Night Music: The Strokes, “Hard to Explain”

I don’t think we’ve ever had the talk about the Strokes.

I always felt that I should hate their casual attitude, their studied stylishness, their irksome confidence, but from the start I really liked the way they sounded. And when the songs were good. On the first few album most of them were.

7 thoughts on “Night Music: The Strokes, “Hard to Explain”

  1. I liked the Strokes first album and played it quite a bit. Always meant to get the second, never did, then I kind of lost interest (a very common pattern for me). A couple semi-related notes:

    1) At the same time as I was into that Strokes album, I was also into the debut album of a band called Louis XIV, who also did good pop, with their schtick being lots of overtly sexual subject matter. Pulling the CD out this morning I realized they were controversial because the front cover included the top half of an attractive girl’s naked butt. I haven’t thought about this album in a long time and maybe I’ll play it again today.

    2) Saw Dallas Buyer’s Club last night and, as well as being a very good movie, the soundtrack is drenched in T. Rex. The drag queen co-star of the movie has a Marc Bolan fixation as I do too. There may or may not be a message there.

    In fact, maybe I’ll play The Strokes, Louis XIV and T. Rex today. Yay!

    • Hey, just pulled the first Strokes album and that has an attactive woman’s naked butt too. No wonder my mind joins the two!

  2. Good song, good band. I don’t know much about them except that they’re from NYC. I think from the 90s on a whole lot of good bands have singers that whine. The Strokes guy approaches whining but doesn’t cross the line for which I am thankful. I blame Kurt Cobain, who at least had some flair and of course some killer melodies. This song caught my ear last night on Pandora, what you might call studied unstylishness. To be transgressive these days you have to sing about drinking and driving, or maybe not feeding your dog. It’s a heinous world:

    • On that clip it could have been Sammy Hagar, since it seems to be a ventriloquist. Other songs are good, too, without being quite so stupidly goofy, and we see the singer. But what a dismal band name. That’s the best they could come up with?

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