Meet Me in the Bathroom

As "Meet Me In the Bathroom" (2022 release; 105 min.) opens, it is "1999" and we are introduced to Adam Green (of the Moldy Peaches) and their very humble beginnings at an open mike night. Karen O (of later the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) also moves in those circles. One day they run into Julian Casablancas of the just formed Strokes at a party... At this point we are less than 10 min. Into the documentary.

Couple of comments: this is the latest collaboration between co-directors Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern ("Shut Up and Play the Hits"; various music videos). Here they take Lizzy Goodman's critically acclaimed book of the same name and turn it into a visual feat and feast. The documentary follows the early beginnings of New York's Burgeoning rock scene that really started taking off in 2000-2001, with bands like the Strokes, Interpol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Rapture, and LCD Soundsystem. All of them are featured extensively, and the amount of archive footage that the film makers were able to unearth is absolutely amazing, and THE main reason to watch this. While the book covers the entire 00's decade, this documentary focus on the decade's initial 5 years. This is probably the reason why Vampire Weekend is conspicuously absent in this film, as they didn't did start until 2005 or so. That aside, all these bands provided a true soundtrack of my life in the 00's and I caught those bands in concerts multiple times during that decade (and thereafter). If it sounds like I am gushing a bit over this documentary, I will not deny it. I absolutely LOVE this documentary.

"Meet Me In the Bathroom" premiered on Showtime over the Thanksgiving weekend and is now available on the SHO streaming app, where I caught it a few days ago. If you love any of these bands, or you are perhaps curious what life was like in NY 20 years ago, I'd readily suggest you check this out, and draw your own conclusion.

This was a hard documentary to rate. On the one hand the amount of video they have of these bands at the start is gold. And I felt like I was back experiencing a youth I never knew. But the documentary flow and direction is hard to pick up on and the constant dancing between bands is hard, they're all interesting in their own way however and I watched this for the Strokes but I didn't skip or lose interest for any part of the doc.

It's so good seeing bands like the Strokes and Interpol live right at the start of their careers, musically they had it right away. Also interesting to see bands like Yeah Yeahs, the rapture, Moldy Peaches and LCD soundsytem early who Didn't have it to start with... but learnt quickly and started to make good sounding music for their already present coolness. Except for that LCD soundsytem guy, he doesn't look like a rock star at all so even more props to him-workmanlike.

I dreamt of being a rockstar and playing music to get the attention and acclaim I never got from my peer groups and opposite sex when I was growing up. Watching this I'm glad I didn't get it - would've ended up more of a narcissist than I was then. It's actually incredible many of these equally screwed up folks turned out pretty okay.

Interestingly, to me this is proof that survivorship bias and luck is a thing in music as well, and like success in many arts and creative endeavours, having rich parents helps...

If you like one or more of these Bands I definitely recommend you watch.

From the mid 90s to early 2010s, NYC, particularly north Brooklyn, was known as the city to be in for people into indie music. This film tries to connect that with coverage of some key bands from the 2000 to 2005 portion of that era. It's mostly about those bands and less about the scenes in which those bands were a part.

Bands featured in order of the amount they were covered: The Strokes, Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs, DFA (especially James Murphy), Interpol, Moldy Peaches, TV On the Radio, The Rapture, and The Liars. There were more there during this time that weren't mentioned and obviously more after the period covered in this.

Iirc, Karen O notes how NYC started becoming too expensive and that making it more difficult for artists and musicians (and she later moved to LA and still lives there, she grew up in NJ). But some come from more privileged backgrounds and the film touches on that with some of the band members.

Although I was into all of this music then, I don't like how "indie" during this time shifted to whatever people in north Brooklyn are into. I prefer how things were in the 90s where bands from several cities got equal attention, including some pretty small ones like Athens. Some are trying to revive the era covered in this film, including the focus on NYC, because it's easy to just recycle trends from 25 years prior and pretend you're a trend setter, but it is far less affordable now than then.

I grew up watching those bands and I remember what the media used to say about them, that they were going to save rock music.

But now after 2 decades... Yeah, they were just kids. We were just kids. Really, I was literally a kid. And I'm from Brazil and could relate to them so I thought I would be all emotional and so on.

It was nice to see the bands but there's a lot of unnecessary drama and white-rocker-men-from-new-york-problems'.

Maybe we're not just grown up but grew out of all of this so niched and dated scene from the past.

Anyway, maybe with a short edit and a more developed story from Karen O, for instance it would be better to watch.

Overrall, it was 6/10 and worth for the nostalgia.

Not that it's exactly comparable, but I grew up very much amidst a folk music scene with loads of extremely mediocre working-class musicians - ballad singers, guitarists, fiddlers etc., who all thought they would go on to some sort of musical greatness. Watching this, it's good to know that those ridiculous pipe dreams were not just confined to Glasgow in the 1970s. Spool on to the early naughties and we are presented with a collection of "musicians" living in Yew York City with aspirations that in the vast majority of cases way outstripped their talents. The one exceptions is probably Julian Casablancas, who managed with "The Strokes" to get his head above the parapet of bland noisemaking, and here the documentary is quite potent at illustrating that the stresses of achieving and building on success are actually just as tough as those involved in getting noticed in the first place. On a more generic level, it does point out how tough this industry is, how hard people work to achieve little better than a subsistence existence and at just how transitory and fickle it all can be, but I did tire a little of the also-rans who whined on about sexploitation and objectification as if they'd had been living under a rock for most of their lives. They dreamt of success and acknowledgement in an industry that was/is riddled with sexualisation and somehow it came as a shock to them - pissed and stoned as they invariably were. Real talent is the best fast-track to initiate meaningful and lasting change. It's an interesting fly-on-the-wall style of production with loads of archive, busily edited to leave us with an authentic-looking view on the lives of these people, but I felt most of them really had no idea what they were doing and the fact that 9/11 occurred midway through the chronology of the narrative seemed merely designed to attempt to bedrock this otherwise flighty and shallow assessment of a music industry that took me back to those nights in the pub, with the folk singers who sounded great after eight pints, but who had no shelf-life beyond that!