What’s the point of a drum roll, you know? It’s suspenseful, it’s emotional. . . . When I was a teen-ager, I realized, going to shows, that if you’re gonna be onstage people are going to be looking at the belt you’re wearing and the shoelaces you have. It affects how much people listen to you? But, if you have something you think is important that you’re trying to communicate, I think that what you’re wearing affects that. For some of the ways that I would like to have an impact, unfortunately, how well known you are, how respected you are, they do affect your success rate. But there is a dance you have to do, and a price you have to pay, if you want to have a positive impact on the world. Is that something that you’re not interested in? I just feel like so many artists rely on the Internet in order to get their music out there, their persona out there. You can move to Wyoming and not have the Internet. It’s still relatively controllable in terms of, if you want to hide from the world you can, I think. (Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.) As we were sitting down, he tucked a sheaf of index cards and a pen into his coat pocket. (In a particularly memorable moment, the band performed their song “New York City Cops” as the audience stormed the stage and uniformed police attempted to shut the event down.) During our conversation, over several cups of coffee, some fries, and a cheese-bacon-and-spinach omelette, Casablancas, who despite the heat was wearing a long, torn trench coat, was by turns recalcitrant and voluble, guarded and very funny.
JOHN CASABLANCAS STEPHANIE SEYMOUR SERIES
In recent years, Casablancas has become increasingly interested in left-wing politics: in “S.O.S.,” a YouTube series that he hosts for Rolling Stone, he has interviewed luminaries such as Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, and Amy Goodman, and in the run-up to the Democratic Presidential primaries, the Strokes played a rally in New Hampshire in endorsement of Bernie Sanders.
He agreed to speak to me, however, to highlight his support of Maya Wiley, a progressive Democratic candidate in the city’s upcoming mayoral race, who he believes could make the city “a safe utopia for all,” and for whom the Strokes will play a benefit concert at Irving Plaza this Saturday, June 12th. “This time I’m staying with my mom,” he added.īy his own account, Casablancas doesn’t particularly enjoy giving interviews. “I don’t have a place in the city anymore,” he told me, when we met recently, at a downtown diner. The musician no longer lives in New York City, and splits his time between California’s Venice Beach and a hamlet upstate, where his two sons live with his ex-wife. In the years since “Is This It,” Casablancas has released five more albums with the Strokes-the latest, “The New Abnormal,” which came out in early 2020, earned the band its first Grammy-two albums with the more experimental Voidz, and a solo record.
I saw kids in Connecticut and Maine and Philadelphia and DC looking like they had just been drinking on Avenue A all night.”) (In the words of the late music critic Marc Spitz, in “ Meet Me in the Bathroom,” Lizzy Goodman’s oral history of that era, “The Strokes were making New York travel with them.
There was the sound-melodic but dirty, short and sharp and tight there was also the look-thrift-store skinny denim and shaggy hair and sneakers. The band’s first record, the modern classic “Is This It,” released in 2001, when Casablancas was twenty-three, has been largely credited with kick-starting the city’s early-two-thousands rock-and-roll revival, which then spread far beyond New York itself. He formed the Strokes while still a teen.
Casablancas grew up in the nineteen-eighties and nineties on the Upper East Side, the son of John Casablancas, the founder of Elite Model Management, and Jeanette Christiansen, an artist and onetime Miss Denmark. For nearly two decades, Julian Casablancas, the lead singer of the Strokes and the Voidz, has been synonymous with New York City, or at least one particularly iconic version of it.
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