From the clubs of New York's Lower East Side to the warehouses of Williamsburg?a time that
changed music and the city forever. As the twentieth century drew to a close New York City
felt played out as a cultural capital. A flood of new money had turned downtown into a museum
of what used to be cool a playground for bankers and the dot-com crowd. If you wanted the
rock-and-roll life New York City was the last place you'd move. And yet in the decade that
followed it would serve as the stage for a radical pop-cultural renaissance. How exactly did
this happen? In this riveting oral history told by those who were actually there playing the
music pouring the drinks signing the checks and writing the cover stories journalist Lizzy
Goodman chronicles the rebirth of New York rock. In the early 2000s the Strokes Yeah Yeah
Yeahs Interpol the Moldy Peaches LCD Soundsystem and others who had been honing their
craft in obscurity suddenly became reflections of a newly flush newly booming town determined
to recover from the devastation of September 11. As kids around the world began to dress like
they'd been thrifting on Avenue A it became clear that New York had not only reclaimed its
signature rock-and-roll swagger but had also exported this new incarnation of American cool
globally. A second generation was eagerly waiting in the wings: Franz Ferdinand the Killers
and Kings of Leon who'd all but given up on breaking out of their provincial corners of the
world got the message that rock was back and used grotty New York clubs as launching pads on
their way to selling out arenas around the world. Meet Me in the Bathroom explores how during
this era the music industry was dismantled and then reborn via technology?first by Napster and
later iTunes?and how traditional publications like Rolling Stone and Spin were pushed to
compete with evangelist bloggers typing feverishly in their underwear as well as with edgier
journalistic upstarts like Vice and Pitchfork. Meanwhile as the reshaping of the
city?technological aesthetic cultural and physical?spread from downtown Manhattan to
Williamsburg Brooklyn bands like MGMT Vampire Weekend TV on the Radio Grizzly Bear and
Dirty Projectors became the new stars remaking the idea of New York in their own nerdy image
and helping ensure ?I heart Brooklyn? would become the mantra of a new generation. Crafted from
nearly two hundred original interviews and curated by a writer who remembers the hangovers
herself Meet Me in the Bathroom follows in the great tradition of the beloved classic Please
Kill Me by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain. Charting the first decade of the 2000s in all its
epic and reckless glory here is a brilliant portrait of a city an industry and a generation
on the verge of seismic change.
