 27 from a heroin overdose. Basquiat was sponsored by Warhol. Warhol produced The Velvet Undergrond. And the music of the strokes happens right in between. Between the undergroud, the upper class between endless neighbors and valid decisions. Above all, the strokes survived. Albert Hammond Jr., the guitarist, overcame his heroin addiction. Casablancas defeated alcoholism.
You look so fresh now. They wear Hawaiian shirts on the press photos.
That evening you play a concert in the Columbiahalle in Berlin. A surprise concert that was announced just a few days in advance. It was sold out in seconds. And the record label invited some journalists to hear "The New Abnormal" in advance. The whole thing will take place before the concert in the Silverwings Club, the former officers' casino of the U.S. based Berlin. Air Force opposite Columbiahalle, instead.
Chefs roast burgers for the journalists, along with chicken skewer and vegan spring rolls. Beer and white wine are drunk. Old strokes songs are playing in the background. Now "Reptilia".[EDIT 1]
A woman from the record company from Munich announces the new album. The journalists applaud. A technician presses "Play". The first song is called "The Adults Are Talking".
But another strokes song is playing in the background. The journalists and the woman from the record company don't notice that. You toast yourself. I go to the mixer and tell the woman that there is another song running. And she looks at me. And after a short puse, says: "It was just a test to find out if you were listening." She beckons the technician. It makes up the old song. You play "The Adults Are Talking" again from the beginning. [EDIT 2]
It's such an eighties roller disco song. I think of the mall from "Stranger Things". To Miami. On cocaine. On the unshaven armpits of a young woman. I'm thinking of getting away with a stolen Ford Mustang and driving through the night. The guitars play a dü-dü-dü-dü sing-along tune, the drums sound like a spray can, the verse consists of palm-muted chords. And Casablancas sings so shot, with a thin, slightly distorted and shattering voice of the terror of adulthood and the awareness that you can never get out of it. [EDIT 3]
The song "Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus" goes in a similar direction. It sounds like the song "11th Dimension" on Julian Casablancas' first solo album, only a little faster. Like a night at the Arcadium when the vending machine cowboy wants to set a new Pac-Man record.
After the fifth song the music goes out. After each song, the journalists applauded like tourists when the pilot hit the runway in Palma. The woman from the record company plays an old strokes song again. And a radio host dances expressively. [EDIT 4]
She wears black Doc Martens and a top from some band. I had seen this garment on Nina the last time in tenth grade. Nina's breasts were the first ever to be chamfered. That was in the meadow behind the bus station. And she also wore a top like that. Most women I know today wear dresses or blouses or t-shirts or shirts or sweaters. But I haven't seen the top garment, that is, a shirt that fits tightly over the upper body. The radio host's long blond hair flies around the room.
And I give again to the woman from the record company. And say that four songs are still missing. And she says "Oh yes", then she pauses, and then she says "But I'm going to finish the song now because Anja is still dancing." [EDIT 5]
"At the Door", the first single for the new album, was released three days before this evening. The video was made by Mike Burakoff, a guy who made MGMT's "When You Die", "At the Door" is perhaps the most untypical strokes song. It is five minutes and thirty-three seconds long. There are no drums and almost only synthesizer tones. The reef is from the Strokes guitar technician. He had played the band in the rehearsal room. It sounds like chamber music from the future when the universe is on fire. The video is an apocalypstic cartoon in the style of the 80s. Future space Ninka Turtle Heavy Metal, F.A.K.K. (…skip). [EDIT 6: nachossj1 collab]
The concert begins sometime after nine. The Strokes begins with "Heart in a Cage" followed by "You Only Live Once" and the third song they play is "NYCC". Everything is too loud. Exactly right. And the 30- to 40-year-old fans form a moshpit. Those who won, the creative directors, the music managers, the fashion designers are again or still sixteen. They are children who are afraid to die. They are children in adult bodies.
Julian Casablancas wears a kind of Nazi leather coat. Plus chucks. He climbs on the pedestal of drummer Fabrizio Moretti. He´s really called like the Italian beer company. Casablancas spits on Moretti's drums. He pours the red cups with drinks, more by mistake than on purpose. One remains. He drinks from it. In the second pause in the song .. "Automatic Stop" he drops the microphone, misses his use.
He looks at guitarist Albert Hammond Jr., who, like the rest of the band, plays absolutely machine. Albert Hammond Jr laughs, Casablancas laughs, Casablancas makes announcements like: "I thought someone was dead in the first row. Someone dropped his phone". Sometimes he leaves the stage. He often sings to the audience with them jerking. Then he knocks the microphone stand over. Pick it up again. He says: "..in not angry at you mic stand." He looks into the audience and says: "we have a complicated relationship." [EDIT 7: collab w/ justanotheeredditor & nachossj1 & me]
It is this complete refusal of a show which is of course the opposite of that, namely a performative act that makes the strokes so special. This is .. Permanent Vacation, by Jim Jarmusch, this is Lou Reed again.
Next to me, someone is filming the concerts on her cell phone. Almost 50 scars of a woman flash in black light on her left arm. I think of Nadja, who also had these scars everywhere. In a small village in Bavaria. Growing up is hard everywhere. In Berlin, in New York. Nowhere. Paramedics contribute to .. "Take it or Leave it" a woman from the hall. For "Last Nite" Casablancas is in the middle of the audience, he says: "I want you to kick the shit out of me".
The strokes play 15 songs. Only two of them from the new album. "The Adults Are Talking" and "Bad Decisions". The melody of the refrain from "Bad Decisions" is that of Billy Idol's "Dancing with Myself". Idol is even named in the song credits as the author of "Bad Decisions". "Bad Decisions" otherwise kills more like Joy Division.
The sound of the new Strokes album is an almost Afro-futuristic odyssey to Wetall. The band samples and remixes the motifs. Basquiat on the cover, the dystopian future fit in the lyrics, new living spaces in space in the video "The New Abnormal" poses the big questions of our time: Who are we as a postmigration company? What identity do we still have? Where is the ram ship heading for? But the concert remains in the band's past. The dark soul of "The New Abnormal" doesn't come out. In Berlin the strokes 20 year old white garage skirt.
The backstage area of the Columbiahalle. The varlassene kitchen area. A fridge with cola, fanta and Turkish water, a couple of yogurt drinks. A gasher. No cooking marks. Gordon Raphael, the producer of the first two strokes albums, is running ahead of me. One wobbles in a way no longer knows whether it is Gordon Rapahael, Ozzy Osbourne or Slash. Men with long hair, who go wide in old age and still want to be rock types, look equally fluent in gender and personality.
"I am Julian", introduces Julian. We go to a ram for two. Completely dark. A leather sofa and an armchair, with a chair in between. "I want to sit on your lap," says Julian. I think of Lou Reed again. How a journalist once told him where he got his creativity from. And like he said "I masturbate every day". I think Adam Green, who once sat on my lap and offered me ectasy, and how Macaulay Caulkin came in then. And then I think of it as the New York test. This totally polite type of provocation, which is not hollow, but epistemological. Because it doesn't happen because of the provocation, but to find out how the other person reacts. And which is based above all on honesty. Honesty is the greatest provocation. In addition, a good provocation is always a social science attempt to build up knowledge that generates knowledge from the reaction of the provoked opponent.
"Of course you can sit on my lap," I say. And I tell him that I have all my plates for drugs. chewed.
He asks: "Do you miss your records?"
And I say no and that I'm surprised to be sitting here now. Sober. With family and everything. And I ask him if he can do the same. I ask him "Are you surprised who you are now?" And he says: "I mean, I get you get used to yourself. Surprised? I guess so. I'm pretty suprised." Julian pats his heart with his right hand and makes a peace sign. And he says, "Hashtag blessed."
We're talking about what's hot to find out who you are. When you are. How to be woman is one. Julian says the problem is that you don't know for a long time. “You’re playing basketball until your twenties, and then I actually found out I like baseball and soccer. You just grow up, you know.”
In one way, of course, it's banal; in another way, sentences like from a Great American Novel, Von Salinger., Von Roth, or Capote are snapped up and written down somewhere. Sentences that a man says who cannot yet understand the depth of his surface.
We are talking about the cover, about the artist Basquiat. Julian saw Basquiat's work in Paris for the first time. “I felt the whole range of rainbow emotions.” he says. Then silence again. Sometimes I don't know if he's tired. Whether he's gone to another world. Whether he's lonely. About what he really is.
I ask "The abnormal has become more normal. Can there be normality in a society based in individuality?”
He looks at me.
I say that the range of normality is washed by the normalization of abnormality. You can now be a Porsche driving communist or a trans man who loves bowling, and that’s okay. Julian laughs to himself. “The trans bowling guy, that is my favourite.” Then he says that "the new abnormal" is a quote from television. Julian was watching CNN and the governor of California stood there and commented on the wildfires that were now "the new abnormal".
Julian speaks of a power greater than that of the cherry or of monarchies. And from the fact that such a large retro and nostalgia wave would determine our aesthetics. It is the longing for the good old days when companies were not yet in charge. [EDIT 8: collab from justanotheeredditor]
In February, The Strokes performed at a rally event by demoscratic candidate Bernie Sanders. Julian wrote in a message from the band shortly before: “As the only truly non corporate candidate, Bernie Sanders represents our only chance to overthrown corporate power and help return America to democracy".
Julian Casablancas' father was John Casablancas, the founder of the American model agency Elite Models. He discovered Giselle Bündchen, his slogan was: "We don’t wake up for less than $ 10,000 a day." In the 1980s, his agency made about $ 100 million a year. Today that would correspond to about 313 million. Julian's father was that Corporate America.
"Do you think onstage." I ask.
"Yeah," he replies.
"Do you remember what you thought onstage tonight?"
"Yeah." he says.
"Would you like to share your thoughts with me."
"No. Sorry but it's a good question."
A conversation with Casablancas often leads to nowhere. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't lead to anything. Existing as nothing is something and not nothing, and I mean that in a David Lynch-est way. Here, the absence of being is a prerequisite for becoming something.
Casablancas can no longer remember why they made the album. Whether Rick Rubin asked the Strokes or the Strokes asked Rick Rubin.
“I was thinking how ironic the difference between pop art and pop music is", said Casablancas at the beginning of the conversation. We were briefly at Basquiat and Warhol. Now he says: "I mean, Rick Rubin was like next level mind and human king. But I think he kind of is more like a pop mind. And I am kind of drifted further into art things."
Albert Hammond Jr. arrives in the room. He brings with him a red heart shaped balloon. The woman from the Munich label had brought five hearts with her. We still have two minutes for the interview.
Julian Casablancas and I talk about our children in the remaining time. Two and a half years and eight months is a bleak age, says Julian. And then he hugs me. He really holds me close. I can feel his three necklaces on me.
It is just before midnight. And the winter is over.
https://preview.redd.it/i8s9jcj4oop41.jpg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=42a4fce3d4df1a491b0d69daefb50ec0a7b7dad7
