Is This It

And so I'm like, this is it.

And they showed me Is This It, which is obviously a great album.

But

production-wise, it sounds

tight toy night street surprise the world was so thin between my bones and skin there stood another

It's quite sweet in lots of ways, which I would say a lot of the Strokes guitar work is quite sweet on their most famous album, Is This It? But also lyrically, I don't know if they were a big sort of drug-influenced band, television, but I think they might have dabbled a bit.

And some of the lyrics in this song, Venus, talks about Broadway looked so medieval, it seemed to flap like little pages.

I think that might have been a brief dalliance with acid there.

Go on, you go.

Well, this is the one I went to first, actually.

And it's a band we've mentioned a few times here, which is The Strokes on Is This It from 2001.

So Albert Hammond Jr. and Nick Valenzi are the dual lead guitarists on that album.

So for this episode, I would like to talk with Stephen Hyden.

He's the author of Is This It? The Neverending Rise and Fall of the Strokes and Rock and Roll, released in September of 2026 by Decaypo.

It's a look at the career and impact of this New York band who got huge waves of attention when their first album, Is This It?, came out in 2001 and have since had kind of an up and down career, both commercially and critically.

Hyden's book is as much cultural analysis and criticism as it is biography, delving into the way rock and roll itself has changed over the last 25 years, bringing in other bands from the time as well as groups from the past to address some bigger philosophical questions about what all of this means.

As Stephen writes, a quarter century after they were heralded as the coolest band on the planet by one especially overexcited British music magazine, the Strokes remain a Rorschach test.

The aspirations and the biases of the beholder give shape to their otherwise uneven and amorphous body of work.

Did the strokes peak early and fail to live up to lofty expectations? Or did music culture change in such a profound way at the turn of the century that those expectations were already anachronistic by the time Is This It entered record stores? Did the strokes fail the world, or did the world fail the strokes? So Stephen's written a bunch of books on rock and roll.

I recommend checking all of them out.

Not retail.

Is this it? What's that album? Is this it?

Is this it? Is this it? Dude.

Is that the name of the song? Mm-hmm.

I wrote it.

I know why you don't like it.

The real reason is they didn't put a question mark after.

Is this it? Oh, yeah.

Favorite Zionist band.

I was down in the studio with the Strokes recording that beautiful song, New York City Cops, for that wonderful album, Is This It? Best Strokes album, the only good one.

Because The Strokes were recording that album when that happened, and there's an interview with the guitarist Nick Valenzi about it, and he comes out and he's like, and we're recording, and then the plane hit the towers, and we came out, and I was like, what a deeply unserious city.

Imagine if it happened in a real town.

Um-

Nickelback, uh, The Strokes' Is This It.

Um, I literally worked at a record store.

Jimmy Eat World, Bleed American.

[laughs]

You know? I, I, I had a book event this week, which by the way, my book came out this week, Is This It?: The Neverending Rise and Fall of The Strokes and Rock 'n' Roll, which I will try not to plug relentlessly in this episode.

But anyway, when I was at my event, someone asked me about the future of music journalism, which I feel like this is something I'm asked about constantly now in every interview I do.

I've been doing a lot of interviews for the book.

What are you gonna do? [laughs]

Put that aside.

Uh, the 25th anniversary of September 11th is coming up, and I was thinking about 9/11 albums, uh, in part because I have this book that just came out about Is This It?, and I feel like that album is one of the big records that's associated with September 11th, even though it didn't come out on September 11th.

It came out in America about a month later on October 9th, uh, 2001.