Hey folks!

Today’s Best Album of 2001 match is:

#2 The Strokes, IS THIS IT

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vs.

#3 The White Stripes, WHITE BLOOD CELLS

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To vote, follow this link to the Google Form. You will need a Google login to vote. If you can’t or won’t have one, let me know ASAP (either through this newsletter, my email [[email protected]] or on the Best Album Brackets Bluesky account) and I’ll see what I can do.

We have three Designated Cheerleaders today, two for IS THIS IT! First up, it's @tomewing.bsky.social. Take it away, Tom!

Is This It is fundamentally a pop record. I bought it at the same time as the Kylie album which is a pop album in a surprisingly similar way to The Strokes - pop that’s stylish and new but also in love with pop’s own past, specifically a particular idea of New York cool. At the distance of 25 years, the difference between Studio 54 and CBGBs no longer seemed terribly important. At the distance of 25 more years, it matters even less.

The Strokes is a new wave record decades after the new wave receded, a band imitating bands imitating the Velvet Underground’s VU and Another View (for a while the easiest records to get by them). Kylie is a pop star wearing disco like a vintage dress. Neither - sorry “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” - sound remotely like the future, though plenty of music from 2001 did. But both are pop music, understanding that part of pop’s central appeal is great hooks, cool worn lightly, a nice arse.

The Strokes did turn out to be the future (briefly) and people have written books mythologising that. What struck me at the time was how exhausted they sounded by their own poses: Julian Casablancas’ vocals are a bored croak, straining for affect then fraying into a trail of ennui. Is this it? Can this really be where the grand boho rock tradition is ending up? He sometimes sounds up for it, or at least the picture of hot diffidence, but more often he feels the weight of indie hopes like Frodo feels the One Ring. “I will do my best” he sings on “Someday”, sounding sad and small.

What saves him are his band, who refuse to slack off or slow down, approaching each song like a sprint, functional and lean, giving their singer’s langour a chance to unfold itself on each song without actually losing any of the track’s energy. Is This It is admirable in its refusal to dick around. Nothing breaks four minutes, a minor miracle in a bloated year. Everything has a functional hook or two, and everything could be danced to.

Someone who wrote for my site at the time - I forget which writer it was, I’m sorry - had the excellent insight that the Strokes and the scene around them were American Britpop. A retro scene based on pop’s first principles (see above about the nice arses) and driven by bright young things in a bright young city. Fair enough, I think. Is This It reminds me a lot of Elastica by Elastica, the same “we’re stealing stuff? What are you going to do about it?” energy.

But while I don’t have much time for most Britpop and less time for most of what came after The Strokes, I think Is This It is even better than that, because of that ennui, that sense of decadence, the feeling you get that the band know it’s all downhill from here, for them and for rock music and white boy cool itself.

The second worst song on Is This It is the only one that you might briefly worry is about something, “New York City Cops”, and it’s still pretty good. (You can forgive it as it annoyed the actual NYC Cops, too). The worst song is “Trying Your Luck”, the closest they come to sloth. And the best song on Is This It isn’t on Is This It at all, it’s the bootleg version of “Hard To Explain” that grants Casablancas the release from toil he’s been searching for and puts Christina Aguilera’s “Genie In A Bottle” vocal line over the top. Suddenly a space opens up where The Strokes and Kylie could meet.

It works because “Hard To Explain” is a disco record, the realisation of which unlocked the whole album for me back in 2001. The rhythms of Is This It aren’t sophisticated or even groovy but they are party rhythms and that’s why they still sound good.

A Dedicated Champion by Tom Ewing. Written in the 35’48” the album took to play. Over and out.

Thank you, Tom!

Then, also for IS THIS IT, it's @renamj.bksy.social. Take it away, Rena!

Full disclosure: I did not nominate The Strokes' debut album Is This It for the 2001 album tournament, nor did I give it a seed vote. It doesn't need my help, and I wanted to champion lesser-known albums that could really use the boost. But it was my favorite album when I was an actual teenager in 2001.

2001 was a pivotal year for me: I became a high school senior (Class of 2002!); I was literally in my AP U.S. History class when 9/11 happened (lol); I turned 17 in October; I was accepted to my first choice college (they had rolling admissions so I could apply early); and in December I finally got my driver's license on my third try. I was ready for the next chapter of my life as a young adult, even though I had no idea what to expect. I knew I would have a better life..."someday."

I was getting more into music around this time, reading album reviews and watching MTV2 after school. Early on in high school I went through a "pretending to be normie" phase where I tried to be like everyone else - wearing trendy mall clothes and listening to Top 40 (nothing wrong with pop per se, but most of my peers were mainstreamers who didn't have a deeper appreciation of music). To put it bluntly, it wasn't me. I didn't really know who I was yet, and school is a terribly confining environment. It goes without saying that music is an enormous part of my life, and this was only the beginning.

For the record, I did go through an "indie" phase in my late teens/early twenties. Then I discovered SoulSeek and a much broader scope of music. One great thing about music communities like this one is discovering just how much music is out there, beyond what gets written about in Rolling Stone or Pitchfork (I was never a fan, I found them off-putting even then) or other major music sites. As I always say, look beyond the canon.

The Strokes had a deafening amount of hype around them, and even then they had very vocal haters on message boards. "The Strokes are jokes" and all that. Is This It is the Anora of the indie revival scene (personally, I liked Sean Baker's Oscar-winning film but did not love it.). Anyway, I bought the CD, maybe at the local CD World, and I played it over and over (favorite tracks: "The Modern Age," "Soma," "Barely Legal"). I couldn't really relate to the lyrics per se - I was awkward and inexperienced and more focused on my grades anyway. I just thought the songs were catchy.

In retrospect they were sort of a "gateway" band for me. There are folks who got into The Velvet Underground, The Cars, The Modern Lovers, and Television through them and I think that's great! Listening to these songs now, they're not exactly earth shattering but they're still fun. I actually think their second album, Room on Fire, is even better.

Is this the best album of 2001? No! Not in my humble opinion, anyway. As a work of art, I think Björk's Vespertine is far more interesting, to name one example. But it meant something to me at one point in my life and that does matter.

Thank you, Rena!

Finally, last but not least, for WHITE BLOOD CELLS, it's
@laurenoneal.bsky.social. Take it away, Lauren!

It’s barely an exaggeration to say that I would not have survived high school without the White Stripes. I owned every album (plus a burned CD of B-sides I downloaded from Kazaa because I didn’t have access to limited-release vinyl), and I listened to them as obsessively as only a teenager can, memorizing every word, every note, every transition from one track to the next.

Now that my frontal lobe is fully formed, I can articulate what it is I love so much about the White Stripes, which is the way they strike the perfect balance between so many pairs of opposing elements: 

• the rawness of the music vs. the theatricality of dressing up in color-schemed costumes

• the virtuosity of the guitar playing vs. the simplicity of the drums

• the reverence for the blues/rock tradition vs. the ambition to take the world by storm with something exciting and fresh

• Jack White being a huge nerd vs. the fact that the thing he’s a nerd about (rock and roll) is very cool

Essentially, The White Stripes are in this paradoxical sweet spot, equal parts unsophisticated garage band and savvy art-school project. (The title of their previous album, DE STIJL, hints at this, referencing a Dutch art movement that used simple elements and primary colors to create work that was nonetheless abstract and conceptual.) 

But as a teenager, I didn’t think of it in those terms. I just felt like this music was what it sounded like inside my brain. My brain sounded like pounding drums and screaming guitars. WHITE BLOOD CELLS is the album I played in my car at age sixteen when I got my license and drove by myself for the first time. To me it will always sound like being kind of a child vs. being kind of an adult, being newly independent vs. still being quite dependent.

As an adult rapidly approaching middle age, I no longer need daily WHITE BLOOD CELLS transfusions to live, but I remain a huge fan. I have this poster above my couch and this poster in my kitchen, so Jack and Meg are always watching over me.

In our current political hellscape, I feared that Jack White, who holds what could be called “traditional values” in such high esteem when it comes to aesthetics, might get sucked into the MAGAverse. (After all, the Black Keys went from playing benefits for Obama to playing a show called “America Loves Crypto.”) 

I needn’t have worried. White is now on Instagram posting anti-Trump rants every few days, and when Stephen Colbert hosted a public access show in Michigan the day after government censorship ended The Late Show, White acted as musical director, interlocutor, and chili dog sharer. And so, in honor of Colbert sucking helium from a tank before singing “Fell in Love with a Girl,” I believe we must all do our part to support democracy by voting for WHITE BLOOD CELLS.

Thank you, Lauren!

Click here to see the current results for the entire tournament, and click here to see the current results for the prediction bracket contest.

Yesterday, #1 Wilco, YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT defeated #5 Björk, VESPERTINE, 238-236-2.

Thanks,

Kent