The Indie Sleaze Draft with Rob Mahoney and Sean Fennessey

It’s draft day, and Yasi is joined by Rob Mahoney and Sean Fennessey for a generational Indie Sleaze Draft. But first, what actually counts as indie sleaze? Are the Strokes so important that they get their own category? And can you win by simply drafting Yeah Yeah Yeahs in every category? (You can if you draft with your heart.) Plus: the return of Sparks (not the band)! Subscribe on YouTube CREDITS: Host: Yasi Salek @yasisalek Guests: Rob Mahoney @robmahoney and Sean Fennessey @seanfennessey Producer: Rob Sundermann Editor: Adrian Bridges Additional Production Supervision: Justin Sayles Theme Song: Bethany Cosentino Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:05Speaker 02

  What's with this band anyway? I don't get it, can you please explain? Wait, like, Bandplain? Never heard this band in my life. Oh, you haven't? I'd love that. Really? Why? Yeah, I love this song. Oh, I don't know that one. Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain. I really like this band! Whatever, I'm their biggest fan. Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain. Bandplain!

• 1:46Yasi Salek?

  Hello and welcome to Bandplain. I am your host, Yasi Salek. This is usually a show where I invite an expert guest on to help me explain a cult band or iconic artist. But today's episode is a little different. Today's episode is one of my legally mandated, ringer-approved draft episodes. It is a draft under the theme of indie sleaze. We will get into what exactly that term means shortly. But first, I would love to introduce my guests, who are not really sleazy at all, actually, in the end. Jonathan Fantasy and Robert Mahoney, welcome to the program.

• 2:22Speaker 04

  Hi, thanks for having us. I mean, I'm happy to be here. It sounded like you're in a little bit of a hostage situation.

• 2:29Yasi Salek?

  My whole life is a hostage situation. And then I am the captor.

• 2:33Speaker 04

  Oh, yes.

• 2:33Yasi Salek?

  That's the irony.

• 2:34Speaker 04

  Yes, yes.

• 2:35Yasi Salek?

  I have Stockholm syndrome of being held by myself.

• 2:39Speaker 04

  And you live in Stockholm.

• 2:40Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, and I live, well, in a way, in a sense, yeah. The other day, I was like, my fucking boss won't give me a day off. And then I was like, and who is that? It's me. Um, you guys, thank you so much for doing this with me. I know, Rob, for you, it might have a different tone and tenor. For Sean and myself, I think it's a bit hard.

• 3:02Speaker 04

  This is an interesting experiment because we are a little bit older than you.

• 3:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:07Speaker 04

  And but I think that little bit kind of shatters what our expectations are of this conversation.

• 3:12Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:13Speaker 04

  And we pre-gamed it a little bit the other day. And you and I have not spoken about what we think this is that we're about to do.

• 3:21Speaker 05

  What indie sleaze is or what this draft is?

• 3:23Yasi Salek?

  We should tackle the elephant in the room head-on, which is, what is indie sleaze? What is, what does that term mean? I mean, obviously, it's like a post facto catch-all upon much, you know, reflection. It's really meant to describe a subculture and less of a musical genre. And maybe has more to do with the subcultures like fashion and partying proclivities. But then I kind of was like, is that a lot of genres? Like, you could kind of say that about grunge, too. Like, the bands that are all kind of categorized as grunge don't all sound the same.

• 4:04Yasi Salek?

  They're kind of dressed the same and maybe like, we're in the same milieu, but they didn't sound the same. So I was wondering what you guys were thinking.

• 4:12Speaker 05

  Well, we're only 20,000 hours into Bandspoint history, and we've just discovered that this is, in fact, what genres are.

• 4:17Yasi Salek?

  It only took five and a half years and nearly 200 episodes.

• 4:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's 100% more lifestyle than it is music. In that vein, what qualifies for the purposes of this draft? I really don't know. I would say especially on the dance end of the spectrum.

• 4:33Speaker 04

  Right.

• 4:34Speaker 05

  Because for me, so much of indie sleaze is, do you like rock music? Do you like dance music? Do you like dance music in your rock music?

• 4:40Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 4:41Speaker 05

  But like, is Robbin indie sleaze? I really couldn't tell you, even though contemporaneously and stylistically, kind of.

• 4:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think I'm, I've been getting the roots of indie sleaze confused for what I think the general public believes it to be.

• 4:55Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 4:55Speaker 04

  Like, I dropped the term into Spotify, and the first thing that came up was a very long playlist that someone had compiled.

• 5:02Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 5:02Speaker 04

  And I would say only about 22% of the songs that appeared there, I thought, qualified.

• 5:08Yasi Salek?

  I don't know, but some of that...

• 5:09Speaker 04

  But I'm not the arbiter of the term. So I'm open-minded here about what it is we're doing.

• 5:13Speaker 05

  We're all too old to be the arbiter of this term.

• 5:15Speaker 04

  Right. Who came up with the term?

• 5:17Yasi Salek?

  I have no idea. It's, I was reading, actually, this incredible article, you guys should read it, by the great Megan Garvey. She wrote a piece about it in GQ like two years ago. She kind of posits that, like, it has taken the place of the word hipster, which I thought was actually genius, because that is what we said back then.

• 5:37Speaker 05

  Right.

• 5:37Yasi Salek?

  In, fortuitously, like, nobody wanted to be called a hipster. But we all, I mean, I can't speak for you guys, but I absolutely was with my Janet from Three's Company haircut and my full American apparel and my, like, beat-up sneakers and going to CineSpace Tuesdays. Like, I was fully a card-carrying hipster. But that word, I guess, just fell by the wayside or didn't apply anymore. And so they've retroactively, and I think it's young people. Because to your point about that indie sleaze playlist, what shocked me about it is there's many, like, contemporary songs, like, that came out this year.

• 6:09Speaker 04

  Were there?

• 6:10Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, like, "The Dare" is on there, for example. It was obviously very much in the lineage of, like, an LCD or whatever. "Two Hollis" is on there.

• 6:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:16Yasi Salek?

  There's a lot of music that might be considered, like, hyper-pop that falls. "Frost Children," "Fuckers," like, that lives on that playlist, too.

• 6:27Speaker 04

  Right. It was the intention behind this indie sleaze series because we're at the quarter-century mark of this movement being born, even though it wasn't called that at that time? Or did you just think you wanted to do it?

• 6:38Yasi Salek?

  I didn't really think about that.

• 6:40Speaker 04

  Okay, I love an anniversary. I'm always thinking in that way.

• 6:42Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, that's why they pay you the big bucks.

• 6:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure. That's what it is, me knowing numbers.

• 6:47Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I occupy the space of instinct, intuition.

• 6:51Speaker 04

  A freely evolving artist.

• 6:53Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, but it is crazy that it's 25 years. That, like, I was trying to kind of do some back-of-the-napkin math on the way here, but I'm not a woman in STEM and I'm bad at math. But I was thinking about, like, because yesterday was, we're recording this on September 25th. Yesterday was the anniversary of Nirvana, Nevermind. And I was like, okay, in 1991, how long ago was The Beatles?

• 7:15Speaker 04

  You shouldn't talk about this in front of Rob, who famously does not enjoy "Smells Like Teen Spirit."

• 7:20Speaker 05

  I have no comment on this matter.

• 7:21Speaker 04

  Or even Nirvana?

• 7:22Yasi Salek?

  We will, we will deal with you later on that, because it's, you're wrong and it's not your fault, really.

• 7:28Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 7:30Speaker 04

  Whose fault is it?

• 7:31Yasi Salek?

  You know, it's like, he's just misled.

• 7:34Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 7:35Yasi Salek?

  He needs education.

• 7:36Speaker 04

  It's like being born into a cult.

• 7:37Yasi Salek?

  Exactly.

• 7:38Speaker 04

  So me being waterboarded is bonus content? I don't know.

• 7:41Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah, after dark. But I think that's about right. I mean, I've been lambasted in the comments for, like, not knowing the exact 10-year years of The Beatles, because I'm not a fucking loser. But I think, I think it's roughly 25 years before 1991. Does that sound right?

• 7:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:58Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, 67-ish.

• 8:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:00Speaker 05

  The tail end, for sure.

• 8:01Yasi Salek?

  So basically, it is, that is us in 1991 talking about The Beatles, is us talking about The Strokes right now in 2026, which is so insane.

• 8:11Speaker 05

  I think this is part of the reason...

• 8:13Yasi Salek?

  It's really upsetting.

• 8:14Speaker 05

  It's very upsetting. But it's also like part of the reason to me why, like, hipster didn't stick. It was like, that's too broad to last 25 years. In the same way, the, like, blog wave was never going to be the lasting definition of what this kind of music was.

• 8:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, I feel like hipster is kind of an offshoot of a previous identification of try-hard, cool kids from the 50s and 60s. And the sort of post-beat, beatnik, you know, trying to be more open-minded and liberal about you, the way that you experience the world and think about art. And a pose is really, I think, a pretty significant part of it. And hipster and poser are kind of interwoven to each other. And this is like, I don't feel like this lifestyle is about pretending to be anything. I think what it's about is, it started out as about pretending to go back to something.

• 9:05Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 9:06Speaker 04

  Like, a kind of regression to form that we had lost something in the culture of the music. But then, it kind of interestingly evolves into, I don't know if it's a new kind of music per se, but it felt very new at the time. Like, in 2005, it did feel like, I was like, I'm not sure we'd had music quite like this before.

• 9:21Yasi Salek?

  Right, but you know what's interesting is that I was, we just did an episode on The Rapture's House of Jealous Lovers, this is the episode before this. And I was like, it is just like enough time passes and people forget everything. But we had "Gang of Four." We had ESG, we had, like, there was a lot of precursor to that sound of music. I, the sound of music, but I think it's the packaging. You know, it's back to the subculture of it, right? The packaging was different, the subculture was different.

• 9:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 9:49Yasi Salek?

  Vice Magazine was around, you know?

• 9:52Speaker 04

  I think there's something in the, in the DJ culture and the party club culture that, that's the thing that felt new to me.

• 9:58Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, and you and I spoke about this because I think you and I are pretty, like, similar in this, is that there was a real crossover with hip-hop.

• 10:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 10:08Yasi Salek?

  Which didn't so much exist in previous rock subcultures.

• 10:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 10:13Yasi Salek?

  You know?

• 10:14Speaker 04

  You'd have "Walk This Way," you'd have Blondie with Fat Fight Freddie. You'd have a couple things over the years.

• 10:18Yasi Salek?

  But it was, it was almost more like, we, here's, like, peanut butter and jelly. Like, that was that. Where this was just like, we, it was all, we were in a soup, you know? Like, you would have people like us who, like, listened to backpack rap. And also, and that was actually a sect of indie sleaze, as my friend Crystal Mozzell reminded me that day. She was like, we were streetwear indie sleaze, which was a total thing. And that's like, I feel like that was my life, you know?

• 10:42Speaker 04

  Well, Yasi and I lived in New York at the time when this is happening. Like, from, from where you were, you were in Texas at the time, I assume. So like, how did you perceive it? What did you, what did you think it was? Did you even think about it as a genre?

• 10:53Speaker 05

  I mean, the early part, no, just because it was still so emergent and it felt like, oh, this is indie rock or alt-rock, like, adjacent. And then I would say it really kind of started crystallizing, forming into what we now know as indie sleaze when I was in college. And so like, for me... Genre wise, a lot of this music is like stuff that I may or may not have downloaded on Oink while like trying to maintain my ratio in a college dorm room is kind of like the vibe. But also so much of this scene and this identity to me is like at a distance. I'm in Austin, Texas at UT. I'm seeing, I'm reading these blogs, I'm seeing photos, I'm seeing like glimpses of especially what things are like in New York and like that, what that lifestyle is like in the club at these parties day to day.

• 11:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:34Speaker 05

  And I'm like, how do I connect with that idea from here? And really, the only way I could do it was by listening to the music and reading these things, but it was very much at a distance and very online for me at that time.

• 11:44Speaker 04

  The funny thing is though, like, I felt like we lived it that way too, where sometimes I would be at a party where Cobrasnake would be taking photos, but then other times I would just be at home alone, not at the party, just looking at Cobrasnake.

• 11:56Yasi Salek?

  Well, Real Heads will remember Polaroid scene, which is what it was called in the beginning.

• 12:00Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 12:01Yasi Salek?

  Um, me and my Nike dunks were featured several times.

• 12:06Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I mean, that's, the internet is a huge part of it, right? Like, and party photographers are a huge part of it.

• 12:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:12Yasi Salek?

  The documentation of the fashion and, and the general hedonism. It was kind of, you know, in a way, like a really perfect place before everything became too much, where it's like, you didn't have cell phones, so everyone wasn't capturing the moment, but there is documentation, so you could be free and do bad kid stuff. But you also have like all this, these amazing, um, you know, historical artifacts from that time.

• 12:46Speaker 05

  I wondered too, how much of that too, is like, I think that's for one, the motivating factor behind the revival today. Like so much of the music and attempt to like recapture the fashion of this time is grasping at an era that younger people didn't get to be a part of.

• 13:00Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 13:01Speaker 05

  Where those concerns weren't a part of it. And also like, weirdly enough, the difference between the very like digital camera, high flash photography at a party.

• 13:11Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 13:11Speaker 05

  It's like, yes, it was online and living in a particular space, but like it was so separate from everything else because it wasn't, it was such a different form of capturing and photography that no one would like pull it into your job interview. In the way that now, if you're posting things to your Instagram or posting things online anywhere, it's like, it's just following you like a shadow all the time. And I feel like this was, there was at least a half step removed for that stuff.

• 13:35Yasi Salek?

  But it did sort of birth influencing, like the narcissism of the individual that you could be a bit of a star, you know, without maybe actually doing anything.

• 13:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 13:48Yasi Salek?

  That, that kind of.

• 13:49Speaker 04

  Like a lot of people emerged out of those photographs and became, I don't know if well-known, but known to the public.

• 13:55Yasi Salek?

  Cultural figures. Yeah, I mean, I do think a lot of people think about this, and I sent you guys this because I think it's an important part of the revival and this term that Indieslee's Instagram account, which goes all over the place. But I think a lot, a big part of it is kids want to party, kids want to do cocaine.

• 14:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 14:13Yasi Salek?

  A big part of it is that people want to do cocaine and drink Sparks.

• 14:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, they do.

• 14:18Speaker 05

  They do.

• 14:19Yasi Salek?

  And maybe they are. It's none of my business anymore, but for a while they weren't, you know? And it's post-COVID, you know, I, I really feel like I remember this term getting a swell kind of out of, don't you feel like it was like around that?

• 14:34Speaker 04

  I guess it's in the arc of nostalgia, then you're looking at somewhere between 10 and 20 years since something has happened and then it kind of picks up steam again. I, I personally came at this from a very different perspective because I wasn't doing cocaine in 2002.

• 14:48Speaker 05

  In 2002.

• 14:49Speaker 04

  Or ever. But I wanted to try to be a music journalist and I, and I wanted to be in the scene, but not like partying with rock stars. I, I was like interested in going to shows and covering the music. And the first interview that I ever did in my entire career was with my friend Ryan Dombel, who I went to high school with, who went on to be a long time editor of Pitchfork. Before either of us wrote for Pitchfork, we were writing for a website called newmu.net.

• 15:13Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yeah. I've been referencing a lot in my, uh, in my research.

• 15:17Speaker 04

  And we interviewed, um, half of Interpol in the basement of the Bowery Ballroom in 2002, 2003. Can't remember what year it was. And we just hung out with them.

• 15:28Yasi Salek?

  Turn on the bright lights.

• 15:29Speaker 04

  Post, right after it came out, or maybe right before it came out. And at the time, I was like, this is, this is what you do.

• 15:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 15:37Speaker 04

  Almost Famous had come out and I learned that this is what you do. You sit, you have drinks in the basement for two hours with Paul Banks.

• 15:43Speaker 05

  You ask Interpol what they like about music.

• 15:44Yasi Salek?

  You're totally that kid, that you're like, Paul Banks is the coolest man to ever exist. And I.

• 15:49Speaker 04

  What I came to learn was, I had talked to musicians before, but what I came to learn was that he was as nervous as I was. And that he actually wasn't that cool. And he was really nice.

• 15:57Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 15:57Speaker 04

  And, and I thought a really good front man, but that.

• 16:01Yasi Salek?

  Also, Paul Banks is like three years older than us.

• 16:03Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 16:03Yasi Salek?

  Which is really crazy, right? He's not like, this was like some person that was like a decade older than us and.

• 16:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, it's exactly right. And so I think that was a nice entryway for that. And I mean, I went to a ton of shows and saw a ton of bands in that part of the world. And I interned at Spin Magazine and I was writing about music in 2004. So like, I was really entrenched in it, though I was never very cool in it, but I really loved it. I loved this music very much, even though I was kind of more naturally a hip hop kid. I, I thought this was like the coolest thing going in music at the time. And then it, I felt like in real time, I aged out. Like as like hollertronics was rising and the like clubbier, more hip hop party scene component of it started happening, I was like, this isn't really my thing.

• 16:45Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 16:47Speaker 04

  I'm more interested in the music.

• 16:48Yasi Salek?

  I think what's so interesting is that they were both happening at once and then they converged. Like the first Fisher Spooner single is 2000, right? So you can kind of trace back the electronic electro clash, if you want to term it that way, arm of Indieslee's to that, you know, to Larry T's parties, Berlinium's Burg, I think it was called. Larry T, I think actually coined the term electro clash. And then at the same time, you had The Strokes, who also were playing in 2000, put out their first EP in 2001. And then slowly it sort of started to overlap, right? Because the Yaya's and The Strokes are playing these like warehouse parties in Brooklyn that also have DJs.

• 17:31Yasi Salek?

  And also, it all sort of converged into one scene.

• 17:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:36Yasi Salek?

  I think it's interesting.

• 17:37Speaker 04

  It is. Why did that happen? I think I, my theory is that because hip hop was the dominant form of music culturally at that time, that it was sort of like, kind of drafting off of the energy that I think hip hop was giving more commercially.

• 17:50Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 17:51Speaker 04

  Because when you ultimately look at the record sales of the biggest artists from this time, they're not, they're not the biggest artists of all time.

• 17:58Yasi Salek?

  It was 50 Cent, Get Rich or Die Tryin'. Everywhere you went, every party, it doesn't matter what kind of party it was, you're gonna hear 50 Cent in the club. Thank God.

• 18:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:07Yasi Salek?

  We used to be a proper country.

• 18:08Speaker 05

  And this is still such like, I mean, speaking to your hip hop and rock intersection, like still like a very Linkin Park kind of era.

• 18:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:16Speaker 05

  Very much like a Creed puddle of mud stained kind of like post-grungy era.

• 18:21Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 18:21Speaker 05

  It's like this stuff is ascend, here's the thing, if you're in a very particular bubble, a Ratatat song will seem like the biggest thing on the fucking planet, right? But if you're outside that bubble, it's like, oh, literally no one knows what this is. And I think the wanting to protect that and wanting to cultivate that is probably some of how these movements came together too. It's like, oh, if we join forces, this is a little bit stronger, but also still so much our thing.

• 18:43Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And I think like, this might be me like over-intellectualizing it, but I, I do kind of feel like it was such a reaction to that by being like, hold on, like rock has gotten way too like bro-y, hyper, you know, Fred Durst. And like, we need to bring back gayness and women and people of other cultures.

• 19:07Speaker 04

  No doubt.

• 19:07Yasi Salek?

  And, and you know, a lot of that is present in what we, I guess, kind of now term Indieslee's, you know?

• 19:13Speaker 04

  It didn't start that way. I mean, I, Karen O was the exception and not the rule at first. And it evolved pretty quickly.

• 19:20Yasi Salek?

  Even the Gothiness of it, you know, like even like the Interpol bringing kind of their like Goth post-punk thing. That's an, that's an outsider.

• 19:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:29Yasi Salek?

  Approach to things. But yeah, Karen O, but even TV on the radio, there's a lot, there was a lot going on. The Strokes are, I read some, some tweet the other day that was like, The Strokes were the most multicultural band because they're like French and, and.

• 19:43Speaker 04

  Come on.

• 19:44Yasi Salek?

  And I was like, y'all need to.

• 19:46Speaker 04

  No, but I think that, I think the movement needed a kind of white boy rock band so that the press could kind of rally around them in a traditional way. You could have 45 year old rock journalists saying like, something is back.

• 19:59Yasi Salek?

  Particularly, I think, and as I'm a huge Anglophile, I understand this propensity because I have it with Englishness. The, the English are like so susceptible to five American guys with dirty hair being like, we're bringing rock back. They like cannot fucking contain themselves. It doesn't matter, like, if it's actually authentic or whatever, like, they are buying it, they are buying it and they are selling it back to us. And that's what happened with The Strokes, you know?

• 20:30Speaker 05

  And the bros are still here for those with eyes to see. You know, it's like, there is that theatricality and like a, let's say slight diversification of who is allowed to be in a popular band in a movement, but like, this is still, this is still a bro's bro kind of, kind of moment.

• 20:44Yasi Salek?

  And I don't know how you guys feel, but like, I don't have any beef with the term Indieslee is like, I don't care. You know, like, no one called Joy Division post-punk in the moment. And it's, no one likes being grouped into a thing, but I'm not a linguist, but like at this point, when you say Indieslee's, most people roughly know what you're talking about. There might be like quibbles about like exact, but like.

• 21:08Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 21:09Yasi Salek?

  It worked, like the word is working. You kind of have to, you kind of have to let it go.

• 21:14Speaker 04

  I feel like frequently throughout this draft, we'll have to say, does this qualify? And maybe everything qualifies.

• 21:21Yasi Salek?

  I think you have to make your case.

• 21:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. But like, can I just throw one out that I'm curious about your feelings about?

• 21:26Yasi Salek?

  Just for as a temp check.

• 21:27Speaker 04

  Cause this is, this is kind of early days, though not the absolute origin point. MIA.

• 21:33Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 21:34Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 21:35Speaker 04

  Cause she was, I think a line came out originally in 2003, but really hit in 2005.

• 21:41Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 21:42Speaker 04

  And I remember being at a, like a record release party for, was Aralar the first record?

• 21:47Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 21:49Speaker 04

  And feeling like I was, I was actually at something that mattered, which is stupid maybe to say now. But I, I was like, this is what I have been working towards. Like this is why I went to journalism school, which is pathetic in retrospect, but like every rock critic who I thought was cool was there. There were a lot of beautiful people there.

• 22:05Yasi Salek?

  That's a major album.

• 22:07Speaker 04

  I'm a huge fan. I was a huge fan then. I'm a huge fan of especially those first three records. But I actually felt like I was like, I'm in a, I'm in a historical popular music moment.

• 22:18Speaker 05

  You were like, I, I don't, I, I'm trying to sort through whether or not that's true. I think if we did this podcast and never said the words paper planes, it would be a dereliction of duty. And it's like to, to the history of that moment, that song is, I would say, still the leading cause of finger guns in this country for going on decades now. So like, if that's not history, what is?

• 22:37Speaker 04

  Wait till Digger comes out. That's all I'm gonna say.

• 22:38Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 22:39Yasi Salek?

  Put money in the pocket of the clash too, which is important. Yeah. And my account, I mean, we talked about this, like Amanda Blank, Spank Rock, you know, all of that stuff counts to me.

• 22:49Speaker 04

  Yeah. Okay. There's like a whole other strain, but I'll hold it on the whether or not I think it counts.

• 22:54Speaker 05

  One clarifying question on this ground as well. Things that are stylistically and like fashion wise, incredibly indie sleaze, but musically, I would say not even close. Like is Amy Winehouse indie sleaze?

• 23:05Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 23:06Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 23:08Speaker 04

  I would say no as well.

• 23:09Yasi Salek?

  That's just my gut instinct.

• 23:10Speaker 04

  I know what you're saying.

• 23:11Speaker 05

  I agree with you. I'm just wondering where the lines are.

• 23:13Speaker 04

  No, but just like the vibe, the sense of style, the, the kind of.

• 23:17Speaker 05

  I would say the, her look is as influential on a very particular strain of indie sleaze as much as anything else.

• 23:22Speaker 04

  Decaying lifestyle and you know, being contemporaneous with like the Libertines and things like that, you know?

• 23:28Yasi Salek?

  I mean, doing drugs doesn't make it indie sleaze.

• 23:30Speaker 05

  It helps.

• 23:31Speaker 04

  I think it's a component that helps, you know?

• 23:33Yasi Salek?

  Well, like a question, one that I was wondering about, this is gonna, it's so funny that what we put forward is so like telling of what I was like, do pretty girls make graves count? And I kind of feel like, no.

• 23:45Speaker 04

  I feel like that was just closer to straight up.

• 23:48Yasi Salek?

  It's like post, it's post hardcore, but they put out a release on Dim Mac. So it's like, it really is funny how everything was sort of, and yeah, I agree. I don't think they totally count. But I was like, oh, I would, I could maybe if I wanted to make the case.

• 24:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:02Yasi Salek?

  One thing that like, I feel like I'm interested to see, cause I think Rob, your references will be later. I just kind of don't know much past 2006. Cause I, I was like, checked out, don't care. Like, don't know what's happening. Do not recognize this. So I'll let you have at it.

• 24:18Speaker 05

  I'm, I'm glad to speak for my sub generation. It's very important.

• 24:22Yasi Salek?

  It is. You know what? And I think the last thing I want to say about this, like you pointed out, Sean, that it's a return, right? A revival. And I don't think that that it's a coincidence that it came with the internet, right? Because the internet, I feel like kind of stops time, like in terms of the progression of things. Like, once the internet comes around, it's so much easier to take from the past. And I do feel like we start to see that a lot. I, not to Mark Fisher, but Mark Fisher said, "The feeling of belatedness of living after the gold rush is as omnipresent as it is disavowed."

• 25:02Yasi Salek?

  And I feel like that really fit here, right? It's like these, the, the idea of like, oh, we're gonna be the Rolling Stones. Like we missed it. Or, or like for, for, I think what how people were looking at New York was like the, the heyday of CBGBs, right? And the idea that if you lived in New York and, and I felt this way, when I got to New York in 2004, I was like, it's over. Everything's over. I should have been here in the 90s.

• 25:23Speaker 05

  Even by 2004.

• 25:23Speaker 04

  I didn't feel that way about music. I did feel that way about the music media. I did feel that way about magazines and all that stuff. The music itself, I was like, this is fucking amazing. I mean, I was also a huge White Stripes fan, which were not a New York band.

• 25:35Yasi Salek?

  No, but they were part of this.

• 25:36Speaker 04

  They were part of this.

• 25:37Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 25:38Speaker 04

  And they were firing and seeing them live was incredible.

• 25:42Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 25:43Speaker 04

  And, and so like I, there were, I've, I had moments of transcendence watching the music where I was, I didn't get stuck in my own cynicism. And that's part of the reason why like, I'm very happy to be here and talk about this stuff. Cause I really love this era of music.

• 25:53Yasi Salek?

  I love that I moved to New York in 2004 to become a music journalist, just as all magazines collapsed. I think it was wonderful timing.

• 26:02Speaker 04

  You could have been a legend and now you are a legend.

• 26:04Speaker 05

  There you go.

• 26:04Yasi Salek?

  I became a podcaster.

• 26:05Speaker 04

  Now you're doing a podcasting magazine. Congratulations.

• 26:08Yasi Salek?

  Thank you so much.

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• 27:44Yasi Salek?

  Okay, let's talk about the categories really quick. We're doing best band, best front person, best song, best album, best blank Strokes, which is basically about the idea that the Strokes launched a thousand ships. And you could kind of easily point to the bands that they inspired globally and within the country. And a wild card, because we love a wild card here.

• 28:11Speaker 04

  Great.

• 28:13Yasi Salek?

  Other Rob, what is the draft order?

• 28:16Speaker 06

  It is Rob, Mahoney, Yasi and Sean.

• 28:20Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 28:21Yasi Salek?

  Okay, great.

• 28:21Speaker 04

  The turn.

• 28:23Yasi Salek?

  You have the turn.

• 28:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:24Yasi Salek?

  That's good, right?

• 28:25Speaker 04

  Sure. There, there are no losers today.

• 28:28Speaker 05

  There really are. I mean, three drafters, we're gonna get a lot of good stuff. I mean, I have to start with best band and I'm gonna pick the Strokes.

• 28:34Speaker 04

  Okay, that's, that's the number one overall pick.

• 28:35Speaker 05

  I feel like I'm drafting the Godfather, but like sometimes you just have to sit here and draft the Godfather. So.

• 28:40Yasi Salek?

  Not this guy being like Nirvana's mid and then being like the best band in this draft is the Strokes.

• 28:45Speaker 05

  I.

• 28:45Yasi Salek?

  I see you is what I'm saying. Clocked.

• 28:47Speaker 05

  I'm just saying.

• 28:48Yasi Salek?

  I'm clocked your tea.

• 28:50Speaker 05

  I'm, I'm happy to be clocked. I'm happy to sit here in front of you and everybody else and say the Strokes are in fact good. So I don't think I particularly need to defend them, but incredible discography. I'm sure we'll talk about it more and more. I am curious from both your perspectives as far as what qualifies, like I think the Strokes 2020 album is one of their best albums. I don't know at that point if they're still indie sleaze. Does indie sleaze still exist? Is an indie sleaze band always indie sleaze?

• 29:15Speaker 04

  That's a good question.

• 29:15Speaker 05

  Or is it, once the movement is over, everybody goes home?

• 29:19Yasi Salek?

  There's so much I want to like, ask you about this statement, because this is something that I discovered in my Strokes research, which was like news to me, that an entire generation, which I presume is your generation, is like obsessed with late era Strokes.

• 29:32Speaker 05

  Well.

• 29:32Yasi Salek?

  Like their most streamed song on Spotify is not from the first two albums, which shocked and awed me.

• 29:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:40Yasi Salek?

  Cause I didn't really. I'll tell you right now.

• 29:42Speaker 05

  Probably the adults are talking.

• 29:43Yasi Salek?

  I think it is the adults.

• 29:44Speaker 05

  Which is a fucking banger.

• 29:46Speaker 04

  Wow. Man, this is a real act in making me feel old.

• 29:50Yasi Salek?

  It is. It's the, it's the adults are talking. More than last night.

• 29:53Speaker 05

  That is, that is, that is surprising.

• 29:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, to me, this band, I always love this band. Obviously they're kind of critical to, I was 19 when this record came out. An amazing act of being marketed to, you know? I really feel like the package that they put together, the sense of style, album cover, the way that they looked, the way they were like simultaneously aping, um, the Ramones and, uh, like Wire at the same time, was very appealing. And the way that the first album is produced and the way that the guitar sound and the way that it feels like it's slightly underwater.

• 30:29Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. The vocal, the like, the like far away vocal is very interesting.

• 30:33Speaker 04

  And the, and the way that the press like aided, especially the British press, as you said, like aided up and communicated to us how much it mattered, which did work, like hype does work sometimes. And it really worked for them, but I also thought the songs were good and I loved listening to the records.

• 30:46Yasi Salek?

  The first, I love the first two records. Rob, where, how did you come across them? Like, how old were you? Like?

• 30:53Speaker 05

  I was in high school. It was definitely through the singles off of Is This It? Right? It's like last night was probably like the shot across the bow of like, what the fuck is this?

• 31:01Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 31:02Speaker 05

  And then, I mean, you start, especially you start digging into that record. It's like, you would be lucky as any kind of band to have a last night, a hard to explain, a someday, a this, like the modern age, like if you get any of those songs on your first record or any record, you're doing something very right. But it, it's so stacked.

• 31:18Yasi Salek?

  To, to be fair, it's crazy when people will say the Strokes are bad. Like you're insane.

• 31:22Speaker 04

  No, they're great. Truly great.

• 31:24Yasi Salek?

  I worked at a record store in college. And so like that, I had, um, a coworker who looked like Rivers Cuomo, who showed me the Strokes and the White Stripes, like from Jump. It must, it might've even been the EP on the Strokes. And I was like, hell yeah, brother. And my best friend in college was convinced she was gonna marry, um, Nick Valensi.

• 31:44Speaker 04

  Did it work out?

• 31:45Yasi Salek?

  Did not happen. He likes older women.

• 31:47Speaker 05

  Wow. Life is long.

• 31:48Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, I, you know, I grew up in New York and we would go into the city on the weekends and go record shopping.

• 31:55Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 31:55Speaker 04

  And I remember my friend buying the modern age. I didn't buy it, but he was like, this is, this, this matters.

• 32:00Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 32:01Speaker 04

  This is a, this is a moment in time. And it kind of was.

• 32:04Yasi Salek?

  They had a really charmed, uh, Forrest Gump-esque ascent into, you know, being big.

• 32:10Speaker 04

  But didn't, but we're not like Def Leppard, you know, like they didn't sell 20 million albums.

• 32:14Yasi Salek?

  No, no, they were lapped by Kings of Leon and The Killers and many of the bands that came in their wake, actually.

• 32:20Speaker 05

  But they still snuck into that, like you'll hear one of these songs at the grocery store kind of lane. So it's like, just big enough and I mean, certainly sell out and play monster venues.

• 32:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:29Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 32:30Speaker 04

  But last night was hard in rotation on MTV, like on TRL.

• 32:34Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, totally. Totally.

• 32:36Speaker 04

  Okay. You have a pick.

• 32:37Yasi Salek?

  I do. Okay. I'm gonna go best front person.

• 32:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:40Yasi Salek?

  Cause I want to stake my claim early for Karen O.

• 32:43Speaker 04

  Yes. Yeah. This is the number two overall pick in my opinion.

• 32:46Speaker 05

  I think. Yeah, it has to be. These to me are the two most competitive.

• 32:49Yasi Salek?

  In that category?

• 32:50Speaker 05

  No, I think like if you had to do the big board of value, it goes Strokes and Karen O in the top two. That is, I think that's right.

• 32:56Yasi Salek?

  I wouldn't, Strokes wasn't my top one for the band. So I already knew that that was not giving me a problem. I'm sorry.

• 33:01Speaker 05

  You're an iconoclast and you always have been.

• 33:03Yasi Salek?

  It's just not how I feel. Um, I think Karen O, and I said this on the YAS podcast. I think she's one of the greatest front people that's ever existed. She's like the mixture of performance and wildness and also like, I don't know how to say it, like she has, you could tell she has within her this like negative charisma thing that Kurt Cobain and them had. It's like a very like, look at me, but also don't look at me. And she's just so uninhibited and free and her voice is so cool. And she wasn't afraid to look ugly and she's not ugly. She's a beautiful one. That's not what I'm saying.

• 33:45Yasi Salek?

  But she wasn't afraid to be sort of monstrous on stage. Yeah. To like, to have this very like primal, you know, carnal pose on stage, which I, I think, you know, I think puts her in a class of her own. She's incredible.

• 34:03Speaker 05

  Well, it kind of, she needed that cognitive split, I think.

• 34:06Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 34:06Speaker 05

  Of like of clearly separating who I am on stage, of understanding more than literally anyone else who's ever lived. Sometimes you need to like down a few margaritas and cover yourself in olive oil and go to work. And boy, does she does do it. Like, I just think what she's able to channel in terms of chaos and raw power is just unlike anything else.

• 34:25Yasi Salek?

  But then also like so much vulnerability.

• 34:26Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 34:27Yasi Salek?

  You know, and all in one package. I think it's, it's amazing. And also to see like a Korean American woman occupy that space after like decades of that not being a situation, I think was really important.

• 34:40Speaker 04

  I think there's something really surprising about the first album too, which, you know, like there's not, there was no indication that a maps was coming from the band. Like if you were listening to them and listening to the EPs, they were like.

• 34:52Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, they're like really punky.

• 34:53Speaker 04

  Really punky and really noise, like a noise rock band. And she was screaming and screeching at the top of her lungs on every song. And so it, the first album feels like a little bit of a revelation in that way where they, they also sort of like instantaneously went pop in a way. That you, you might not have been expecting if you were in New York at the time.

• 35:11Yasi Salek?

  Right. If you were experiencing them in real time, but like, once you like kind of researched their trajectory, you, you see that like, oh, she was writing, you know, folk songs before that. She was playing a sidewalk cafe. Her and Nick Zinner had a more like folky project called Unitard. So it was all kind of there underneath the YAS of it. So it makes perfect sense that once it was time to make an album, you're going to go back to some of those songs too and sort of even out. And it's that album.

• 35:36Speaker 04

  But I think, I think in this case for it is the best album of this whole period of time, but I have like a point of order question.

• 35:44Speaker 04

  So if you've taken Karen O, are all things YAS off the board?

• 35:48Yasi Salek?

  Okay. I don't like those. I don't like that restriction.

• 35:51Speaker 04

  So like Fever to Tell is on the board.

• 35:53Speaker 05

  It's on the board.

• 35:55Speaker 04

  Fever to Tell might be my most listened to album from this, from this particular movement.

• 35:59Yasi Salek?

  It's really up there for me. It's, it's psychotic.

• 36:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:03Yasi Salek?

  For a first album.

• 36:04Speaker 04

  It's under 40 minutes. It is perfectly paced.

• 36:09Yasi Salek?

  And it's, it's a real side.

• 36:11Speaker 04

  I suspect we might be. Oh, yeah. I don't want to be boring and follow YAS with YAS, but it's like, and it's Dave C. Tech, right? Who is in, in TV on the radio and is producing at the time in the scene in Brooklyn. And I don't think they ever got close to this feeling ever again. I really liked some of the later albums, but

• 36:33Speaker 04

  maybe I'll, maybe I'll just take a break on YAS and think about what I should take instead.

• 36:36Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 36:36Speaker 04

  So we've got a band and a front person off the board.

• 36:39Yasi Salek?

  You're always thinking about the entertainment and I appreciate that about you.

• 36:43Speaker 04

  I mean, my favorite band is the White Stripes from this period.

• 36:46Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, be honest.

• 36:47Speaker 04

  I have, I have to just take them.

• 36:48Yasi Salek?

  Go with your heart, Ben.

• 36:50Speaker 04

  And it probably won't be the last time I talk about them. To your question earlier about like, as you get older, are you still doing it? Like Jack White is not making indie sleaze right now. I listened to the new Jack White album and I was like, this is pretty cool. But like, it's just so iterative of the last five solo albums that he's made. And the absolute fury, not of White Blood Cells to me, but the first two albums, which I think are, and we talked about it when we did the episode, which was a very long episode.

• 37:14Yasi Salek?

  Sean Fantasy on the White Stripes.

• 37:15Speaker 04

  But he, you know, whatever he was cooking up at that time in his upholstery studio, recording on like eight track, I don't know. It like, sounds like shit, but sounds like the best, to me, it's like, it sounds like the best rock and roll music like ever recorded. It is up there.

• 37:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 37:31Speaker 04

  With, um, you know, Chuck Berry and fucking early Rolling Stones albums. Like I, I think it's just so raw and primal and fun.

• 37:39Yasi Salek?

  Really bold.

• 37:40Speaker 04

  And I, I just, I really fell in love completely with that band and seeing that band when I was living in New York was very powerful because obviously they were just a duo. And Meg was entrancing, intoxicating and watching her.

• 37:54Yasi Salek?

  Their coolness comes from that part of the band.

• 37:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. And watching them kind of work together and watching him like set the timing on every song and just like them just like sharing a glance. And at the time, the, the faux mystery.

• 38:06Yasi Salek?

  Are they brother and sister? Are they married?

• 38:07Speaker 04

  The marriage certificate, you know, all the stuff we learned. Oh my God, they're divorced now. Like all of that stuff was just a really fun little wrinkle. I don't know if they were like indie sleazy.

• 38:18Yasi Salek?

  Well.

• 38:18Speaker 04

  Ish. Kind of. They were very rock to me.

• 38:21Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, they were like, it's where like the boundaries get blurred, right? They were part of that first wave. So in that sense, like genre wise, you have to count them.

• 38:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:32Yasi Salek?

  But they were in Detroit.

• 38:35Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 38:35Yasi Salek?

  They were not, they were way more straightforward.

• 38:38Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 38:39Yasi Salek?

  And like Jack, it's a really interesting comparison, Jack White to Julian Casablanca's, cause like, there was no way in hell Julian Casablanca's was going to be the man representing rock and roll for the next three decades and like at the rock and roll hall of fame. You know what I mean? That was going to be Jack White because that's like what his positioning on earth is.

• 38:58Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 38:59Yasi Salek?

  That's not what Julian Casablanca's was about, which does make the Strokes a little more sleazy.

• 39:03Speaker 05

  Well, it's also, it's also what makes them more indie. Like to your point, Sean, about like what Jack White and the White Stripes become, like if you've written maybe the most identifiable melody in human history, can you also be indie? And I think at this point, the answer is still yes, because Seven Nation Army hasn't taken on that life yet.

• 39:20Yasi Salek?

  Well, we haven't even litigated the indie term of it because many of these bands were on major labels. The Strokes were immediately on a major label.

• 39:27Speaker 05

  It's true.

• 39:27Yasi Salek?

  Doesn't, who's indie really?

• 39:29Speaker 04

  I mean, the White Stripes were indie. Like they were, I think they were on sympathy for the music industry. It was the first record, maybe even the second record too. And that, I mean, that's a tiny label in the Midwest. So the, at the beginning, yes, but I wasn't really up on them. I wasn't, I maybe just still was like communicated to me as a record you should buy, but I wasn't so deep in the weeds on this particular strain of music. It was really only when the singles for White Blood Cells hit.

• 39:54Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 39:55Speaker 04

  I immediately went back and when I did go back, those, those are still the albums that I love the most. And the other thing was just like the color coordination, the quality of the music video, like they had a package that was very conceived, but also felt very handmade, that I think is kind of essential to the first stages of this stuff. Okay. I'm, that, that, I feel comfortable with that.

• 40:16Yasi Salek?

  I'm happy for you.

• 40:17Speaker 04

  I'll, I have another pick, right?

• 40:18Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 40:20Speaker 04

  Then I'll, I'll kind of go to the complete flip side and take House of Jealous Lovers by The Rapture.

• 40:25Yasi Salek?

  Best song.

• 40:25Speaker 04

  Which for best song, which I think is like, kind of the urtext, right? It's sort of like the foundational idea for the genre.

• 40:32Yasi Salek?

  That means.

• 40:35Speaker 04

  It usually means like the first of something.

• 40:38Yasi Salek?

  The urtext?

• 40:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:39Yasi Salek?

  Okay, got it.

• 40:40Speaker 04

  And I, I do, and, and sort of like the first and the sort of essential, like the most, the most definitive.

• 40:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 40:46Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 40:47Speaker 05

  But also kind of unlocks like Rosetta Stone-ish everything.

• 40:50Yasi Salek?

  Cause like, yeah, if you wanted to be really like pedantic, you would say the Fisher Spooner song is first. But this is the song that sort of like launches the genre.

• 41:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, and makes it like kind of pop. You know, not, not totally pop, because this wasn't a song that you would see on MTV, but.

• 41:10Yasi Salek?

  No, but if you were in a club, honey, it was coming on and you were throwing ass.

• 41:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:14Yasi Salek?

  And you were drinking sparks and you were throwing ass.

• 41:16Speaker 04

  To me, this, um, they're very similar to the AAS where if you listen to that, you know, Out of the Races and On to the Tracks.

• 41:24Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 41:24Speaker 04

  It's like a noise rock band. They're just like trying to be Gang of Four or Y or something.

• 41:28Yasi Salek?

  They came out of the hardcore scene in San Diego. They were, they were like an indie rock band. They were signed to Sub Pop, you know?

• 41:33Speaker 04

  Yeah. And that stuff sounds so, so, so, so different. Once they put a backbeat on, on their songs, but.

• 41:38Yasi Salek?

  Sometimes you meet James Murphy and your whole life changes, Ben.

• 41:41Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yasi, I think you introduced a great litmus test as far as what is indie sleaze and what is not. Would you throw ass to this is like as close as we're going to get to Potter Stewart in this debate.

• 41:50Yasi Salek?

  If you're going to like throw ass to Interpol.

• 41:51Speaker 05

  You, someone might.

• 41:52Speaker 04

  You might. I assure you someone has.

• 41:54Yasi Salek?

  That's true. You're right. You're so right. Um, it's a fucking amazing song. There's not enough cowbell in my opinion.

• 42:01Speaker 04

  Agreed. You might say you'd want more.

• 42:03Yasi Salek?

  You might say you want more cowbell. Yeah. It's incredible. That whole album, honestly, echoes like start to finish is, I think people really forget how good that album is.

• 42:12Speaker 04

  Huge fan.

• 42:12Yasi Salek?

  Great, great pick.

• 42:13Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 42:22Yasi Salek?

  Okay, I'm gonna try to be strategic since I know I'm with two of the most competitive drafters on the planet.

• 42:28Speaker 04

  No losers today.

• 42:30Yasi Salek?

  Are there usually losers?

• 42:31Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 42:32Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 42:32Speaker 04

  Especially when, when Mahoney McGee over here is like trying to swoop in and take picture people.

• 42:37Yasi Salek?

  What made you like this? Like what?

• 42:39Speaker 05

  I thought the point was to draft good stuff and I feel like I'm villainized for doing that on every draft I go to.

• 42:44Yasi Salek?

  No, I'm just curious, you just seem very competitive. You're very interested in winning.

• 42:48Speaker 05

  I, I wanna talk about the stuff I like. And if that stuff overlaps with the stuff you like, I'm sorry to say, it, it may just be on my board.

• 42:58Yasi Salek?

  Should I be interesting or should I be honest?

• 43:00Speaker 05

  Both.

• 43:02Speaker 04

  I, I always say honest.

• 43:04Yasi Salek?

  Cause I have, I have two.

• 43:06Speaker 05

  Okay, first of all, you don't always say honest.

• 43:08Speaker 04

  I do always say honest.

• 43:09Speaker 05

  I saw you sit there in front of me and many of our friends and who knows how many listeners and draft Inception, a movie you don't even like.

• 43:15Speaker 04

  And what did I say it was out of 10?

• 43:16Yasi Salek?

  Six out of 10, many people.

• 43:18Speaker 04

  Was that honest or was that not honest?

• 43:19Speaker 05

  I guess you were honest, but the selection was not honest.

• 43:21Yasi Salek?

  That's not authentic with your heart that you love it.

• 43:23Speaker 04

  No, exactly. It's a game.

• 43:25Speaker 05

  That's not honest.

• 43:27Speaker 04

  Games are not about only honesty.

• 43:29Speaker 05

  Oh, I see.

• 43:30Speaker 04

  Games are about success with truth.

• 43:32Speaker 05

  What a narrative we have woven here.

• 43:34Yasi Salek?

  I think we all come from different places here, I guess.

• 43:37Speaker 04

  Look at your notes, oh my goodness.

• 43:39Yasi Salek?

  You know, I, you know, well, you guys just seem to, you have that thing where you remember everything. I'm in perimenopause, honey. I'm luteal as hell, I simply cannot be grasping for information.

• 43:50Speaker 04

  Written a great amount of detail next to every potential choice.

• 43:54Speaker 05

  She loves a doc.

• 43:55Speaker 04

  And you do love a doc. I do love a doc too.

• 43:58Yasi Salek?

  I'll do Best Band.

• 43:59Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 44:00Yasi Salek?

  And I'm gonna do Yaya's.

• 44:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:01Yasi Salek?

  And I'm sorry that that's boring.

• 44:03Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 44:03Speaker 05

  It's not though.

• 44:04Yasi Salek?

  But that is, I really believe that with my heart and soul. I think that is the best band of this entire milieu. I think they are head and shoulders above everyone else. I think they were more interesting. I think they were more boundary pushing. I think if you look at their, the totality of their discography, it is better and more even. And as a whole, more listenable.

• 44:31Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 44:32Yasi Salek?

  I mean, it's Blitz, bitch.

• 44:34Speaker 05

  Come on.

• 44:34Yasi Salek?

  Come on. Heads Will Roll?

• 44:38Speaker 04

  The Heads Will Roll remix also.

• 44:41Yasi Salek?

  By DJ A-Track?

• 44:42Speaker 04

  Is one of those like kind of critical documents of this entire movement.

• 44:47Yasi Salek?

  I think are really, not me holding my, my emotional support post flags. I think Yaya's really straddle in a way both the strains of Indie's that we've talked about because like they have like, as to your point, many songs you can throw ass to. Also, they really courted the DJ culture, you know? You have many Diplo remixes, you have A-Track remixes, you have all these, I think they had a really good The Faint remix, did I make that up?

• 45:19Yasi Salek?

  Just like incredible versions of their songs, which were already hard hitting and beat driven, but like, I think, I just think they're platonic ideal for me as an Indie sleaze band.

• 45:28Speaker 05

  Well, especially becoming more beat driven over time, like starting out more in that like screaming, snarling rock style we're talking about and getting into the It's Blitz era in particular, which is like so dancy and also so turned down whenever it wants to be. Yasi, it was like genuinely shocking listening to your episode about Yaya's, hearing that Karen O doesn't think she has a great or like conventional voice.

• 45:49Yasi Salek?

  Shocked me.

• 45:50Speaker 05

  I mean, she's the best voice of any band we're gonna talk about.

• 45:53Yasi Salek?

  I was like, would you like to hear me sing there? Because we can talk about what, what is or is. Also, I'm sorry, I think justice for, what's the album that everyone is like, kind of like not into?

• 46:04Speaker 04

  The second one?

• 46:05Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 46:05Speaker 04

  Mosquito?

• 46:06Yasi Salek?

  Mosquito.

• 46:07Speaker 05

  Mosquito is the one.

• 46:08Yasi Salek?

  I think Mosquito's really cool.

• 46:10Speaker 04

  I've been spending a lot of time with it. Um, and I don't, I'm not sure if I've even heard Cool It Down.

• 46:15Yasi Salek?

  Cool Down is really good.

• 46:16Speaker 04

  Probably something I need to.

• 46:17Yasi Salek?

  Cool Down is one of those like shocking late era albums that you're like, oh, you have no business making an album. You know how that happens sometimes?

• 46:25Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 46:26Yasi Salek?

  Like The Cure just did it. There's like, you have no business making an album this good, this many years in. It's amazing. Mosquito's very strange and I understand why it's a little inaccessible to some people. You have fucking Dr. Octagon as a feature on there.

• 46:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:39Yasi Salek?

  Get fucked. Who's cooler than that? I'm sorry.

• 46:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:41Yasi Salek?

  Dr. Octagonogologist? I can't even say it. Dr. Octogynecologist.

• 46:46Speaker 04

  You got it.

• 46:46Yasi Salek?

  One of the best albums of all time.

• 46:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:48Yasi Salek?

  Blue Flowers.

• 46:48Speaker 04

  Blue Flowers.

• 46:49Yasi Salek?

  Let's fucking go.

• 46:49Speaker 05

  I have the next pick, right?

• 46:50Speaker 04

  You do.

• 46:51Speaker 05

  Let's just continue it, cause I'll just select Fever to Tell on Best Album.

• 46:54Speaker 04

  Oh my god.

• 46:54Speaker 05

  And let's just like get a lot of the Yaya's off the board.

• 46:56Yasi Salek?

  That was the one I was like considering that I was like, I'd rather choose, see, this is only proving my point that the Yaya's are the best band.

• 47:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 47:03Yasi Salek?

  They're taking a lot of board space.

• 47:05Speaker 05

  Well, plus in the, in the throw ass litmus test, I think it's.

• 47:09Yasi Salek?

  I'm really sorry that I've introduced that term into your, your beautiful, your beautiful unblemished brain.

• 47:15Speaker 05

  I think it's physically impossible to listen to this album and not move. It, Yasi, if you put a gun to my head and you said you can save your life if you just don't tap a toe or dance or headbang in any way, I would hand you a towel, I would apologize for the mess and I would say goodbye.

• 47:29Yasi Salek?

  What if I put the gun to your head and said you can win the draft if you don't dance?

• 47:32Speaker 05

  I'd.

• 47:33Yasi Salek?

  Like this.

• 47:34Speaker 05

  I'd also think I could do it. I would, I would gladly take the L. I just think like it's, I mean.

• 47:40Speaker 04

  I had, I had Date with the Night as my number two song on my best song list.

• 47:44Speaker 05

  A ripper.

• 47:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. So many of the songs on this album are like under two and a half minutes too. They're just, they're in and they're out.

• 47:49Yasi Salek?

  Sorry, how many other fucking stone cold rock and roll bangers do you know about a woman masturbating?

• 47:55Speaker 05

  Not enough.

• 47:55Yasi Salek?

  Not enough.

• 47:56Speaker 05

  Not enough.

• 47:57Speaker 04

  That would be a good draft.

• 47:59Speaker 05

  Date with the Night too, you can, you can smell the club that that song is being played in. And like, I love that visceral part about this album. Maps becomes this like self-evident thing.

• 48:08Yasi Salek?

  Why Control?

• 48:09Speaker 05

  Why, Why Control?

• 48:11Yasi Salek?

  Fuck me up.

• 48:12Speaker 05

  I think, I think has a great case for the best Yaya's song, period.

• 48:16Speaker 05

  All bitterness, all frustration, all this like bottled up stuff that makes Karen O go. And so to me Fever to Tell, I've probably spent the most time, as you were saying, Sean, like with this album, listening to this album over the years, over and over and over. Maps as the gateway drug, cause that was the song that was being passed around like blog, like random blogger.com sites at that point.

• 48:37Yasi Salek?

  Also, can I, can I make a, just case for this being the most, maybe not the best, but the most Indie sleaze album cover of all time?

• 48:43Speaker 05

  Oh yeah, I like that.

• 48:44Yasi Salek?

  Shout out to Cody Krishlow who did it, who is like an incredible artist himself. He goes by Sean, but he's, does music videos and creative direction, art direction, did the Perfume Genius album. He's like an incredible artist, but that was his first ever piece of art. He was in art school and did that. And it's, it's so that, when I look at that album cover, I'm like, that's what this time looked like and felt like.

• 49:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's also something about it being an Interscope album and it feeling like that pipeline was still possible, where you were like a cool indie band and the major label swooped in and they're like, there's something here. These kids are stars. And it going wide and then having a hit single and selling out. And then I, you know, Maps is like a legitimately generational classic.

• 49:27Yasi Salek?

  Maps will be played at weddings till kingdom come. Also, they had the best, well, most interesting manager, the most Indie sleaze manager, Asif Ahmed, who managed a lot of these bands, but was apparently an absolute lunatic and at one point bit Jimmy Iovine's arm at like a dinner. Like he was just like a wild person and I'm obsessed with the stories about him. Come on the pod. Awesome. Okay, whose turn is it now? Is it still Rob?

• 49:51Speaker 05

  I think it's still me.

• 49:51Speaker 04

  Rob goes again.

• 49:52Speaker 05

  I think there are some great songs by the bands we've already named, but I do wanna diversify a little bit. There's a version of this draft that is very heavy, Yaya's White Stripe Strokes.

• 50:00Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 50:00Speaker 05

  I would like to select instead, TV on the radios, Wolf Like Me for Best Song.

• 50:05Yasi Salek?

  Wonderful.

• 50:06Speaker 05

  Because are you fucking kidding me with this song?

• 50:09Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 50:09Speaker 04

  I, I, my, my picks for them would have been.

• 50:12Speaker 05

  A little downstream.

• 50:13Speaker 04

  Earlier.

• 50:14Speaker 05

  Yeah. Look, we, we get it.

• 50:15Speaker 04

  But Wolf Like Me is great.

• 50:16Speaker 05

  Look, you have the cooler picks. I'm gonna pick instead, maybe the greatest song ever. I, I just think if, look, if you, first of all, if you have not seen the live performance of the song on Letterman, stop this podcast.

• 50:29Speaker 04

  Unbelievable.

• 50:29Speaker 05

  Go listen to it, go watch it. And I think to me, it captures so much of what's special about TV on the radio, which is all these other bands, like they get the garage element or the club element or the dance element down. This album comes out, Return to Cookie Mountain, and it's like, this is a fully actualized, multi-layered sonic experience from the jump.

• 50:49Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 50:49Speaker 05

  And Wolf Like Me is, is just the pinnacle of that, the energy, the power. I don't think a single song has ever made me wanna be in a band more than this song. Just like be on stage, be a part of that energy. It is amazing, it's propulsive, just like it, it makes you wanna to pull in closer for some reason.

• 51:16Speaker 04

  The weirdest thing ever happened with this song. It showed up in a Spider-Man movie this summer.

• 51:20Yasi Salek?

  Really?

• 51:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's in Brand New Day. And it started and I was like-

• 51:24Yasi Salek?

  Good for them.

• 51:25Speaker 04

  Where was it in Brand New Day? It's near to the beginning, it's during like a montage with, for Peter. And I was like, wow, I'm fucking old, man. The filmmakers who are making Spider-Man movies are in their mid 40s. And they are reflecting on their youth in the same way that you just were about how much that song meant to them. And they managed to smuggle it into a fucking Spider-Man movie, which is now like the biggest movie of all time.

• 51:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 51:49Yasi Salek?

  Thank god, they deserve it.

• 51:50Speaker 04

  I hope they got paid a lot of money.

• 51:51Speaker 05

  Well, the Spider-Man soundtracks, historically, very important texts.

• 51:55Speaker 04

  True, true.

• 51:55Speaker 05

  So maybe this one will be too.

• 51:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, a lot of, lot of Nickelback.

• 51:59Speaker 05

  A lot of Nickelback, a lot of Dashboard Confessional, you know?

• 52:01Speaker 04

  True.

• 52:02Yasi Salek?

  I'm with Sean, I'm maybe partial to the earlier TV.

• 52:05Speaker 04

  Bomb yourself staring at the sun.

• 52:06Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, staring at the sun.

• 52:07Speaker 04

  Those were the two for me that I fucking loved.

• 52:09Yasi Salek?

  They were more the band that I felt I got to experience in real time because like, that was, I mean, we're not like friends or anything. But I would like, I hung out at Max Fish, like, that's where they were.

• 52:19Speaker 04

  They were around, yeah.

• 52:20Yasi Salek?

  We went to their shows.

• 52:21Speaker 04

  Kip and Tunde, they were just out.

• 52:23Yasi Salek?

  Totally. God, they were so good.

• 52:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:25Yasi Salek?

  They were so good live. Yeah, I'm sure they still are, I haven't seen them in a while.

• 52:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:30Yasi Salek?

  Actually, I did, I saw them like last year at, maybe Just Like Heaven? That sounds about right. Good pick, Rob.

• 52:35Speaker 05

  Thank you, great pick.

• 52:38Speaker 04

  You're up.

• 52:39Yasi Salek?

  It's me?

• 52:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:42Yasi Salek?

  I'm gonna do best album. I'm gonna do Silent Alarm by Block Party.

• 52:48Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 52:50Yasi Salek?

  Block Party is incredible.

• 52:53Speaker 05

  They're so good.

• 52:53Yasi Salek?

  This album, I put it on again this morning and I was just like knocked over by how incredible every song is.

• 53:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 53:02Yasi Salek?

  His voice, just like, how emotionally jarring and, and just, oh, what a fucking album.

• 53:11Yasi Salek?

  I love it, I got to see them play, I think it's CineSpace, I want to say, I might be making this up, like, it's a little bit later, it's 2005. But I think they're pretty firmly indie sleaze in this world.

• 53:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:22Yasi Salek?

  Silent Alarm is just like a stone cold classic album.

• 53:25Speaker 05

  This is one of those emerging from your bubble moments for me where I just assumed everyone had a deep and intimate relationship with the song This Modern Love. And then I come out and I'm like, not only do they not, but it's like, not even one of the five or six most popular songs on this album somehow.

• 53:39Yasi Salek?

  I love that, they also played Just Like Heaven a year or two ago and I was like crying when that song- Blue Light?

• 53:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 53:46Yasi Salek?

  Bye. But obviously Banquet is the fucking jam.

• 53:49Speaker 05

  Banquet's good, I mean, Helicopter.

• 53:51Yasi Salek?

  Like Eating Glass.

• 53:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 53:52Yasi Salek?

  It's, it's amazing. I don't think people talk about Block Party enough, to be honest.

• 53:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, I feel like they had a pretty precipitous falloff of the first two albums.

• 53:59Yasi Salek?

  They really changed their sound a bit.

• 54:01Speaker 04

  It's true, yeah. But he, he was also, I think, just such a great frontman and, you know, there, there are a lot of British bands who are a part of this, but also not- It's kind of a, it's kind of a tricky crossover, you know, you can almost feel them responding to what's happening in, in New York, which is very different historically from how the way the British invasion so dramatically influenced American bands.

• 54:25Yasi Salek?

  But arguably, the big, some of the biggest, I mean, the Arctic Monkeys exist solely because The Strokes existed, you know? And now they're-

• 54:33Speaker 04

  I suspect they'll come up here.

• 54:34Yasi Salek?

  A massive, massive band.

• 54:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're, I mean, they're the single biggest band that's come out of this entire movement.

• 54:39Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. But you know, the Libertines, many people will live and die for the Libertines.

• 54:44Speaker 04

  I've got them on, I've got them on a long list somewhere here.

• 54:46Yasi Salek?

  And then there's so many more with Klaxons, there's a lot more if you want to like really dig down, Foles, I think are a British band.

• 54:51Speaker 05

  Yes, I think it worked in Block Party's favor in such a unique way though, where it's like, they're not the British band that sounds American in delivery. It's like, you, you hear the accent every syllable. And it's like, it gives them such a unique feel right out of the gate with-

• 55:04Yasi Salek?

  They feel really in the lineage of like A Joint Division, like, they are a post-punk band, you know, in that, in that direct DNA. God, I love them, I love that album. Is it Double Me?

• 55:16Speaker 04

  No, it's Double Me.

• 55:17Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 55:18Speaker 04

  Okay, let's talk through this a little bit. I'm gonna take LCD Sound System LCD Sound System.

• 55:22Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 55:23Speaker 04

  The first LCD Sound System album.

• 55:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 55:24Speaker 04

  Which I think is much like House of Jealous Lovers, like foundational, essential, because the album comes out in 05. There's a lot of LCD songs and, and, and mixes that have come before this. And James Murphy and Tim Goldstone?

• 55:40Yasi Salek?

  Goldsberry?

• 55:40Speaker 04

  Golds, no, Goldsberry?

• 55:42Yasi Salek?

  I believe so.

• 55:43Speaker 04

  Really?

• 55:43Yasi Salek?

  Gold's Worthy?

• 55:44Speaker 04

  Gold's Worthy, thank you.

• 55:46Yasi Salek?

  See, this is Perry Mennys, honey.

• 55:48Speaker 04

  This isn't my favorite LCD Sound System album, but it is the most important.

• 55:52Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 55:52Speaker 04

  I, I probably would, if I had to just put them in the CD changer, would put, this is happening in first, then Sound of Silver, then the self-titled album. But Daft Punk is playing at my house.

• 56:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 56:04Speaker 04

  And-

• 56:04Yasi Salek?

  Losing My Edge.

• 56:05Speaker 04

  Losing My Edge, I think defined something intellectually and attitudinally about the movement that didn't exist before it. There was, because these bands were not meta or self-aware, they were revival acts in a lot of ways. You could say, yeah, yes, pushed something forward, or White Stripes were trying to break something that had not been, you know, played properly. But this was actually specifically philosophically felt different.

• 56:34Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 56:35Speaker 04

  And also the songs bang, like, they're just good, they're really, really good dance records. And also, if, you know, I was, I was living in New York and going to bars and clubs in 2004, 2005, and you just heard them non-fucking-stop.

• 56:47Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. James Murphy is like a fascinating character also.

• 56:50Speaker 04

  Very much.

• 56:51Yasi Salek?

  What an interesting, bizarre person.

• 56:54Speaker 04

  I never came across him, like, I never met him, I never interviewed him.

• 56:57Yasi Salek?

  I just, just as, I mean, I don't know him, but just from my research, like, he was, you know, already a bit older, had played in indie rock bands, you know? Had stumbled into this like insane situation with like, a borderline benefactor.

• 57:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:10Yasi Salek?

  Who bought a building and was like, you can have a studio in it.

• 57:14Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 57:14Yasi Salek?

  But also was this like savant who like, you know, pre-sampling, knew every single reference. Just really interesting. And I, I love the story we told in the House of Jealous Lovers episode, but like, you know, he was clearly such a creative person. And after like funneling his creativity into The Rapture, and then, you know, they, probably if you ask him, abandoned him, you know, they left DFA.

• 57:38Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 57:39Yasi Salek?

  And, and then in one year, that happened, his parents died and 9/11 happened, and he, then he made LCD. It's like such like, what an origin story, you know?

• 57:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:51Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, and he was like, fuck it, I'm gonna make Losing My Edge, you know? And then had to put together a band in like two seconds and go play it in England.

• 57:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was thinking about like comparable movements in recent artistic history. And we don't have a lot of those like in our popular culture, but I was thinking about the Nouvelle Vague and French cinema and like, who are the different figures who represent? And he really is kind of like, he's like the Godard, he's the one who's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know everything that happened before this. But in order to go forward, we have to kind of break it and cut away and get down to the barest essence of what is good about this. And I think he does that with punk and with dance music, like, that is what, especially early LCD, is these kind of raw materials records that are so- And they're like arch and funny.

• 58:35Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 58:36Speaker 04

  And, and compelling, and they have reverence, but also the irreverence is sort of the point, so.

• 58:42Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 58:43Speaker 04

  Just a, just a great band.

• 58:43Yasi Salek?

  I think you could make the argument that maybe Sophie is like a later example. Yeah, or, no, just like another person that sort of created an entire, not created, but like was the arbiter of this whole hyperpop thing and was like such a visionary, you know? There's stuff that I'm just not that familiar with, you know, we're 44, but I know that there's new movements.

• 59:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, of course.

• 59:04Yasi Salek?

  That are like, just not within our parlance. You have two. You have a second one?

• 59:10Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 59:12Speaker 04

  So I've got album, song, and band.

• 59:16Yasi Salek?

  Correct.

• 59:18Speaker 04

  Front person.

• 59:19Yasi Salek?

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:21Speaker 04

  Is MIA a front person?

• 59:23Speaker 05

  Not really a band. Isn't MIA just MIA?

• 59:26Yasi Salek?

  I don't think it has to, I mean-

• 59:28Speaker 05

  Just artist or front person?

• 59:29Yasi Salek?

  You know, I'm not, I'm not rigid on this.

• 59:31Speaker 04

  Okay, I mean, there are not a lot of solo artists in this movement.

• 59:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 59:35Speaker 04

  There's something-

• 59:36Yasi Salek?

  Uffy?

• 59:38Speaker 04

  Sure. That's kind of-

• 59:39Speaker 05

  Icon or artist.

• 59:40Speaker 04

  Third tier, yeah, I loved-

• 59:43Yasi Salek?

  Great stuff.

• 59:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, if, I mean, if you'll allow it, I think I would go with MIA, because I think she did, you know, when, when I first started seeing her and experiencing her, Diplo was on stage with her.

• 59:54Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 59:54Speaker 04

  DJing, and a part of that, and they very much felt like a duo, and he produced the entire first album.

• 1:00:00Yasi Salek?

  Peaches.

• 1:00:01Speaker 04

  Yeah. Peaches, for sure. And I feel like Peaches predates-

• 1:00:05Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 1:00:05Speaker 04

  Even all of this stuff, right?

• 1:00:06Yasi Salek?

  About 2000s.

• 1:00:07Speaker 04

  2000, okay.

• 1:00:08Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, maybe late 90s, but I think her big song was 2000.

• 1:00:10Speaker 04

  Right. I mean, she's like a complicated figure now, right? And that's some weird shit, so I'm not representing for all that, but the first three albums-

• 1:00:18Yasi Salek?

  You don't have her protective gear for mind control?

• 1:00:22Speaker 04

  No, is that something she, she sports?

• 1:00:25Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, she, she manufactured it.

• 1:00:27Speaker 04

  Should we, should we get some of that?

• 1:00:28Yasi Salek?

  I would love to be gifted.

• 1:00:29Speaker 04

  Next pot? Is it like a visor? What is it?

• 1:00:32Yasi Salek?

  I think there's something-

• 1:00:32Speaker 04

  A feast of yando visor?

• 1:00:33Yasi Salek?

  Jacket, hat, there's like, I think, a laptop cover.

• 1:00:36Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 1:00:37Yasi Salek?

  A bag.

• 1:00:38Speaker 04

  To protect from the waves?

• 1:00:39Yasi Salek?

  From the 5G, yeah.

• 1:00:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. Where do you stand on that?

• 1:00:42Speaker 05

  On 5G?

• 1:00:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:42Speaker 05

  I'm pro, I think.

• 1:00:44Speaker 04

  Okay, you're pro the brain damage?

• 1:00:47Speaker 05

  No, not the brain damage.

• 1:00:48Yasi Salek?

  Cancer?

• 1:00:48Speaker 05

  The global communication, I'm pro.

• 1:00:51Speaker 04

  Global communication, got it.

• 1:00:52Yasi Salek?

  I think we have probably too, too much global communication.

• 1:00:54Speaker 05

  I mean, that's also a fair point.

• 1:00:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm, I've been daydreaming on Life in the Forest, so.

• 1:01:00Speaker 05

  There's some time that comes up every few weeks.

• 1:01:02Yasi Salek?

  This is like really, not related, but it's been on my mind, you know how the Native Americans said that when your photo is taken, it steals a bit of your soul?

• 1:01:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:11Yasi Salek?

  Where do you think we land on that spectrum, having ourselves filmed multiple times a week?

• 1:01:15Speaker 05

  Oh, the souls are stolen. They've been fed into an AI machine and they're making holograms of us as we speak.

• 1:01:19Yasi Salek?

  Not an ounce of soul left in us.

• 1:01:20Speaker 05

  Not a bit.

• 1:01:21Yasi Salek?

  Great.

• 1:01:22Speaker 04

  Just assumes I had any soul in the first place, which I'm not sure that I actually did. But I loved MIA and I loved her music, I loved what she was about.

• 1:01:32Yasi Salek?

  You know who helped her initially make music that was not Diplo? Her roommate, Justine Fishman of Elastica.

• 1:01:39Speaker 05

  That I did know. Was it her roommate? And was she like, but they're not the same age.

• 1:01:43Yasi Salek?

  No, Justine Fishman is older, yeah. I don't know why they live together.

• 1:01:47Speaker 05

  I know that I always read that she was like a mentor, like a teacher to her in some way. Like she, Maya was in art school.

• 1:01:53Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:54Speaker 05

  Justine Fishman was somehow associated with the school. I couldn't figure out what the connection was there. Maybe they like to party, who knows?

• 1:02:00Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:01Speaker 05

  But she did seem, speaking of iconoclast, very iconoclastic. And she was very different, you know, not a white person in this scene, a very, very rare, non-white person.

• 1:02:10Yasi Salek?

  Cher, No, and TV and Radio being other exceptions.

• 1:02:13Speaker 05

  And, and she was dance music first.

• 1:02:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:16Speaker 05

  You know, she was pop, hip hop, club music. You know, obviously Diplo bringing a ton of his own interests and her background

• 1:02:26Speaker 05

  in England and her Tamil background, like that, both of those things influencing the sound and style and look of her music.

• 1:02:32Yasi Salek?

  It was a perfect intersection, a beautiful woman, first time you've ever heard the Tamil Tigers, a world music vulture like Diplo.

• 1:02:40Speaker 05

  Very much.

• 1:02:40Yasi Salek?

  But also very talented.

• 1:02:42Speaker 05

  Well, it's one of those things where like, I'm obsessed with recombinant cultures across the board. Like Beastie Boys are my favorite group of all time.

• 1:02:48Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:02:48Speaker 05

  So anybody who's kind of like grabbing with love, that's, I love filmmakers who do the same thing. We're just like, I love this and I want to reprocess it and share it with you. And I felt like she was, she was one of the best participants in that.

• 1:03:02Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Cool stuff. Love it.

• 1:03:10Speaker 00

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• 1:04:41Speaker 05

  Yasi, what are you feeling?

• 1:04:41Yasi Salek?

  Oh, it's me now?

• 1:04:42Speaker 05

  Back to you.

• 1:04:42Speaker 04

  You're up.

• 1:04:44Yasi Salek?

  We'll never understand the order of the drops. I guess I should go with best song.

• 1:04:54Speaker 05

  What have you done? What are you about to do?

• 1:04:57Yasi Salek?

  I just like know I shouldn't do this because it my, it'll make my board really one-sided. But I don't want to lie.

• 1:05:04Speaker 05

  Has a role?

• 1:05:05Yasi Salek?

  No, it's Y Control.

• 1:05:06Speaker 05

  Oh, sure.

• 1:05:07Yasi Salek?

  Y Control is the-

• 1:05:09Speaker 05

  You're going all Y Y Y's.

• 1:05:11Yasi Salek?

  I, I mean, I could say hard to explain by the Strokes, but I don't like it as much as Y Control. I think it's a great song, but if I'm just being a hundred percent honest.

• 1:05:19Speaker 05

  As you should.

• 1:05:20Yasi Salek?

  That is the best song that came out of, for me, this world. I mean, How to Tell Lover is really fucking good. But like, if we're talking like rip out my guts, emotional wrenching. I mean, the lyrics of this song, I wish I could buy back the woman you stole.

• 1:05:39Speaker 05

  Let's go.

• 1:05:40Yasi Salek?

  The, the economy of words that knocks you the fuck out, like, and it's a jam. It's just her, her vocal performance.

• 1:05:52Yasi Salek?

  My arm hair is standing up. It's just one of the best songs of all time, let alone from this milieu. So how could I not pick Y Control by the Y's?

• 1:06:08Speaker 05

  Fever to Tell, as I selected it, is a no skips album. But if I'm being honest with myself, I spent a lot of it waiting for Y Control. I'm like, I'm ready to hear that like siren opening of Y Control.

• 1:06:19Yasi Salek?

  When I used to DJ, I would bum people the fuck out with putting this on. But people also loved it, you know, it's, it's, it's still a danceable song.

• 1:06:27Speaker 05

  You can dance and be confronted by the lies you tell yourself to justify your existence, you know?

• 1:06:32Yasi Salek?

  Men.

• 1:06:35Yasi Salek?

  Targeted at men. Okay. So that's my best song. And then I have another pick?

• 1:06:40Speaker 05

  I believe it's mine.

• 1:06:42Yasi Salek?

  Oh, when do I get my double pick? Never? Oh, that's how that works.

• 1:06:46Speaker 05

  It's the burden you bear.

• 1:06:47Yasi Salek?

  That's fine. I don't need it. I was just curious. Also, you guys, can we make a, a, a note to circle back to a question I wanted to ask you regarding Christopher Ryan's controversial opinion on the watch that he thinks The Walkmen are much better than The Strokes?

• 1:07:06Speaker 05

  The Walkmen are great, but I, see, The Walkmen are-

• 1:07:09Yasi Salek?

  They're amazing.

• 1:07:10Speaker 05

  They're such a borderline band in this for me too, where it's like, clearly they're of this time. Clearly they're contemporaries with all these bands.

• 1:07:15Yasi Salek?

  Well, yeah, then they came out of Jonathan Fireeater.

• 1:07:17Speaker 05

  But they're also not sleaze enough, I don't think.

• 1:07:20Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:21Speaker 04

  Red Moon is my wedding song, so.

• 1:07:23Yasi Salek?

  Wow. So you're with Chris Ryan on this?

• 1:07:25Speaker 04

  I, I'm not sure if that's my opinion, but I have a huge, huge affection for Walkmen and, and especially Hamilton. I think he is like truly a special rock figure.

• 1:07:36Speaker 05

  Chris's argument, if I remember correctly, hinged on like, The Strokes have two good albums, which I'm sorry, I just, I can't sit here and accept this.

• 1:07:42Yasi Salek?

  Me and Chris are old, so.

• 1:07:44Speaker 05

  Look, some, some of us accept autotune Julian for what it is. And I'm not, I'm not gonna, we don't have to go down that route. We don't have to talk about the new record.

• 1:07:51Yasi Salek?

  I'll make, I'll make Chris litigate that when he comes on for the Strokes episode with Amanda.

• 1:07:55Speaker 05

  I need a front person still.

• 1:07:57Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 1:07:57Speaker 05

  I could take Julian Casablanca, I could take Jack White. I, I'm gonna take Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys.

• 1:08:03Yasi Salek?

  Wow, amazing.

• 1:08:05Speaker 05

  I think for, I'm looking in my, in the front person category of like, who can be the only person to do this exact thing? And the like very specific like rye and lyricism and stage presence that Alex Turner has to me is like completely inimitable. And I think it's a huge part of not only what has grabbed, will grab people from like, I bet you look good on the dance floor.

• 1:08:28Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:08:28Speaker 05

  But made AM like one of the biggest and longest lasting records of, I mean, certainly of my generation. I would argue with like the last 20 years or so.

• 1:08:35Yasi Salek?

  Do you know the Arctic Monkeys have like, I think more than eight billion streamed songs? I mean, they have more billion streamed songs than Rihanna.

• 1:08:42Speaker 05

  And how much of it is just like people spamming, like, do I want to know? You know, like, it's just, it's, it's a beautiful thing. I, I would never have guessed based off of their initial output that they would have had this kind of life.

• 1:08:54Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:08:54Speaker 05

  I think a lot of it is a testament to, if you have a compelling and somewhat mysterious and also like a frontman you can never quite pin down. Like, what, what does that do for you in terms of the mystique of your band?

• 1:09:04Yasi Salek?

  I think, you know, full disclosure and, and longtime listeners of the pod will know this. A, I was very late to Arctic Monkeys, because when did AM come out to them? Six?

• 1:09:13Speaker 05

  AM was way late.

• 1:09:14Yasi Salek?

  Sorry, no, what's the first, the first one?

• 1:09:16Speaker 05

  That, that one is 2006.

• 1:09:17Speaker 04

  What do people say I am or not?

• 1:09:19Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, that's a right around the time, as I mentioned, I was like, thank you so much. None of my business, new music. I will be listening to Dipset and The Strokes over here, or The Smiths over here. Don't talk to me. And then through a beautiful twist of fate, one of my best friends, Amanda Blank, married Matt Helder as the drummer of the Arctic Monkeys. And then I-

• 1:09:39Speaker 05

  You're in the family now.

• 1:09:40Yasi Salek?

  Well, yeah. And so now I've gone to many shows and I'm like, you know what? You guys were right. This band is really good. They laughed at me really hard because it was like the first show that I went to, I was in London. It was at like the Emirates, whatever, you know, stadium. And I was like, oh, and they're like, this is kind of a big band. But what I was gonna say is after that experience, I think your point about Alex Turner is totally spot on. But also they're incredible musicians.

• 1:10:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:10:07Yasi Salek?

  I think, you know, that is not always the case across the board. And a lot of these bands we're talking about, it's okay, it's not necessary, you know? Nick Zinner, I think is a phenomenal guitar player. There's a lot of good musicians sprinkled in here, but the Arctic Monkeys are just like, Matt Helder's is one of the best drummers I've ever seen drum live. They're just so tight. They've been playing together since they were teenagers. It's, it's like a sight to behold, them playing together. And I think like writing music like that, and also they go all over the place with like their interests. Like they might've been, I think the story is very cute that like, because Matt and Alex Turner were like best friends since they were children. They were like riding their bikes one day and Matt apparently, as the legend goes, handed The Strokes EP to Alex on the bike. And Alex was like, that's the day my life changed, you know?

• 1:10:52Yasi Salek?

  But they've evolved out of that, you know, into like so many different arenas. And I think they deserve like every accolade they have.

• 1:11:00Speaker 04

  I have the inverse relationship to the band where I, I literally reviewed the first four albums. And I was a real huge fan and believer. And I did feel like they were very clearly kind of aping a New York rock and roll sound. Especially on the first two records. And then you can hear, especially on the third album, Alex kind of like my propeller, like kind of leaning into the more loose, like frontman thing, which he's so good at. And then I was working at Granland like an absolute animal and I never, I didn't hear AM. Like I just didn't, I never even checked it out. And so I, I probably heard it like years after it came out. I think I might've listened to it because my little sister, who was probably like 11 or 12 at the time, was getting into them and that album.

• 1:11:45Speaker 05

  Oh, that, yeah, that album, I think it's huge, not only in the time, but as like a post-life, you can find this at Urban Outfitters, kind of like on vinyl situation. And it's just, it's grab people and grab people and grab people as it went. It's, it's an amazing record and I would say more than any of their other ones is like the, can you hold attention in silence? Or like the momentary pause between lines, you're just like waiting for the next bit of it to dribble out in a way that's like so intoxicating.

• 1:12:12Yasi Salek?

  And they made it despite that name, which is a whole other thing, you know?

• 1:12:17Speaker 05

  Um, so I have best blank Strokes and wildcard left.

• 1:12:21Yasi Salek?

  I like how we've all been avoiding best blank Strokes.

• 1:12:23Speaker 05

  Well, I think there's a lot of options.

• 1:12:24Yasi Salek?

  There's so many.

• 1:12:25Speaker 05

  These are the two deepest categories to me. Um, I'm gonna start with best blank Strokes. I'm gonna take this band Lime Garden. Are you guys familiar with Lime Garden?

• 1:12:33Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:12:33Yasi Salek?

  Not very familiar with Lime Garden. Wow, that, that is, you're taking a current band? Wow, you're stretching. I need to hear this, cause I don't know if I approve.

• 1:12:41Speaker 05

  I think it's.

• 1:12:42Yasi Salek?

  I love Lime Garden, they're wonderful. I talk about them all the time.

• 1:12:44Speaker 05

  To me, a huge part of indie sleaze as a movement is now the way it has taken on a whole different life. For the people who grew up with the Strokes, who have used them as a reference point throughout their entire lives. And what does that produce? And to me Lime Garden is the best Strokes, Charli XCX crossover act.

• 1:13:01Yasi Salek?

  Alice would love Lime Garden, you should play it for her. I was actually making her a playlist and I put Lime Garden on it, cause I think she'd really like it. Cause it's very.

• 1:13:08Speaker 04

  Have we talked since Party For You took over our house?

• 1:13:11Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 1:13:12Speaker 04

  Oh my god.

• 1:13:12Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so I, so I'm sure she'll really like it.

• 1:13:14Speaker 04

  We were just playing some Charlie in the house, but.

• 1:13:16Speaker 05

  Safe Charlie?

• 1:13:17Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:13:18Speaker 05

  Non-coke, non-coke division Charlie?

• 1:13:20Yasi Salek?

  I don't know that she would catch the reference, that's just five.

• 1:13:23Speaker 04

  I'll tell you who does is Eileen. And she's like, please turn this off. Um, uh, yeah, and she just, she just, she was feeling it. And then I showed her a picture of Charlie and she's like, whoa, wow.

• 1:13:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:13:34Speaker 04

  That's a lifestyle that I'm interested in.

• 1:13:36Speaker 05

  And isn't it, and isn't it very indie sleaze in its own way? And so like, I want a little bit of Charlie representation. I certainly want the Strokes influence. Lime Garden to me is like, I mean, it's, it's not just the sound, it's the attitude of what indie sleaze is about. And so I want to spin it forward a little bit, if you'll allow it.

• 1:13:52Speaker 04

  I love it.

• 1:13:52Yasi Salek?

  I'm gonna allow it just cause I love this band so much.

• 1:13:54Speaker 05

  Fair enough.

• 1:13:55Yasi Salek?

  It's not what I was expecting when I conceived of the category, but I think they're really good.

• 1:14:02Speaker 04

  I'm seeing on the Wiki here that the influences include Charli XCX, Block Party, Arctic Monkeys and the Strokes.

• 1:14:07Yasi Salek?

  They're so great.

• 1:14:08Speaker 04

  And LCD Soundsystem and MGMT and Phoenix.

• 1:14:10Yasi Salek?

  They put out an album this year?

• 1:14:12Speaker 05

  They did, it's quite good.

• 1:14:13Yasi Salek?

  It's so good, they're on So Young, which is a record, a label that I love. But yeah, they're, they're so good, they have a cover of Age of Consent that is just.

• 1:14:21Speaker 04

  Okay, Lime Garden, getting put on the stuff in this.

• 1:14:23Speaker 05

  There we go, love it.

• 1:14:24Yasi Salek?

  I'll finish up Alice's playlist and send it over and you can give it a listen.

• 1:14:28Speaker 04

  Yasi, you're up.

• 1:14:29Yasi Salek?

  Okay, great. I will do also, I guess all I have left is best under, underline Strokes.

• 1:14:37Speaker 04

  And wildcard.

• 1:14:37Yasi Salek?

  Oh, and wildcard, yeah. I'm just gonna say that it would be too easy to take Arctic Monkey, so I'm not gonna do that.

• 1:14:43Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:14:44Yasi Salek?

  Um, cause I think that's almost cheating.

• 1:14:47Speaker 05

  They're too big, I think.

• 1:14:48Yasi Salek?

  I'm gonna say best Swedish Strokes, The Hives.

• 1:14:53Speaker 04

  It's on my list as you know.

• 1:14:55Yasi Salek?

  Um.

• 1:14:56Speaker 04

  Really shank me here.

• 1:14:57Yasi Salek?

  I'm sorry. I, I, there weren't many others that like really spoke to me. I mean, you have a really good one that's still available, there's many good ones that are still available.

• 1:15:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'll be fine.

• 1:15:06Yasi Salek?

  Um, I think The Hives are a little underrated still, like they're such a good live band. They had that really cool look with this, with the suits and the.

• 1:15:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, white and black.

• 1:15:18Yasi Salek?

  White and black, Howlin' Pele is like an incredible frontman. They're wild, way wilder than I would think any Swedish people would ever be. Veni vidi vicious, is that the album?

• 1:15:30Speaker 04

  That's the big breakthrough, which actually does predate all, all of this music.

• 1:15:35Yasi Salek?

  Right, which is almost like.

• 1:15:36Speaker 04

  It's 2000.

• 1:15:36Yasi Salek?

  They maybe weren't, could, is it almost like unfair to say that they are?

• 1:15:40Speaker 04

  Well, it's interesting, cause like, they got kinda like, like ported over by, were they like, did they sign to EMI? I can't remember who they signed to, but they were an independent band in Europe.

• 1:15:51Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:15:51Speaker 04

  And then maybe they were on Epitaph? But like their thing and their sound is kind of like if the Strokes and the White Stripes were one band.

• 1:16:01Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 1:16:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:16:02Yasi Salek?

  But then also Swedish.

• 1:16:03Speaker 04

  But Swedish.

• 1:16:03Yasi Salek?

  But European.

• 1:16:04Speaker 04

  And doing James Brown dance moves.

• 1:16:05Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, just incredible stuff.

• 1:16:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, they were kind of, they, I lived in this weird zone where a lot of people thought they were a joke. And they thought they were like a manufactured thing in the aftermath of a lot of the success. But they're, and they are this kind of arch Swedish, like they're kind of the ABBA of post punk rock bands. Because their songs are hyper catchy, but they, they, I always thought they had a really great ability for like, the kind of speed and power that you wanted from a band like this. Like Main Offender on that, on that record is a banger.

• 1:16:36Yasi Salek?

  What a tune.

• 1:16:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it's a good pick.

• 1:16:38Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, but I mean, yeah, you're so right. It's like their album, first album comes out before the Strokes EP even comes out. So it's not like they were copped and, but I, but I do think they were lumped in.

• 1:16:47Speaker 04

  Yes, they were.

• 1:16:47Yasi Salek?

  As a, you know, this kind of Strokes, so I don't wanna belittle their.

• 1:16:51Speaker 05

  And I'm a little fuzzy on the timing, but my memory is, I remember Hate To Say I Told You So catching on huge MTV VH1 video play.

• 1:16:58Speaker 04

  Very much.

• 1:16:59Speaker 05

  And, but as a late single, like in response to.

• 1:17:02Yasi Salek?

  That's what it is, I think, I think the Strokes catching on big, it was like, you know, Rising Tide raises all ships or whatever. And I think they were existing, but it was when this caught on, that all of a sudden they're gonna be like in spin alongside, well, I don't wanna burn, or The Vines, for example, Australian Strokes. Um, and I think there was like a bit of a story where the MTV VMAs was like, we want all three of the bands to perform together, The Strokes, The Vines and The Hives. And Strokes said no, and so it ended up just being The Vines and The Hives and they called it Battle Of The Bands.

• 1:17:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I mean, they had a lot of contempt, I think, for those guys. They were not really like happy that there were people who were kinda like.

• 1:17:40Yasi Salek?

  And they had a lot of contempt for a lot of people.

• 1:17:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's probably true. Okay, good pick. I guess I'm gonna choose in that category as well, the blank. And I'll, I'll do the, the British Strokes, which to me are really the Libertines.

• 1:17:52Yasi Salek?

  Sure, great pick.

• 1:17:53Speaker 04

  And for a minute, were a great band.

• 1:17:58Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:58Speaker 04

  And Up The Bracket is a, is a banger and is up there for me with like that playability that we're talking about with Fever To Tell. Where like, I remember very clearly just listening all the way through, all the way through, all the way through a number of times. And I thought that they were gonna go on to be a truly awesome band.

• 1:18:12Yasi Salek?

  I fully did too, I thought they were so great.

• 1:18:14Speaker 04

  That first album was produced by Mick Jones of The Clash.

• 1:18:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:17Speaker 04

  And obviously Pete already ran into some personal troubles and had some struggles.

• 1:18:21Yasi Salek?

  They were on, they were on rough trade, they were label mates with the Strokes.

• 1:18:24Speaker 04

  They were on rough trade. And I thought they had a slightly different, their sound was like a little bit more, um, uh, like a rhythm and blues, actually, more than rock and roll, I felt like. And I, I love that, that first record and then the wheels kinda come off pretty quickly.

• 1:18:40Yasi Salek?

  Drugs are hell of drugs.

• 1:18:41Speaker 04

  That drugs are hell of drugs. Uh, but they, and they were O2 right in the immediate aftermath of Is This It? And the NME put their arms around them and was just like, we got another one. And then the sun got interested and it became much more tabloidy and a lot less about the music.

• 1:18:56Yasi Salek?

  When you date Kate Moss, that's gonna happen.

• 1:18:57Speaker 04

  He dated Kate Moss.

• 1:18:58Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:58Speaker 04

  So, uh, you know, it's kind of a sad thing and I think that this album doesn't have that legacy.

• 1:19:04Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 1:19:05Speaker 04

  That, that, that I, we thought it would when we were buying these records.

• 1:19:08Yasi Salek?

  The Libertines are a cult band in the sense that they have diehard fans to this day that think they are like the coolest band that's ever existed.

• 1:19:14Speaker 05

  I thought there was a decent chance Can't Stand Me Now would get selected for song. Like to me, it's so much of this moment and of this era. And like, there is, there is like the rhythm and blues part of what they do. There's also like, if they're not just British Strokes, they're like specifically Brit Pop Strokes to me. It's like, I hear, I hear a lot of like Blur in them.

• 1:19:30Speaker 04

  Completely, completely. They're, they're like responding to exactly what came up when they were kids.

• 1:19:35Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:35Speaker 04

  Um, yeah, and What Became Of The Likely Lads, that's another one of my favorites by them. Okay, wildcard.

• 1:19:42Yasi Salek?

  That's right, what a rich territory.

• 1:19:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I can do anything, right?

• 1:19:45Speaker 05

  You can just take Kate Moss if you want.

• 1:19:47Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:47Speaker 04

  I'm gonna take a concert.

• 1:19:48Yasi Salek?

  Okay, that you yourself attended?

• 1:19:50Speaker 04

  I did. Um, I saw The Strokes and The White Stripes on August 15th, 2002 at the Radio City Music Hall. And it was electrifying. It was probably the best that both of those bands will ever be, in my opinion, in terms of their raw power and fuck you attitude. And the songs that they were playing and the fact that the sets, because they didn't have a lot of songs to choose from, were modest and tight. And The White Stripes played first, The Strokes played second, of course, we were in New York City. And the conclusion, the sort of the encore encore of the show was The Strokes played New York City Cops, which was a song that they had recorded and was originally on Is This It?

• 1:20:35Speaker 04

  And they removed it in the aftermath of, uh, 9/11. And Jack came out and played guitar with them on New York City Cops.

• 1:20:42Yasi Salek?

  It's the best day of your life.

• 1:20:43Speaker 04

  Uh, it was amazing. It was, I was 20 years old and, uh, I was there with my best friend and we were rocking the fuck out, it was awesome.

• 1:20:54Speaker 05

  What a show.

• 1:20:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, shit.

• 1:20:56Speaker 05

  I also spent, I would say, an embarrassing amount of time believing that that song was New York City Girls and not New York City Cops, which I think is really a tribute to Juliette and the way he can just slur it all together. You know, it's, it's really a talent.

• 1:21:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:21:08Yasi Salek?

  Is it me?

• 1:21:09Speaker 04

  It is you.

• 1:21:10Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 1:21:10Speaker 04

  That was my last pick.

• 1:21:11Yasi Salek?

  That was your last pick, this is my last pick now. Um, I'm gonna do an annoying thing where I'm gonna say I was gonna choose this thing, but then I'm gonna choose this thing just so I can get both off.

• 1:21:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:21:21Yasi Salek?

  I was gonna choose with my earnest heart, the Yaya's performing maps on the VMAs, but I have a little heavy on the Yaya's.

• 1:21:28Speaker 04

  I do remember that very well.

• 1:21:29Yasi Salek?

  Bye, but I'm gonna choose with my actual heart and my soul. And I'm gonna choose Sparks, the canned beverage, the canned malt.

• 1:21:40Speaker 04

  Great.

• 1:21:40Yasi Salek?

  Caffeinated, but also a secret third thing was in there, which I believe was methamphetamine.

• 1:21:46Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:21:47Yasi Salek?

  And you could drink two Sparks and be out till 6:00 in the morning and be making snow angels on the hood of a car. On Robling Street and call it a night. And I miss it so much.

• 1:22:04Yasi Salek?

  So that's my wild card.

• 1:22:05Speaker 05

  The fuel of a generation.

• 1:22:06Yasi Salek?

  It really was.

• 1:22:07Speaker 05

  How many Sparks consumed in McKibben Lofts, you know, we'll never know.

• 1:22:10Yasi Salek?

  I've told this story before, but I'll have to say it again because I, you know, I've, well, I've told it on the podcast. I haven't told you guys, I invented Sparks.

• 1:22:17Speaker 05

  Did you?

• 1:22:18Yasi Salek?

  Well, in a way, my friend Scott Tepper and I, I'm sorry, I just told this story on the Rapture episode, but we would mix a forty of Mickey's and Red Bull. Before we went out, we would pour out some of the forty, pour, it would harden the foam, which was probably a really bad sign. Who knows what chemical reaction was happening then? And that would go down and out into the night we go because Sparks didn't exist yet. It came around like a year later. It was in the zeitgeist, clearly.

• 1:22:42Speaker 05

  It was.

• 1:22:43Speaker 04

  I have a very not so fond memory of my cousin coming to visit Eileen and I, and we were living on the Lower East Side in two thousand and five or six. And we went to San Looco, got burritos.

• 1:22:55Yasi Salek?

  One of the worst restaurants of all time.

• 1:22:57Speaker 04

  And then.

• 1:22:57Yasi Salek?

  Absolute atrocity.

• 1:22:59Speaker 04

  I ate there all the time.

• 1:23:01Yasi Salek?

  When I moved to New York, and I was there, like, we have Mexican food here. And I was like, do you? Is that what this is?

• 1:23:06Speaker 04

  I was from Long Island. That's like, this is fantastic. And then we went to the bar and drank for a few hours. And then we bought probably twenty cans of Sparks back to our apartment. And it was my cousin, Dan, and his best friend. And I, we, we probably drank like three to four cans each after a night of drinking.

• 1:23:27Yasi Salek?

  Full hospital.

• 1:23:28Speaker 04

  And it's the most sick I've ever been in my life. It was.

• 1:23:30Yasi Salek?

  Orange puke.

• 1:23:31Speaker 04

  Vile.

• 1:23:31Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:32Speaker 04

  Vile. And god damn.

• 1:23:33Yasi Salek?

  I'm sorry that you missed.

• 1:23:34Speaker 04

  I think San Loco is still around.

• 1:23:36Speaker 05

  I really did miss out.

• 1:23:36Yasi Salek?

  I'm sorry you missed, uh, there was also.

• 1:23:38Speaker 04

  It was horrible.

• 1:23:38Speaker 05

  No, it sounds great.

• 1:23:39Speaker 04

  It was horrible.

• 1:23:40Yasi Salek?

  Did you have Four Loko? That was.

• 1:23:41Speaker 04

  Of course. Yeah, that was like squarely in my college.

• 1:23:43Yasi Salek?

  So you did kind of have that.

• 1:23:44Speaker 04

  I wasn't really a Four Loko person.

• 1:23:46Yasi Salek?

  I was.

• 1:23:46Speaker 04

  You were?

• 1:23:47Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. I was really trying to hold on to the dream as long as possible.

• 1:23:50Speaker 04

  You liked to get it in. You really did. You were getting after it.

• 1:23:51Speaker 05

  I can also see you just crush one before a pot, you know, just like.

• 1:23:54Yasi Salek?

  They don't make it anymore. They, for, for medical reasons, I believe they took them both off the market.

• 1:23:58Speaker 05

  But I mean, your home brewed version, you know?

• 1:24:00Yasi Salek?

  Well, we have it here. It's called Celsius and it makes me feel insane.

• 1:24:05Speaker 05

  Wildcard for me.

• 1:24:06Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:07Speaker 05

  I mean, yes, you made it very clear. I need to represent my sub generation. I need, I need to reference not just the two thousand ones, but we need to get a little deeper. In Wildcard, I would like to select, if you'll both allow it, the two one two music video from Azalea Banks.

• 1:24:19Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:24:19Yasi Salek?

  Amazing stuff.

• 1:24:20Speaker 05

  Uh, not enough hip hop representation overall today. So like, let's get it in there.

• 1:24:24Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:25Speaker 05

  Let's get into a video that just, if I'm being totally honest, changed my brain chemistry the moment I watched it. And it's like, there is something about it that is so hard to put down. And also like, the fact that Azalea Banks was never really this ever again somehow, makes it even more of a moment in time I would like to put in amber and recognize and admire for all of us today.

• 1:24:44Yasi Salek?

  What's your dick like, homie? What are you into? One of the greatest bars in rap history.

• 1:24:50Speaker 05

  We need more covers. People need a cover two one two. Any genre, any style.

• 1:24:54Yasi Salek?

  She's an enigma and I.

• 1:24:57Speaker 04

  A complex woman.

• 1:24:57Yasi Salek?

  I find her fascinating. I do think she's a genius.

• 1:25:01Speaker 05

  You can't be, you can't be anything but a genius and write this song.

• 1:25:04Yasi Salek?

  But yeah, I think, I think squarely counts. If you go on the Indie Sleaze Instagram account, there's many accounts of, uh, C punk is at the tail end of, uh, Indie Sleaze.

• 1:25:13Speaker 04

  What's C punk?

• 1:25:14Yasi Salek?

  C punk was like the blue haired, it was again, it's kind of more of an aesthetic thing, but like early Grimes, I feel like kind of fell into like.

• 1:25:23Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:25:24Yasi Salek?

  Um, but I remember going to a show here. There was like the C punk, it was called like the mermaid ball.

• 1:25:28Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:25:28Speaker 04

  A mermaid ball.

• 1:25:29Yasi Salek?

  And it was Azalea Banks. I remember, I don't, maybe Brooke Candy played. I don't remember another Indie Sleaze, uh, adjacent. And everyone was like in mermaid outfits with blue and pink hair. And it was like a, it's a very Tumblr era.

• 1:25:41Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:25:41Yasi Salek?

  And I saw her play at Coachella and she was amazing. Azalea Banks, yeah. Two thousand twelve, I want to say.

• 1:25:47Speaker 05

  I'm just bummed I missed the mermaid ball. That sounds like quite an event.

• 1:25:49Yasi Salek?

  You would have loved it. You would have loved it. Um, should we do a couple, some honorable mentions?

• 1:25:54Speaker 04

  There's so many. Yes.

• 1:25:55Yasi Salek?

  What I was a little sad about for myself, even though I do think I stand full chest forward behind my slate. I think the Kills were really good. I think Alison Mossart was a very compelling front person.

• 1:26:08Speaker 04

  She would have been a great front person pick.

• 1:26:09Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:10Speaker 04

  I like.

• 1:26:11Yasi Salek?

  They have an uneven discography.

• 1:26:12Speaker 04

  The latter half albums I prefer.

• 1:26:14Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:14Speaker 04

  The early albums, I was like, this feels manufactured and like, it's like trying to recreate.

• 1:26:19Yasi Salek?

  Well, the third, it's midnight boom, I think is the, the third album is where they really coalesced.

• 1:26:25Speaker 04

  Yes, I agree. I agree. That and Blood Pressure is, I think, are great.

• 1:26:28Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:26:29Yasi Salek?

  I think they were really great. Let's see, who else did I have on here that I wish I had talked about?

• 1:26:33Speaker 04

  Let me ask you something. Do you think of something like Passion Pit as Indie Sleaze?

• 1:26:37Speaker 05

  Hundred percent. I think, I think they're of the moment for sure.

• 1:26:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is where like our, our difference in age.

• 1:26:44Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:45Speaker 04

  Cause I just thought of them as purely, as you put it the other night, like a pitchforky indie band.

• 1:26:51Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:52Speaker 04

  And they were, they were a little dancy, right? And they were a little rock and roll. So like, I get it, but they felt kind of safe and like not dangerous to me.

• 1:26:59Yasi Salek?

  It's like, okay, for example, this is a great Deline Ash. I was, I can't believe I was so tapped in. Cause I was like, okay, when did Passion Pit start? Two thousand and seven? When did hipster runoff start?

• 1:27:08Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:27:08Yasi Salek?

  Also two thousand and seven.

• 1:27:09Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:27:11Yasi Salek?

  To me, that's like not Indie Sleaze anymore. I feel like.

• 1:27:13Speaker 05

  You don't think hipster runoff is Indie Sleaze?

• 1:27:15Yasi Salek?

  I, I kind of feel like it, it became something else then, but again.

• 1:27:19Speaker 05

  Well, it's performance art.

• 1:27:20Yasi Salek?

  This is everyone's, you know, where were you and how old were you? I'm just like, okay, it almost became means mainstream as an overstatement. But it became something much bigger than it was in that first half of the two thousands.

• 1:27:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I, I think the most interesting kind of point of debate here is what is MGMT?

• 1:27:40Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:41Speaker 04

  You know, where.

• 1:27:42Yasi Salek?

  What is MGMT?

• 1:27:44Speaker 05

  They were, many people are asking.

• 1:27:45Speaker 04

  They're probably the first band that hit during my life where I was like, oh, I'm no longer, like this, this is for college kids. This isn't for me.

• 1:27:55Speaker 05

  Boy, let me tell you, it was.

• 1:27:56Speaker 04

  I know, I know.

• 1:27:56Speaker 05

  Not this college kid, but I, I think you're, you're hitting something on with Passion Pit. I mean, that just like synth on synth on synth style. And it is a little too clean to be sneeze, but it is looped in with all the dancy stuff. I think because it was such like a blog wave kind of enterprise, that that's how it became part of one movement, but.

• 1:28:14Speaker 04

  That's the word that has been missing from this conversation.

• 1:28:16Yasi Salek?

  Blog house.

• 1:28:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, which kind of, to me is like a little on the outside of this movement, but I know people disagree. People will say like blog house is a kind of continuation of.

• 1:28:24Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:25Speaker 04

  Whatever this started.

• 1:28:26Yasi Salek?

  I guess it totally depends. Where are you looking at it from? We're looking at it from two thousand and one.

• 1:28:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:28:30Yasi Salek?

  They're looking at it from two thousand and six.

• 1:28:31Speaker 04

  It's true.

• 1:28:32Yasi Salek?

  And the kids now are looking at it from, they didn't even experience it. They're in their twen, they're in their twenties. So it's all one thing. It's the sixties, you know? Cause like Vampire Weekend is the one that I always come back to. Vampire Weekend is in Meet Me in the Bathroom, but I'm like, that's not Indie Sleaze.

• 1:28:43Speaker 05

  Indie but not Sleaze. Definitely not Sleaze.

• 1:28:45Yasi Salek?

  I mean, certainly came about in the wake of.

• 1:28:48Speaker 04

  For sure. I was wearing boat shoes at concerts in two thousand and nine. Like, you know, that's not.

• 1:28:52Yasi Salek?

  The sound even, although I've said this before, I'll say it on the Strokes episode and I'll say it here. You can hear every bit of Vampire Weekend first album DNA in the Strokes first two albums and certain.

• 1:29:03Speaker 04

  I agree. Like A punk is just the same, like chord change, the way that the melodies are written, like it's all very similar. It's just sung in a slightly more pop or slightly more like folky pop way.

• 1:29:13Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:14Speaker 05

  I think a band I wish we had talked about more is Metric, who I feel like is Indie Sleaze. And also identifies like, well, yeah, one, the like Canada wing of this entire movement.

• 1:29:24Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:29:24Speaker 05

  Emily Haynes is the front person. Incredible. Also like a weird lilting airy voice that is somehow has the edge to be a part of this.

• 1:29:32Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:29:33Speaker 05

  And then also filtering into specifically Black Sheep into Scott Pilgrim, the movie.

• 1:29:37Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:29:38Speaker 05

  Which I think has become kind of a time capsule for the fashion of this time, oddly enough, for, for everything that movie is and has become like. It is, it is a weird style iconography of this moment in time.

• 1:29:49Speaker 04

  I think that's right on.

• 1:29:51Yasi Salek?

  I love Metric.

• 1:29:51Speaker 04

  Another song, Black Sheep, another song I played for Alice recently that she was into.

• 1:29:54Speaker 05

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:29:54Speaker 04

  Any strong front woman, that's usually going to work in my house.

• 1:29:57Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 1:29:57Speaker 04

  Um.

• 1:29:57Yasi Salek?

  We love representation.

• 1:29:59Speaker 05

  You, yeah.

• 1:30:01Speaker 04

  The Von Bondys?

• 1:30:02Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 1:30:02Speaker 05

  I don't know the Von Bondys.

• 1:30:04Yasi Salek?

  You don't know, you don't remember Jack White punching the guy from the Von Bondys out and then having to go to court about it in his little pork pie hat?

• 1:30:11Speaker 04

  Fellow, fellow Detroit band.

• 1:30:13Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:30:14Yasi Salek?

  It burned in my brain that entire story.

• 1:30:16Speaker 04

  Story. I've stumbled into something quite.

• 1:30:18Speaker 05

  Followed very closely. I mean, you know, we haven't talked about Kings of Leon, really.

• 1:30:21Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:30:22Yasi Salek?

  Southern Strokes.

• 1:30:23Speaker 04

  Which I think, I think Youth and Young Manhood is a legitimately cool album, their first record.

• 1:30:29Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:29Speaker 04

  Everything after that, I don't like at all, but they went on to become huge.

• 1:30:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, they're massive. I mean, you know who I'm shocked we didn't talk about is The Killers.

• 1:30:38Speaker 05

  I, see, I don't know that they're Sleaze enough. They're Vegas Sleaze, but that's a different thing.

• 1:30:42Yasi Salek?

  They're definitely not Sleaze. They're Mormon, but like, but, but they were, that, I'm sorry, that first album, here's.

• 1:30:48Speaker 05

  Somebody told me is Indie Sleaze.

• 1:30:49Yasi Salek?

  Honey, the most. Mary, Mary Choi, our friend, when I was living in New York, that was my best friend. I'd go over to her household time and her roommate was in the bravery. Talk about indie sleaze.

• 1:31:04Speaker 05

  That was definitely indie sleaze.

• 1:31:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was, I was, um, when did somebody, somebody told me come out? Was it like?

• 1:31:10Speaker 05

  Two thousand and three?

• 1:31:11Speaker 04

  Oh, three.

• 1:31:11Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, that's firmly in the.

• 1:31:13Speaker 04

  Oh, timeline.

• 1:31:13Yasi Salek?

  And it was an absolute reaction to the Strokes.

• 1:31:15Speaker 04

  I interned at Spin June, July, August of two thousand and three. And Mr. Brightside was released September twenty ninth, two thousand and three. They were gigging in New York for sure at this time, right before Mr. Brightside came out.

• 1:31:30Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I saw them. And also I remember you guys won another indie sleaze tome, the fucking Garden State soundtrack.

• 1:31:37Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:31:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know. There's like, again, that.

• 1:31:40Yasi Salek?

  It's not sleaze, but it's in that, yeah, the shins. Yeah, but, but Mr. Brightside, was it not on, was it not on there?

• 1:31:46Speaker 05

  I don't think so, but I mean, it's everywhere else.

• 1:31:49Yasi Salek?

  It's all right in my brain at the same time.

• 1:31:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, I know, I know Brandon Flowers has talked about, is this it came out? And it sent him into a deep spiraling depression over like, what are you supposed to do after this?

• 1:31:58Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:59Speaker 04

  Is Mr. Brightside the most sung karaoke song by all people born after nineteen eighty?

• 1:32:06Speaker 05

  It probably, I mean, it's, it's the Sweet Caroline for sure.

• 1:32:10Yasi Salek?

  Mr. Brightside has replaced Journey, Don't Stop Believin'.

• 1:32:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:32:13Yasi Salek?

  In the terms of like what people play at a DJ set to like, get everyone on the dance floor singing together.

• 1:32:19Speaker 04

  I never think of it like this as part of this movement, but of course it is.

• 1:32:22Yasi Salek?

  I really do, because, because it was on so much in my time in New York. Another band I think we didn't talk about at all, though I think is quite good is Interpol.

• 1:32:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:32:33Yasi Salek?

  And very firmly in that era and time. And the first Interpol album is just actually like phenomenal.

• 1:32:40Speaker 05

  I feel like I have bounced off of them so many times in my life, where it's like, I respect this band, but I, they just can't, they never have grabbed me in a way that these other bands have.

• 1:32:49Speaker 04

  Subway She Is A Porno.

• 1:32:50Yasi Salek?

  Subway She Is One Of The Best Lyrics Of All Time.

• 1:32:53Speaker 05

  Somehow did not.

• 1:32:54Speaker 04

  I love them. I, I, as I said, I interviewed Paul and Daniel, um, and they were.

• 1:33:01Yasi Salek?

  Carlos D and his entire, whatever he was doing was just fascinating.

• 1:33:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, what was he?

• 1:33:06Yasi Salek?

  He had a holster and like a, like a Hitler Youth haircut.

• 1:33:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, that wasn't that, that cool.

• 1:33:11Speaker 05

  That's a look.

• 1:33:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:33:12Yasi Salek?

  Well, it's, they, it's funny because they would get so mad if you said that they sounded like Joy Division, but then it's like, you're, you're kind of bringing the dream of Joy Division alive in your Carlos D outfits.

• 1:33:23Speaker 05

  Well, they're mad because they know it's true.

• 1:33:25Yasi Salek?

  Well.

• 1:33:26Speaker 04

  They made efforts to pivot pretty hard, but there's Turn On The Bright Lights is still the best thing they've ever done.

• 1:33:30Yasi Salek?

  Antics is pretty good, too.

• 1:33:31Speaker 04

  It's good.

• 1:33:32Yasi Salek?

  Turn On The Bright Lights, it's just amazing. But yeah, I, I think.

• 1:33:35Speaker 04

  Similar to a lot of these albums, which is also, they're all like ten songs in forty minutes and they're over. You know, like they all, they're not these like, deep expansive explorations of style. Like they're very singularly focused and executing on what they want to do.

• 1:33:48Yasi Salek?

  I am a little sad also, we didn't talk about any of the French.

• 1:33:51Speaker 04

  Like Phoenix?

• 1:33:52Yasi Salek?

  Justice.

• 1:33:53Speaker 05

  Justice.

• 1:33:54Yasi Salek?

  I'm thinking more of like, the electro clash, because Justice was huge, you know, like that sort of, that stretch, and then like, the gossip.

• 1:34:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:34:04Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 1:34:04Yasi Salek?

  The Faint, there were some really great, Airy Weapons maybe falls in this category of indie sleaze? What do you think? Hard to say.

• 1:34:14Speaker 04

  I guess, I don't know.

• 1:34:16Speaker 05

  There's a lot of I guess. I mean, to your point about like, if you look up one of these playlists, I'm sure they emerge on one of them, you know? So I can hear the argument.

• 1:34:22Yasi Salek?

  Ladytron, I love fucking Ladytron. I love, and then, you know, a lot of, a lot of, I think maybe one of the most influential bands is Crystal Castles.

• 1:34:34Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 1:34:35Yasi Salek?

  It was never, like, I thought they were cool, but it was never really like my, you know, I'll die for this band, but you can, like, their, their footprint is almost bigger than any of these other bands. If you look at contemporary music in terms of like hyperpop and stuff.

• 1:34:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's a song on that first record that is on one of my running playlists that I still listen to to this day.

• 1:34:59Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:59Speaker 04

  I think, I think it's Crime Wave.

• 1:35:01Speaker 05

  Speaking of, if this had been a ten person draft in best song, I may have selected She Wants Revenge, Tear You Apart, which has also been a part of, I think, every running playlist I have ever had throughout my entire life. So, uh, is it healthy? Who's to say, but it's, it's a banger.

• 1:35:16Yasi Salek?

  Should also note The Liars.

• 1:35:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:35:18Yasi Salek?

  Because they were a phenomenal band.

• 1:35:19Speaker 04

  I mean, and, and Angus was dating Karen O, right? And they were the power couple of that era.

• 1:35:26Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, but I think we, I mean, there's a lot of other bands we can name check, but I think we've.

• 1:35:30Speaker 05

  I think we've covered pretty well.

• 1:35:31Yasi Salek?

  More or less covered it.

• 1:35:33Speaker 04

  Good work, guys.

• 1:35:33Yasi Salek?

  I think we did great. Should we recap?

• 1:35:35Speaker 05

  Let's.

• 1:35:36Yasi Salek?

  I'm gonna pull up my little recap back. Okay, Rob Mahoney, you first. Do you remember your picks?

• 1:35:41Speaker 05

  I do. In best band, I selected The Strokes, because they're The Strokes. In best front person, I selected Alex Turner of The Arctic Monkeys. Best song, TV on the radios, Wolf Like Me. Best album, Yeah Yeah Yeah's Fever To Tell. The best blank Strokes, I picked Lime Garden.

• 1:35:55Yasi Salek?

  You didn't, but you didn't give them a, a moniker.

• 1:35:58Speaker 05

  I'm gonna say best Strokes Charlie Hybrid as the official moniker.

• 1:36:02Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 1:36:02Speaker 05

  Um, and my wild card is the two one two music video.

• 1:36:05Yasi Salek?

  Great. Sean Fantasy?

• 1:36:07Speaker 04

  Best band, I took The White Stripes. Best front person, I took MIA. Best song, I took The Rapture's House Of Jealous Lovers. Best album, I chose LCD Sound Systems' self-titled debut. Best blank Strokes, I took British Strokes, The Libertines. And my wild card was The White Stripes and The Strokes Live at Radio City Music Hall, August fifteenth, two thousand and two.

• 1:36:27Yasi Salek?

  Gorgeous. And for me, best band, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Best front person, Karen O. Best song, Y Control by The A I S. I work for The A I S. Best album, Silent Alarm by Block Party. Best blank Strokes, The Swedish Strokes, The Hives. And my wild card is Sparks, The Methamphetamine Beverage Drink.

• 1:36:51Speaker 04

  Well done.

• 1:36:52Yasi Salek?

  You guys, thank you so much. What a joy and a pleasure it was to have you relive this era with me.

• 1:37:00Speaker 05

  How, how did the two of you feel about it? About looking inward, but also backward?

• 1:37:04Yasi Salek?

  I was like, I was a little sad the other day because I, this is such like a no man's land of documentation, even though like, the party photography existed, but you can't access it, right? Like, all of the things are dead. I don't have, I was like, I have many photos of myself from this time. Like, it's just gone.

• 1:37:22Speaker 05

  Well, just other people's high flash photos of you in various places that you need to unearth.

• 1:37:26Yasi Salek?

  I need to unearth.

• 1:37:28Speaker 04

  I have something from this period of time that I don't have for very many movements like this, which is I have memories. I mean, I have, I experienced this, I was there.

• 1:37:36Yasi Salek?

  It's a really strange thing.

• 1:37:37Speaker 04

  I was in the darkroom, drinking Coors Light.

• 1:37:40Yasi Salek?

  I was up in the dark, I was lit, bitch. I was out lit.

• 1:37:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:44Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, that's, that's a hard thing to reckon with, right? Like, especially on this show, I spend most of my time talking about these like mythical times of past. And then I'm like, no, me and my Nomdegar hoodie were really sitting at the bar at Max Fish.

• 1:37:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. You didn't miss out on a lot, but you did miss out on being in the Lower East Side in two thousand and five. It was just really, really fun.

• 1:38:02Yasi Salek?

  You rode your bike to the hat, you got a to-go margarita. They used to do that.

• 1:38:07Speaker 05

  Doesn't seem like a thing you should do, I'm gonna be honest.

• 1:38:09Yasi Salek?

  They were awesome. They came in like a soda cup.

• 1:38:11Speaker 04

  I was always trying to find my way to Rosario at the end of the night.

• 1:38:14Yasi Salek?

  Oh, same.

• 1:38:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was what I was, that's, that was my life.

• 1:38:17Yasi Salek?

  That was a pizza spot.

• 1:38:18Speaker 04

  Sounds great to me.

• 1:38:18Yasi Salek?

  On the corner. I gave them a lot of my money.

• 1:38:21Speaker 04

  Me too. I lived literally two buildings down from Rosario.

• 1:38:24Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, Sean and I realized that we were like kind of neighbors, but actually never knew or saw each other.

• 1:38:28Speaker 05

  Do you think you had like a passing on the train moment at any point?

• 1:38:31Speaker 04

  Probably a passing on the street.

• 1:38:32Speaker 05

  You know?

• 1:38:33Yasi Salek?

  Well, we live, we both lived on the same street. We lived on Orchard.

• 1:38:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, I've, I've had that with a few people that I've, it was, it was, our, our people were there at that time.

• 1:38:41Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:42Speaker 04

  That was where we lived.

• 1:38:43Yasi Salek?

  Well, you guys, we wrapped it up. Let's, let's call it a day. Let's call it an indie sleaze day.

• 1:38:49Speaker 04

  Thanks, Yasi.

• 1:38:50Yasi Salek?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:38:51Speaker 04

  Thanks for having us.

• 1:38:52Yasi Salek?

  Come back next week for a new episode of Bands Play.

• 1:39:01Yasi Salek?

  If you liked what you heard today, subscribe for more episodes of Bands Play. Our guests today were Sean Fantasy and Rob Mahoney. This episode was produced by Rob Sundermann and edited by Adrian Bridges with help from Justin Sales. Video production by John Jones. Executive producers for Bands Play are Gina Dalvec and me, Yasi Salek. Our gorgeous and catchy theme song was composed and performed by Bethany Cosentino and Jennifer Clavon, and graciously recorded by Carlos De La Garza in Los Angeles, California. Special thanks to our producer emeritus, producer Dylan, AKA Dylan Tupper Rupert, and also Sparks. May you rest in peace. Come back every Thursday for a new episode of Bands Play on Spotify or wherever you listen to or watch your podcasts.

• 1:39:49Speaker 05

  Being a normal, functional podcaster.

• 1:39:51Speaker 04

  Addressing her.

• 1:39:53Speaker 05

  Oh, this is me, addressing Yasi Salek herself.

• 1:39:57Yasi Salek?

  A normal man.

• 1:39:58Speaker 04

  Addressing her is like the worst David Mannet play, you know? What is addressing her? Undressing her is the best Brian De Palma movie.

• 1:40:08Speaker 05

  Yes, it's all Brian De Palma movies in my experience.

• 1:40:14Speaker 07

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• 1:40:38Speaker 02

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