Every generation of New York rockers romanticizes its era. In the juicy new book Meet Me in the Bathroom, the early 2000s was the golden age.
I liked the tag line on the Slate site better:
"The Keyboardist From the Hold Steady Dishes About the Book That Dishes About the Strokes"
It may be that there is no way to write a definitive history of a particular cultural scene of a particular time and place that doesn’t reveal itself to be simply the story of a loose group of acquaintances who all got drunk in the same five-block radius for a few years in their twenties. (Ask Hemingway.) The New York–specific subset of the genre is the romanticization of, then regretful lament for, the lost grimy glamour of those bars and neighborhoods of the writer’s youth, a fantasy city eternally dirtier and more dangerously sexy 10 or 20 years earlier, a wonderland of mostly consequence-free bad behavior lost forever to gentrification. Lizzy Goodman’s Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001–2011, which has been excerpted in New York magazine and praised by Pitchfork, Spin, and Rolling Stone, recounts in oral-history form the triumphant narrative of a rock renaissance, led by the Strokes, that culminates in the international takeover of urban bohemia by a more domesticated Brooklyn Style™.