Meet Me in the Bathroom

A loose, informal-looking document of a time and place and the idiosyncratic music they served as backdrop to, "Meet Me in the Bathroom" is a glimpse into the Rock music scene of New York City at the turn of the century. Amidst the reality of Y2K, 9/11, Napster and George W. Bush Jr. The film shows how long dead Rock n' Roll came to life in the Big Apple when bands like The Strokes, Interpol, LCD Soundystem, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and a host of others kept a dying genre in life support by creating some of the most eclectic and compelling music in all of music.

Filled with interviews from the bands themselves and their associates and archival footage this takes one back to that cold, chilly and impersonal time. From the sensational hype-driven attention given to the scene-igniting and influential Strokes to the rare female-fronted act of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Dance-Electronic punkisms of LCD Soundsystem and the soulful experimentalism of TV on the Radio, on to the Anti-Folk quirkiness of The Moldy Peaches to the rocking danceability of The Rapture and the cool distant approach of Interpol the movie features a constellation of young hopefuls whose talents coalesced into a particular age and era when NU Metal and Hip-Hop dominated the global music scene, music that were the opposite of what they were doing, these underrated luminaries toiling and creating in a time that neither cared about them nor gave them their due.

While watchable the film lacks perspective on what truly matter. A good chronological backdrop on the history of the New York Rock scene would have fleshed this out more and would have given more of an understanding on what the bands featured have done and what they accomplished. And most of all and what the filmmakers glaringly missed which is what the film is basically about: the music! Too much emphasis is given on the personalities involved that the main reason why they even got to be featured here is sidelined and how good even great the music actually is.

Based on journalist Lizzy Goodman's tome of the same name, "Meet Me in the Bathroom" is a celebration of Gen X's and New York Rock's final hurrah before fading into the eventual eclipse of time and memory. A tribute to a great artistic legacy and a great city this is one Rock fans should see.

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.

Good enough doc but just seems there's far too much going on trying to navigate between 6+ bands and their individual stories. Would have been great as a 6 or 8 part documentary series. Things like interpol's second record are mentioned once for about 10 seconds. This was a seminal record at the time and was made infamous after being one of the first records to be leaked on the internet prior to release. Dunno just feel like there is so much more potential here and these bands deserved a more in depth look at their backgrounds and subsequent influence as well as the scene they created. Because if this it's one I don't think I'll be returning to.

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.

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!