[My year-long recap of my favorite songs of the decade continues, very very slowly.]
4. The Strokes, Last Nite
When The Strokes’ debut album was released in the fall of 2001, it was as if music critics collectively decided to play a game wherein they would each talk about how amazing the album was, both on the grounds that it was revolutionary and also because it sounded a lot like some other completely unrelated band from history.
Rolling Stone said the album sounded like British mods covering James Brown and Buddy Holly; the late Nude As The News heard the Stones and a feisty Lou Reed as influences. Entertainment Weekly also mentioned Reed’s band The Velvet Underground, particularly Moe Tucker’s drumming. Television was also thrown around as an influence by critics, as were Oasis and the Dave Clark Five and pretty much every other band ever beloved by rockists. And I haven’t even gotten to the reeeeeally enthusiastic British press. (NME’s review, though comparison-free, is pretty comically overwrought today.) But at the time nobody–absolutely nobody–picked up on the group’s biggest influence of all.
