getting high on my own supply - 10. the strokes (part 1)
episode 10 - "12:51" (the strokes, august 2007) "the modern age", (the strokes, august 2007 (glitch ending)), "the modern age" (the strokes, august 2007), "the modern age" (the strokes, august 2017)
the strokes were my favorite band when i was seventeen and so on some level they'll probably always mean something to me. i remember the super 8 light leaks video for "someday" which was like a three minute dream of what i wanted my life to be, to look like and sound like and feel like. my freshman year of college s down the hall got an early rip of room on fire that was really low bitrate even for then but i still inhaled. once that year i was so drunk at a party that according to my friends i seemed to believe that the strokes were there playing, live (it was just loud speakers in an empty room).
in psychology there is the concept of the mirror stage where the child apprehends its image and a similar kind of epochal transformation in the life of a home recorder is when you start to hear noise in your audio. for a time you live in innocence and then like a character in a really boring version of an edgar alan poe story you are suddenly constantly hearing different kinds of buzz and hiss and click and pop. certain kinds of hiss can be acceptable and buzz can be masked but clicks and pops basically always just sound bad unless they're intentional in an IDM kind of way, these glitches breaking the illusion of the song. sometimes you can get to a point where you feel you're winning against the noise or make peace and forget about it for a time, but it'll always come and go in these cycles of waxing and waning.
i don't know why i have two separate takes of "the modern age" from august 2007 (i think because the first one i thought had good moments but was too marred by CPU issues especially at the end, whereas the second one, though still a bit speckled with glitches, mostly holds together) and then somehow, without having remembered or intended to do it at all, i recorded a third version exactly ten years later in august 2017, an entire different fucking life (and a different era, musically, more folklore vibes). in 2007 when i posted the second cover of "the modern age" i wrote "also, i just got a myspace and i have 0 friends. it’s sad. if you like the music, please add me". if you're reading this thanks for adding me. i followed the link and the myspace is almost completely broken but it does have the handle, which i'd forgotten was "melodramatic popular song".