Pop Culture Books of the Year # 3 Meet Me In The Bathroom by Lizzy Goodman

An almost six hundred page oral history of New York, its music scene and the bands artists and historical events that shaped it and through it, the world between 2001-2011. Author and interviewer Lizzy Goodman does a highly comprehensive job, talking to most of the important movers and shakers and shaping it into a narrative that makes sense and resonates as the last twenty years that they all lived through that's a great read for anyone with more than a passing interest in these things, whether they have an overriding specific fascination with the bands she's documenting or not.

So you get the Dot.Com Bubble, Giuliani, The Internet, Napster, 9/11, Blogs and the way that music has changed in terms of the way it's made, viewed and consumed. You get the shift from Manhattan to Brooklyn as a centre of focus. And you get Jonathan Fire*Eater, The Strokes, Interpol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, White Stripes, LCD Soundsystem and DFA, Ryan Adams, TV On The Radio, Grizzly Bear, The Walkmen, The National and Vampire Weekend along with many, many more. You get musicians, managers, journalists, DJs and fans. You get everything anyone who was ever fascinated or shaped by one or more of these artists could possibly ever want.

It's a good story well told but also a curious one. It's difficult to care that much about the individual players, particularly as they all seem to always have more than comfortable lives to fall back on if things don't work out in NYC and that essential comfort zone colours their perspective on every level. The obvious pop cultural reference point is with Legs McNeil's Please Kill Me, which documented the Punk scene of the same city in the sixties and seventies and is still, (and seems likely to remain), the Holy Grail which all books of this kind must prostrate themselves to. By comparison to that tale Meet Me In The Bathroom is tame stuff indeed.

Still, I enjoyed it, I'm a sucker for stuff like this and oral histories are the way to tell stories like these.  Of course its a different story from the one told in Please Kill Me because New York City is now essentially a very different city for better or worse. The drug of choice here is definitely cocaine rather than speed, quaaludes or heroin and it's notable that there are no conspicuous deaths in the narrative. This in itself marks a stark contrast with Please Kill Me, which chronicles a time when this was definitely stuff that people were willing to and did die for whether or not they really should have done. Nevertheless, Meet Me In The Bathroom does make the times it documents seem vivid and the music it puts on pedestals seem well-worth revisiting. In terms of the moral of the tale, Vampire Weekend come across by the end of the book as the logical full stop to the chapter in Rock and Roll history that The Strokes began and the band that learned the logical lessons from the mistakes they made to actually achieve the size and status they deserved. They have a new album due next year, as does Julian Casablancas. It will be interesting to compare and contrast the two.