Desire and reward; long term and short term joy

August 2

Never had my life been more akin to a whirlwind than when I landed at Changi Airport with nothing but a backpack that held two days’ worth of clothes and the barest essentials. 

Two weeks before, I had flown to Kuala Lumpur to see The Strokes at a music festival, and we had decided to make it a weeklong family trip. On July 22, it was announced that the rest of the music festival would be canceled after its first day. 

The Strokes were headlining the third and final day. 

I don’t want to get into it, but let’s just say I’ve prayed for the main loser from The 1975 to trip and fall flat on his face every day since then. I burst into tears in the middle of a mall, trying to come to terms with the fact that my one chance to see this band that has meant the world to me in over 10 years of loving them has just popped like a bubble. The KL trip had been fun, but this was why we were even there in the first place. These were their first Southeast Asia tour dates in their twenty-plus-year-long career, and now one of them had just been taken away by utter stupidity. 

I’d come home, gone back to work, and successfully held my tongue from any expletives in front of my coworker who’s a 1975 fan when The Strokes announced a few days later that they were adding a second show in Singapore to make it up to people who were supposed to see them in Malaysia. 

It would be insane, right, to spend an exorbitant amount on another concert ticket, another round-trip flight, another hotel (wait, no, not “another,” we literally stayed with my aunt) just for five men in their forties who changed not only rock music in the 2000s but also my life? 

Anyway, my flight was in five days. 

It was late when I arrived at my hotel in the chic neighborhood of Lavender. I still had a bit of a cold—the whiplash of making all of this happen in less than a week included overcoming a horrible fever that I had to deal with all weekend (with the help of my doting dad <3). 

The room was small and windowless, but cozy. I especially loved the black and white Brooklyn-style bathroom of my dreams, with brick-like tiling around the walls and gorgeous floors. I got settled and rested up for the night. 

August 3

I didn’t include this day when I filed my leave, so I spent until the afternoon working on my phone—I hadn’t brought my laptop, and I’d made sure to finish the major tasks before I left anyway. I walked around the neighborhood to look for breakfast, and I decided to stock up on food and snacks at 7-Eleven: chicken bolognese, an unagi onigiri, a rainbow chip brownie, and some really good instant mac and cheese in a cup.

It was also the time when “Planet of the Bass” was mega-viral, so I can’t think of this trip without being reminded of it. 

I met with Alissa at a coffee shop in Marina Bay Sands before the show and had a lot of fun just talking at length about all kinds of things and getting to know each other better. It was the first time we were hanging out and meeting in person, and I had a great time and I’m always hoping to get to do it again. 

Eventually it was finally time for me to go down to the expo hall for the show. I was near the back since I’d waited until the last possible second to go in, and that was just fine by me. As far as venues went, it was pretty cool: huge space, super high ceilings, but the stage was set against the center of it and it somehow felt like an intimate basement show. (Which, well, it kind of was.) 

I couldn’t think of a better song to start my Strokes show with than “What Ever Happened?” The title track of Is This It is a classic slow burn, but this was the track you wanted if it was about coming out swinging. The pulse of the beat, the anthem-like declarations of the chorus that made it perfect for shouting along to (I wanna be forgotten/And I don’t wanna be reminded), that rousing solo that signaled this was just the beginning—for the song, and for The Strokes themselves at the time it came out. 

I don’t really have a lot of specific memories attached to most of the set list, other than absolutely losing my mind every time they started up and I realized I was hearing them live, but I want to remember every song they played, so I’m listing them here: 

1. “Bad Decisions”
2. “Soma”
3. “Juicebox” (of course it was the most cathartic thing ever to scream along with the chorus) 
4. “Automatic Stop” (I loved swaying to this one) 
5. “The Adults Are Talking”
6. “Take It or Leave It”
7. “Under Control” (this is where I finally cried) 
8. “Reptilia”
9. “Call It Fate, Call It Karma” (literally the fourth time they’d ever played it!) 
10. “Red Light”
11. “Someday” (this is where I finally cried pt. 2) 
12. “Ize of the World”
13. “Hard to Explain”
14. “You Only Live Once” (truly one of the most flawless songs ever, what can I fucking say)

It’s well-established that The Strokes are absolute monsters live and their performances (the guitars!) are always phenomenal, and it feels so good to finally be able to state it myself firsthand. 

I heard the guy in front of me, who’s dancing in all of the footage I took of the night by the way, tell his companion, “They used to just be on TV, and now they’re in front of us,” and as I said in my tweet later when I was reliving the concert in my hotel room: SOBRANG FELT PO, KUYA. 

Julian asked Nikolai to say something, and he was so soft-spoken that Julian said he sounded “like the parents on Charlie Brown.” I couldn’t help but think back to 2014, when I was really falling in love with The Strokes for the first time after years of being a casual fan, and they were starting to play shows again and figure out what it means to be in a band together at their current stages in life after all the animosity of Angles and the uncertainties of Comedown Machine and everything else that came before. I would zoom in on a GIF of Julian patting Nick’s back after their Capitol Theater show and get so irrationally emotional like, “See?! They’re friends!” So to witness something as casual and sweet as this, especially between the oldest members who had known each other longest, was doing my head in a little. I’m so glad they’ve made it to a point where all of it doesn’t have to be such a big deal.

Nick grinned so wide at the Charlie Brown comment, and I wished this could be my life every night. 

One final anecdote: During “Last Nite,” just before the guitar solo, Julian went, “Introducing! Albert... Hammond... Jr!” (Fab, of course, was being his silly, ever unflappable self the whole time, and I loved seeing them all exchange smiles every now and then.) 

I booked a Grab to the hotel. I admired the view as it passed the Helix Bridge, and I couldn’t be happier.

August 4

I checked out in the morning and tried to find the nearest train station, which turned out to be very close by. I got a card that gave unlimited rides for the day and hopped around the city a little before I went to the airport, where I waited to board my flight at the Texas Chicken near my gate. I had salted egg poppers and these cheese fries that I still think about sometimes, with loads of sour cream and cheese and super flavorful large chunks of green onion. Hear that, Taco Bell cheesy fiesta potatoes? GREEN ONION.

I still can’t believe I flew to Singapore on basically a whim and took my lightest backpack and flew back home in two days. I would never recover financially. My eye still twitches when I think about what I had to spend because some man was so full of himself that he caused an entire music festival that people planned for months and was the source of multiple livelihoods to be canceled. (Where’s that class action lawsuit? He needs to pay me back.)  

But the truth is, it was all worth it. Even if my relationship with this band (particularly its frontman) has grown complicated over the years. I was impressed and touched that the band even chose to do an additional concert at all when they could’ve just shrugged it off, and that they managed to put it all together so quickly. It was nice to know they cared, when their entire brand has been foolhardy indifference. They even mentioned Manila when they said they would be back. 

It was a night I’ll never forget, I’d do it again and again if I could, and I got a good story to tell out of it. Even if they didn’t play “The Modern Age” on my show date. 

Tomorrow will be different, so I’ll pretend I’m leavin’

My undergraduate thesis was a stylistic analysis of The Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas’ lyrics supported by a corpus linguistic study centered on the word “wait.” This meant building a corpus — also known as a collection of words — out of his songs including his work outside the Strokes, tracking how frequently “wait” appeared in them, and breaking down the meaning of each track through a stylistic theory to find the relevance of the word to the songwriter, and to determine why he used it so much.

I’ll spare you the details; the important thing here was that when I uploaded Julian’s lyrics to the corpus analysis software, I was able to determine that “wait” was, indeed, the word that occurred most frequently in his songwriting. (Minus the more common pronouns and articles, of course.)

And the point here is: waiting is kind of a recurring theme when it comes to the Strokes. Even when you’re a listener. Especially when you’re a listener.

Their sixth album came out this month, released four years after their Future Present Past EP, seven years after their previous album Comedown Machine, and almost 19 years after their groundbreaking debut Is This It. That’s a lot of time. That’s a lot of waiting. It began to seem almost mythical, like it would never actually happen. Wouldn’t it have been just like the Strokes to have their final track be a half-somber, half-mumbled ballad titled “Call It Fate, Call It Karma,” after a line from Ghostbusters?

But they continue to beat the odds. The nine-track album is called The New Abnormal, and in its greater moments, it showcases the best of the Strokes together and apart. Since they adopted a more collaborative (if initially volatile) songwriting process on Angles, certain Strokes tracks have been easier to pinpoint as the work of a certain member, from guitarist Albert Hammond, Jr.’s frenetic and unpredictable energy to drummer Fabrizio Moretti’s loopy but sophisticated deviations. It’s nostalgic but in the moment, familiar but something nobody else could have done.

Single “Bad Decisions,” in particular, is practically a mashup of the Modern English classic “I Melt with You” and Billy Idol’s “Dancing with Myself” — a perfect example to cite when mentioning the album’s laconic description, which is basically this: It wouldn’t be out of place on the soundtrack of Disney’s 2005 teen-hero film Sky High, and it kind of works.

You can’t say it for sure, but you can guess that the Strokes actually had fun with the creative process; it’s not just something to do for a paycheck. There are “New York City Cops”-style ad libs between the members left on multiple tracks. For a band that’s known for unaffected Manhattanite cool, it’s refreshing to see that the Strokes care. They care so much that part of the album’s promotions included performing at a Bernie Sanders rally. The guitars are intricately tangled as ever, complementing ‘80s synths and falsetto — but there are also instances of crystal clear vocals recalling First Impressions of Earth, to match the equally unfiltered lyrics. They border on confessional, which is something new for a band that’s preferred to keep it vague and esoteric.

Another thing that sounds just like The Strokes? The fact that after everything, they happen to have dropped their long-anticipated album in the middle of a global pandemic that has drastically changed how we live. They’ve always been stuck with generational labels and expectations pinning them to the zeitgeist, their work and existence always seeming to signal the beginning or end of something. And with such an aptly titled album, they might have just done that again.

The songs were written pre-quarantine, but some of the lyrics can’t help but hit hard: “I just wait for this to go into circles,” Julian sings in “Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus.” “And the distance from my room, is anything so necessary?”

At six minutes and 15 seconds long, “Endless Summer” is the longest track on an album that averages five minutes per song. Having been raised on new wave karaoke sessions, I instantly recognized its sampling of The Psychedelic Furs’ “The Ghost in You” in the chorus as Julian croons, “Summer is coming, it’s here to stay.” The familiar melody elicits a feeling of deja vu, adding weight to its overall effect of dissonance — the song sounds bright and full of possibility, but it’s actually more about feelings of ennui, of the pitfalls of boundlessness. This boundlessness is inescapable. You want it to be over.

Last I heard, only two members remain in the city that they arguably define as much as it defines them. Final track “Ode to the Mets,” which is just under six minutes long, cements the fact that you can take a Stroke out of New York, but you can’t take the New York out of the Stroke. It’s a fitting outro, and also a little too close for comfort in these times: “Gone now are the old times, forgotten, time to hold on the railing,” the lyrics go. “So pardon the silence that you’re hearing. It’s turning into a deafening, painful, shameful roar.”

When I was working on my thesis, my adviser told me to study the sociocultural background of each album I was analyzing, i.e. what was going on in the world at the time of its release? I didn’t understand the significance of it at first — the state of the world in the aughts felt like too broad a topic to include — but it ended up helping me make sense of a lot of the lyrics with the added context. And it’s helping me make sense of this album, at least in relation to what we’re experiencing right now.

There’s always been something vaguely apocalyptic in certain Strokes songs, like “Ize of the World” (young adults to modernize / citizens to terrorize / generations to desensitize … cities to vaporize) and “The End Has No End” (one by one, ticking time bombs won / it’s not the secrets of the government that’s keeping you dumb). They welcomed the new millennium with Is This It, and now they’re welcoming a new decade. Their music has seen their generation — and the ones that have followed — through war, and disaster, and collapse, and now this pandemic. Their Gen X nonchalance has grown the heart and spine needed for political dissent.

When I first heard that they’re calling their album The New Abnormal, it sounded contrived, commonplace. Old. But now it’s almost prophetic, in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way, of course.

I’d been wondering whether the so-called tradition of “wait” in Julian’s lyrics would continue with this new era. And when lead single “At the Door” was released, there it was: “Anyone home? Have I lost it all?” he sings. “Lying on the cold floor, I’ll be waiting. I’ll be waiting from the other side, waiting for the tide to rise.” Another few instances to add to my corpus. A continuation of a cycle I’ve never minded.

Listening to this album, in the house I haven’t left in over a month, I turn pensive, restless. It goes too well with the aimlessness I feel as the days blur together, slow and everlasting. But somewhere in there, there’s also purpose, drive, and just the tiniest bit of spite: we will make it past this, by sheer force of obstinacy at the very least. What’s “Ode to the Mets” about, anyway, if not rooting for the underdog?

As always, as ever, we wait.

Can I stand in your light just for a while?

Nick Valensi: Sonic mastermind, guitar deity, 1/5 of the Strokes, scrabble enthusiast, bibliophile, American Literature dropout from Hunter College who wrote for the student paper, epicure, wine mom, born and bred New Yorker who left the city for love, stoner dad whose kids know Matilda primarily as a Roald Dahl book and not just a movie, husband whose idea of date night is a good old LA comedy show and burgers after, overall awe-inspiring human being. Ask anyone in the know, and they could probably tell you a thing or two about him.

But one thing that is sure to come up very seldom, if it even comes up at all, is his penchant for photography.

A couple years ago I was reading something Strokes-related and scrolled down to the comments section. Someone had written: "Whatever happened to Nick's photography?" I narrowed my eyes in confusion. What photography?

It's not very obvious, unlike Fab's art, but it's all laid out in plain sight. How camera-shy he was in the always heart-wrenching "In Transit" ("What, you got a fucking crush on me?"), but specifically how he'd hog the camcorder the other way and film his band and tour mates, for one. And for another, the immense archive of personal photos they used to post on their website (I always did love how DIY and hands-on and down-to-earth their approach used to be for things like their fan club and posting updates and everything else), quite a bit of which were taken by him.

I came across a compressed folder that has virtually every photo from the old Strokes website, circa 2001 to maybe 2005, and it even had a subfolder of grainy, lo-fi videos. Aside from the pre-selfie age 35mm self-portraits, some images stood out as undeniably his work. Ultimately, going through them was what got me curious about Nick's forgotten hobby. So I went digging.

If you Google "nick valensi photography," you're more likely to get results about his wife Amanda de Cadenet, who's been very accomplished behind the camera, being the youngest woman who's ever shot a Vogue cover and having come out with a photo book called Rare Birds. (She was also supposed to release a book called Just a Boy, which would've been composed entirely of photos of Nick, but it was shelved. Literally.) Doing research for this post, I had to come up with all kinds of word combinations just to find any evidence that he was into it. Eventually, I found the following.

From a feature on Julian Casablancas and Phrazes for the Young in Nylon:

From a news piece on NME about Nick working on Sia's We Are Born: 

A Strokes website update:

The site was given a whole new look (LP6 realness!!!) and might have changed servers a couple of days after I found the above post, so the link I had didn't work anymore, and while searching for it again manually, I saw another update addressing it:

Their old fan club "Forget What You Heard" newsletters also had collages that list him as the photographer.

I tried looking for more regarding those prints, particularly which photos they're of, to no avail. And neither Nylon nor NME (quadruple alliteration!) offered any real information regarding Nick's supposed foray into photography during the Strokes hiatus. Maybe it really is just something he's passionate about, and he doesn't feel the need to have that all out in the open. But honestly, he should at least make an Instagram because we're missing out!

I'll spend the rest of this post interspersing facts and comments with the photos I've rounded up; the real evidence in all this, of course. There's quite a bit of them, but they're worth the extra scrolls for sure.

First off: His weapon of choice. He wasn't kidding—the Contax T3 is pretty fucking dope (it's still super popular among people who take this kind of thing seriously, or even not-so-seriously), and it is pricey. More than "a bit," in fact. I've recently gotten back into film photography and was looking for cheap 35mm cameras on OLX, and the first result was this ad for a used T3. And it's P45,000. It stung like hell, like the universe was trying to spite me. Oh, the dream. And Nick had the gall to lose two of them?!      

A feature in the sadly now-defunct Elle Girl, circa 2006. (Click to enlarge.) A magazine that largely contributed to my self-discovery and musical awakening. They were pretty big on the Strokes, going so far as to feature Juliet Joslin in 2003 and putting Fabrizio Moretti (#50), Nick (#22) and Julian (#9) on their "50 Hottest Guys in Rock!" list. Fab made it onto the list another year, at number 29.

Okay. On to the real photos. I've divided them into three groups, and the first one, much like the introductory image, is composed of self-portraits or pictures where Nick is visibly holding the camera. He was quite fond of mirror shots, obvi.  

I know this is technically not a self-portrait, but that arm is unmistakable.

I love the composition of this one. 

This next group includes photos that have explicitly been credited to Nick on the Strokes website:

This one of the shoes wasn't credited to him, but judging from those infamous worn-out sneakers and the caption and the angle, this is definitely a Valensi. 

And finally, some photos that aren't Nick's for certain, but I'm putting here based on educated guesses: 

The picture above could probably count as one of the Nick-is-visible stuff because I'm pretty sure that's his reflection. Anyway, I figured the above five were taken by him, considering he experimented with black and white film a lot, plus the grain and focus felt like they were from a Contax T3. 

Also, Fab was pretty much Nick's muse. 

The next five colored images, I've included based on observations re: consistency and the overall feel of them. 

I love the composition of this one, too.

These last two are definitely from the same night as the picture with Jack White.

I find it adorable and amusing how slice-of-life and candid the above shot (particularly because Julian used to be so grumpy/moody then) and this one below (particularly because of how accurately it depicts tour life!) are.

The purpose of this post was to dig deeper into a somewhat long-lost facet—in the public eye, at least—of Nick Valensi that's mostly just been mentioned offhand and thrust to the side. In doing so, I found that, in the midst of the mesmerizing or the mundane, he had (and hopefully retains) quite an eye for the real moments worth saving, and was/is able to do so in a way that really commands attention and thought. Even if they were just "fucking around." But the fine line between love and hate photography for posterity/the heck of it and as art is visible, and these are all clearly on the more creative side. There's this quiet surge of life in them that makes them interesting, and not just because they're all of a rock band.   

(And they're all so beautiful, which made it pretty difficult to narrow the selections down!) 

You can see from his work how well he knows his subjects (and his surroundings, and his city) and what makes them who they are. They come alive even without motion. 

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that, whatever did happen, they continue to, even if we haven't gotten the chance to witness it in quite some time.