New York, a city responsible for bands such as The Velvet Underground, Blondie and Ramones, was a cultural wasteland by the late 90s and the wider music scene was pumping out shlock like Limp Bizkit and Hoobastank., a documentary based on Lizzy Goodman’s oral history of nYc’s musical rebirth, “Maybe New York wasn’t the kind of city anymore that produces iconic bands”.
There’s the early performances by The Strokes at the Mercury Lounge, whose booker Ryan Gentles became their manager and Yeah Yeah Yeahs in Brooklyn with fellow scenesters Liars and Oneida as well as incredible early footage of frontwoman Karen O performing solo at the Sidewalk Cafe.It also features LCD Soundsystem founder James Murphy’s origin story and Interpol’s early challenges including playing a nu-metal festival in the UK.
Lovelace admitted that when they started making the film a few years ago, they had no idea what footage existed and one of their biggest challenges was tracking it down.“We did a lot of detective work, we could be employed by Bellingcat, we went on old forums of the early days of the internet and found people. The good thing about Covid was everyone was bored so they wanted a project. We found people who were willing to go into the attic.
But turning a 650 page book into a feature documentary had its own challenges. The origin stories of the bar owners, promoters and scene kids that helped birth these bands would have been near impossible to tell in a fascinating form and many of the bands on the edges had to be left out.