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.
