The Strokes
Reptilia

What will remain of these two-thousands? What has music given us in this decade that has just passed?

From an artistic, cultural, and musical point of view, a new millennium is the symbol of a beginning, starting from ZERO in the truest sense of the word. The musical decade that has just passed has aroused much clamor among contemporaries and disappointment for those who have inherited what has been done. A decade in which the new generations have accepted the "death of rock," "its non-reinventability," and thus a gradual shift towards "new music" that is increasingly electronic, extravagant, and tied to the market (videos, massive tours, and special effects), thus abandoning traditional instruments and elevating rock music to a product rather than a work of art, as those before us have tried to do. Hence, the musician relies on the machine, on artificiality, and forgets about fingers and vocal cords. Perhaps change scares nostalgics like me, but let's see what the future holds. In any case, the early 2000s were a return to the origins driven by the nineties. That's why I chose this song for my review.

"Reptilia" and The Strokes fully represent the "good and unoriginal" attitude that led to explosive beginnings and a disheartened finale with the consequences I've described above. In "Reptilia," there's a great song, a piece that will surely remain for future generations. I'm not saying it will be the only one, but in my opinion, it synthesizes the entire musical world we have just left behind. The formula is the same: NOTHING NEW, "WISE" IMPLICIT QUOTATIONS, A CATCHY AND PSYCHEDELIC RIFF, A RABID AND "SUFFOCATED" VOICE, AND ENERGY.

In my opinion, the piece presents itself as a little melodic gem, one of those that really matter, made by a group that knew how to debut with originality and die in total indifference (ANGLES). This track fundamentally repeats an identical structure several times. There's a bit of psychedelia, a bit of garage, a bit of brit and the idea of the ROCK-STAR that is so pleasing. Like everything released in recent years, there is nothing new, nothing truly moving; at most it managed to ENTERTAIN, making an entire generation of disillusioned kids sweat, who no longer want to waste time REFLECTING because the world is dark. We may have lived through one of the last decades of true Rock; great records have been released, but all with the pretense of Enjoying at PARTIES. Where there were cultured citations, there was an enormous void.

Music must come out of the world of lively and KARAOKE-SINGING stadium listening. We must return to playing, writing, and LISTENING. If we do so, we then realize that in Reptilia there is a little bass line that alone was enough to make a great piece... here is the beauty of music... it's not just appearance and words.