Six Degrees of Is This It?
It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-contained artifact. The great records certainly feel that way. But albums are more permeable than solid, their motivations, executions and inspirations informed by, and often stolen from, their peers and forbearers. It all sounds awfully formal, but it's not. It's the very nature of music — of art, even. The Six Degrees features examine the relationships between classic records and five other albums we've deemed related in some way. In some cases these connections are obvious, in others they are tenuous. But, most important to you, all of the records are highly, highly recommended.
The Album
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Hype is suspicious on its face. Never trust it. But never be so untrusting that you can't hear through it. The Strokes are a perfect example. If you were a young music know-it-all in 2001 and started hearing about them, you'd have decent reason to wonder. Garage rock what's new about that? What's so different that hasn't been done a thousand times already, to death? That attitude can only hold for so long, though: eventually you start to hear the songs or you don't. And it doesn't take long to hear the songs. In fact, you'd be kind of deaf not to. Especially if you hear them every day at the CD shop where you work. And watch the manager put Is This It on every night because, as he says, "We sell a copy of this every time I play it." Not bad for a 35-minute album. Not every song is a classic, but all of them slots perfectly into place in the running order. Like most of the truly great albums in the MP3 era, Is This It begs to be heard all together at once. It's a complete picture of a fashion-mag version of being young, hungry, uncommitted and wondering if that's OK, and out all night in New York during an affluent time. ("Fashion mag" isn't meant pejoratively, either.) It's a little too glamorous to be quite real, but it's so feisty it can't be anything but. "Take It or Leave It," the hard-boogeying "Last Nite," the chopping "Hard to Explain": all are indelible, and all of them make the second half of the album whomp a terrific first half. The most vexing part: who exactly did these guys sound like? Unfortunately, the answer isn't on eMusic: "Shake It," from the Wedding Present's 1994 album Watusi. Surprise your friends sometime by playing it and saying it's a rare B-side from the Is This It period. Totally works.
The Papa Figure
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What's that? I'm sorry, what? Wait: stop mumbling. Oh, you're doing that on purpose, are you? Well congratulations: you learned to vocalize in goodly part from Lou Reed. As its title makes plain, Rock and Roll Diary 1967-1980 is a survey one of many of what Reed would later term "growing up in public with your pants down." It's also heavy on his work with the Velvet Underground, and is therefore ideal for people new to Reed's work. The Velvets, as you've probably read elsewhere, are one of the most crucial bands in rock, and their selections here showcase them at their loosest, including live versions of "Heroin" and "Femme Fatale." His solo '70s are condensed rather brutally: only seven songs. Nevertheless, they include three essential pieces: "Berlin," the unexpected radio hit "Walk on the Wild Side" (the "colored girls'" doo-doo-doos can still bring chills), and the 11-minute epic "Street Hassle," the latter two odes to a New York that exists solely in myth now.
The Laconic New York Rockers
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It's never been fair to say the Strokes sound much like Television. Drummer Fab Moretti is a human metronome; Fred Smith hit his kit as dramatically as Tom Verlaine soloed on guitar. The songs are very differently constructed: Verlaine expansive, Julian Casablancas compact. The twin guitars: glide versus grub. Nevertheless, Television could make a squalling racket when they damn well felt like it, and on The Blow Up, a somewhat muffled but nevertheless excellent tape of a 1978 performance, they prove it for as long as they feel like on some of the most high-wire arrangements ever cooked up by a rock band. In particular, the 15-minute "Little Johnny Jewel" on this has a fearsomely jagged guitar howl by Verlaine and then Richard Lloyd, while "Marqueen Moon" goes on longer and further than the epic LP version. Of course, "Venus de Milo" and a cover of Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" are pretty laconic; maybe that's the two bands' real link.
The Hyperactive Brooklyn Cousins
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In the decade when Fall Out Boy enlist Elvis Costello for guest appearances, or the rapper-rocker collabo is so routine it might as well be Steve & Eydie, the most resonant cross-genre summit occurred without the aid of its real-world participants. A Londoner named Richard X performed aural surgery on teen-pop queen (and erstwhile Latin crossover) Christina Aguilera's hit "Genie in a Bottle," from her debut album, and the Strokes' "Hard to Explain," from theirs, creating "A Stroke of Genius," a record that surpassed both its excellent sources on its way to becoming one of the best singles of the '00s. Aguilera followed this up first by getting naked, metaphorically and otherwise, with Stripped, but in 2006 she put on a nice dress and toughened things up with Back to Basics, featuring her best single yet, the DJ Premier-produced hard-funk throwback, "Ain't No Other Man," a track nearly as shocking and inspired as "Stroke" itself. If nothing else, it proved the diva's secret weapon was how well she collaborated.
The Fantasy-Land Hit Collaboration
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The Raveonettes' Danish boy-girl singer-guitarists Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo have a lineage that maps onto the Strokes', if you substitute New York as hometown for London as spiritual home. There's a similar new-face-of-retro thing going on, only instead of CBGB's Wagner and Foo went for the Jesus & Mary Chain and its swarm of influences, primarily '60s girl groups, Suicide, and hey! the Velvet Underground. (Nuggets in, nuggets out.) But no one was expecting the Raveonettes to peak with their third album, 2007's Lust Lust Lust, a surprisingly assured take on the old template. "You Want the Candy," the single, summed it up nicely: bubblegum in form, structure, and intent (look at the title), and a sugar rush in execution, only layered in noise like foil wrap. It's absolutely shameless. Which in rock and roll can often mean pretty great.
