Meet Me in the Bathroom

by Lizzy Goodman

MusicScenesRockstar Energy

The Short Answer

An oral history assembled from 200+ interviews, tracing the NYC indie rock revival of 2001–2011 — the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, and the Brooklyn wave — entirely in the words of the people who lived it. It documents one of the last scenes to form before the internet made geography irrelevant to music discovery: scenius in real time, and its dissolution.

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Key Insights

Scenius requires a physical address — the revival was inseparable from cheap Lower East Side rent and specific venues; when the geography changed, the scene’s conditions changed.

Rivalry is creative fuel — the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Interpol competed in a small social ecosystem, and that proximity produced better work than isolation would.

The internet killed the conditions it later documented — blogs spread the scene globally while destroying the scarcity and locality that made it cohere.

New York is a character, not a backdrop — the city’s density and particular type of ambitious misfit were material conditions of the music.

Every scene ends before the people inside it realize it’s happening — the self-awareness that produces nostalgia only arrives after the thing dissolves.

Quotes Worth Remembering

10 curated passages from Meet Me in the Bathroom. Chapter references map back to the book so you can re-read them in context.

Everybody is living through their own golden age, but you only realize it afterward, so start living it now.

Conor McNicholas (NME editor), the book’s epigraph — its whole thesis in one line.

New York is an apparition generated by those who come together to breathe life into something not quite temporal, something that has to be conjured... the particular alchemy generated when every last person who happens to be there at that precise moment — the famous and the anonymous — come together serendipitously.

Lizzy Goodman, on why the scene was not replicable — the city itself as a conjured phenomenon.

All I wanted was to do good enough work that it was important. I wanted to be important. I didn’t know what that meant, even.

James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem), on the ambition behind the DFA era — significance, not fame.

I was dancing and I was happy and I had a revelation: this is actually me.

James Murphy, on the night that converted a frustrated rock musician into a dance-music evangelist and set DFA Records in motion.

There was this amazing time, before we had to record the first record, we’d play to eighty people or something like that, but no one really knew us... Everything was so innocent. Somehow you lose the innocence through time and through doing too much, then you spend a lot of time chasing that same innocence.

Albert Hammond Jr. (The Strokes), on the pre-fame window when the work itself was the reward.

The Shout! parties totally, totally, totally set the groundwork for all 2000s bands.

Gideon Yago (MTV), on the weekly mod dance party where the future musicians and audiences first found each other.

You had to find some way to not accept the fact that there’s actually five dudes out there that are cool as fuck that are writing insanely awesome music. And they did it by themselves. They are cooler and better than you are, and they will steal your girlfriend.

Paul Banks (Interpol), on how rival bands processed the Strokes’ rise — by inventing reasons to disqualify them.

I’m sure Ryan Adams has his own story and it’s grandiose and beautiful and whatnot, but he’s not that major of a player in the Strokes’ history.

Fabrizio Moretti (The Strokes), a dry dismissal that became one of the most-quoted lines in coverage of the book.

My thing about New York was just to be around cute, cool guys... This was fantasy land where those kinds of guys existed.

Karen O (Yeah Yeah Yeahs), reframing the scene as a social ecosystem before it was a musical one.

I manifested that shit for you! I wanted to get in there like a motherfucker and that’s what I did.

Karen O, on her own drive and agency — a counterweight to the book’s many portraits of passive drifting.

Chapter-by-Chapter

Each chapter distilled to a key idea + 2–4 sentence summary — so you can navigate the book's argument without re-reading it, and re-read it with fresh compass if you want.

Before the Scene — Pre-2001 Formation

The revival had a pre-history in dance parties, cheap rent, and musicians who moved to the city before anyone was watching.

The book opens before 2001, establishing the social infrastructure: weekly events like the Shout! parties at Bar 13, the network of aspiring musicians who already knew each other, and Lower East Side neighborhoods still affordable. The Strokes were playing to eighty people, unknown outside the room.

The Strokes and Is This It (2001)

The Strokes’ debut arrived at the precise moment a generation needed something to believe in that wasn’t the mainstream.

Their rise from local fixtures to international obsession, built on Is This It (released in the US weeks after 9/11). The NME championed them before American press caught on. Hammond describes the pre-fame months as the best time of his life — the benchmark against which everything after is measured.

September 11 and the Acceleration

9/11 didn’t create the scene but gave it a sudden cultural weight it hadn’t asked for.

The attack sits at the hinge of the first part. Bands already honing their sound in obscurity were cast as symbols of urban resilience and forward-looking youth. The music didn’t change, but its context did — a dozen bands became anthems for a generation processing grief.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Interpol — The Scene Expands

The second wave proved the Strokes weren’t an accident — New York had a genuine generational cluster.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Interpol emerge as distinct proof points. Karen O’s physical performance made the Yeah Yeah Yeahs a live phenomenon; Interpol’s Turn on the Bright Lights offered the dark, disciplined counterpart to the Strokes’ looseness. The bands are social neighbors — competitive, aware of each other, sharing venues and managers.

DFA Records and Dance-Punk

James Murphy built DFA partly from creative frustration and partly to fuse the rock scene with the dance music he’d discovered.

Running parallel to the guitar-band story, Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy found a label producing LCD Soundsystem and The Rapture’s Echoes, creating the dance-punk moment. The tension between Murphy and Luke Jenner shows the scene’s social dynamics at their least romanticized.

The Blog Era and the Internet’s Arrival

Music blogs bypassed the gatekeepers who made the scene and replaced scarcity with instant global access — killing the conditions that produced it.

By mid-decade the scene that grew through word of mouth and NME features was documented in real time by bloggers; Pitchfork’s influence expanded. The availability of music online eroded the local, venue-specific energy. Being a band in New York stopped meaning the same thing once geography no longer gated access.

The Brooklyn Shift

The center of gravity moved to Brooklyn, and the new music was more sonically ambitious and less tied to Lower East Side mythology.

As Manhattan prices pushed artists to Williamsburg, a new cluster emerged — TV on the Radio, Grizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors — more eclectic and experimental, native to the internet rather than adopting it. An evolution and a departure from the original scene.

Fragmentation and the Comedown

The same forces that amplified the scene — money, attention, drugs, the internet — dissolved its conditions.

From roughly 2008 to 2011 the bands break up, go on hiatus, or play arenas without the original social glue. The Strokes’ internal tensions, Hammond’s drug problems, and LCD Soundsystem’s 2011 farewell at Madison Square Garden are framed as symptoms of a scene that consumed itself. Goodman ends not with closure but with the participants’ recognition that they didn’t understand what they were living through at the time.

Best For

Scene-builders studying how a modern movement forms and burns outAnyone who lived through or loves the early-2000s NYC rock revivalCreators thinking about how the internet reshaped scene formationReaders who want the contemporary bookend to the older scene books here

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Meet Me in the Bathroom about?

An oral history of the New York City indie rock scene from 2001 to 2011 — how The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, and others emerged from downtown clubs to become one of the last scenes to form before the internet made geography irrelevant. Goodman conducted 200+ interviews over six years.

Which bands does it cover?

Core subjects are The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, and LCD Soundsystem. The extended cast includes The Rapture, TV on the Radio, Grizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors, Vampire Weekend, MGMT, Ryan Adams, and Kings of Leon, plus managers, journalists, label heads, bloggers, and DJs.

Where does the title come from?

It is taken from a Strokes song on their 2003 album Room on Fire, referencing the backstage/after-show social ritual of the scene — the bathroom as an unofficial meeting point. It captures the intimacy and slight illicitness of how the scene actually operated.

Is there a documentary?

Yes — Meet Me in the Bathroom (2022), directed by Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern, premiered at Sundance and streamed on Showtime. It uses archival footage and home video rather than new interviews and focuses on the four core bands.

Is it written as a narrative or as interviews?

Entirely as interviews. There is no authorial narration — Goodman selected and sequenced excerpts from 200+ subjects into a chronological story. It reads like an extended conversation among dozens of people who were at the same events and remember them differently.

Continue Reading

If Meet Me in the Bathroom opened a door, these books walk you through it. Curated for reason, not algorithm — each entry explains why it pairs with this book.

How Music Works

by David Byrne

Also in this collection. Byrne’s "How to Make a Scene" is the theory; this book is the live case study of a scene forming and dissolving on the same streets a generation later.

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Please Kill Me

by Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain

The oral-history template this book follows, one scene earlier — punk’s CBGB to this book’s 2000s revival, same city, same form.

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Just Kids

by Patti Smith

The 1970s New York that every later NYC scene measures itself against. Read for the deep roots of the mythology these bands inherited.

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Go Deeper — Videos

The book is the foundation. These talks and interviews are where the ideas sharpen, get challenged, and connect to adjacent work. Best watched after reading, not instead of.