Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011
Written by Lizzy Goodman
Narrated by Charlie Thurston and Nicol Zanzarella
4/5
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About this audiobook
Named a Best Book of 2017 by NPR and GQ
Joining the ranks of the classics Please Kill Me, Our Band Could Be Your Life, and Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, an intriguing oral history of the post-9/11 decline of the old-guard music industry and rebirth of the New York rock scene, led by a group of iconoclastic rock bands.
In the second half of the twentieth-century New York was the source of new sounds, including the Greenwich Village folk scene, punk and new wave, and hip-hop. But as the end of the millennium neared, cutting-edge bands began emerging from Seattle, Austin, and London, pushing New York further from the epicenter. The behemoth music industry, too, found itself in free fall, under siege from technology. Then 9/11/2001 plunged the country into a state of uncertainty and war—and a dozen New York City bands that had been honing their sound and style in relative obscurity suddenly became symbols of glamour for a young, web-savvy, forward-looking generation in need of an anthem.
Meet Me in the Bathroom charts the transformation of the New York music scene in the first decade of the 2000s, the bands behind it—including The Strokes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem, Interpol, and Vampire Weekend—and the cultural forces that shaped it, from the Internet to a booming real estate market that forced artists out of the Lower East Side to Williamsburg. Drawing on 200 original interviews with James Murphy, Julian Casablancas, Karen O, Ezra Koenig, and many others musicians, artists, journalists, bloggers, photographers, managers, music executives, groupies, models, movie stars, and DJs who lived through this explosive time, journalist Lizzy Goodman offers a fascinating portrait of a time and a place that gave birth to a new era in modern rock-and-roll.
Lizzy Goodman
Lizzy Goodman is a journalist whose writing on rock and roll, fashion, and popular culture has appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and NME. She is a contributing editor at ELLE and a regular contributor to New York magazine. She lives in upstate New York with her two basset hounds, Joni Mitchell and Jerry Orbach.
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Reviews for Meet Me in the Bathroom
54 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Intensely in-depth oral history of the New York city rock scene. If you like the strokes, Interpol, yeah yeah yeahs, and a little bit of LCD Soundsystem and vampire weekend, you’ll love it. The killers and Kings of Leon are also touched on
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Fascinating but brutally long. Exhaustive, and exhausting. Throwing in the towel. Didn't quite finish. I don't think I missed much. I got the story of how Interpol, The Strokes, the Yeah yeah yeahs, The Rapture et al got their start. And that was interesting. I do like the oral storytelling style. I Want My MTV is another. But I just can't face yet another self-aggrandizing 1st person account of being fucked up at yet another dingy party in Brooklyn. Like it's some sort of higher plane of existence or something. Please. The book got very repetitive after a time. Worthy effort, but, sometimes less is more.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The low rating is based on two factors:
1). I love oral histories but the actual structure used in this book is extremely hard to follow. People pop in and out without any reintroduction or explanation for why they are there. Some anecdotes are placed right in the middle of longer overarching stories with no point or connection.
2). The people covered in this story are just not that compelling. As opposed to say Please Kill Me, or Other Hollywood, a lot of the stories told are thorough snore feats that alternate between doing too much coke, or having too much sex. I guess that is cool, but that won't sustain a 600 page book.
If you are a super fan of the Strokes, or Yeah Yeah Yeahs, or Jonathan Fire*Eater, this book. If you are looking to read a compelling oral history I would check elsewhere.