‘Vanity can easily overtake wisdom. It usually overtakes common sense...’
At the turn of the millennium, a bunch of like-minded artists in New York City all recorded and released music at roughly the same time. The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, Ryan Adams, The Moldy Peaches… the list goes on. With over twenty years of distance from that then-burgeoning music scene, there has been a lionisation of the whole era, with many of the acts now regulars at the top of festival bills and lists of the most streamed artists on Spotify. Part of this reappraisal stems from Lizzy Goodman’s excellent oral history Meet Me in the Bathroom. Inevitably, that book has now been turned into a feature-length documentary by co-directors Will Lovelace, Dylan Southern and Andrew Cross.
Having already brought us two stellar music docs about the aforementioned LCD Soundsystem and also Blur, Lovelace and Southern (with Cross working mainly as editor) have a proven track record in the field of the music documentary. Taking the oral history format utilised in Goodman’s book, Meet Me in the Bathroom mixes archive footage and spoken narration from all the main players of the scene. Whilst not as exhaustive as the book, focusing instead on the bands mentioned in my introduction, the film still packs in plenty of story – beginning with Adam Green and Kimya Dawson playing to a handful of people in 1999 and ending with Interpol on the rise as many of their peers began to fall apart.
What is perhaps most striking about this movement is how different the bands were. The Strokes’ rich boy, boarding school background is about as far away from the scrappy streets of Brooklyn in which Karen O and her band grew up in as it is possible to be, and Interpol singer Paul Banks mentions that everyone assumes all the NYC bands were friends when they barely knew each other in reality. What can’t be denied, however, is that musically they were linked. Even the electro-tinged indie dance music favoured by James Murphy and his DFA record label shares a punky, snotty aesthetic and sonic style with the more guitar-heavy groups with which LCD Soundsystem also became associated, and indeed, it is Murphy who proves to be one of the film’s most candid and interesting characters. To hear Karen O’s tales of sexism and misogyny within the music industry is also telling, especially as many of those issues appear to still be prevalent today.
For any music fans who grew up against the backdrop of the NYC explosion of the early ’00s, Meet Me in the Bathroom should be essential viewing. It provides the Proustian rush of deeply entrenched nostalgia whilst still finding something new to say about what was a chaotic period in the history of New York. I loved it.