The Strokes – A Nostalgia Tour That Never Ends

The new documentary Meet Me in the Bathroom, about the rise of The Strokes and the early 2000s New York rock scene, amps up music's backward-looking momentum

- By Jeff Gordinier

It was a september evening, and as I walked along West 48th Street in Manhattan, I recognized a pack of young men coming out of a Music Row guitar shop. Like many imprint-making bands, they had a look (skinny, jittery, tousled) that made them seem like five variations on the same person. They were the Strokes, and their debut album was about to set the world on fire-although no one would use that phrase, because the next morning I woke up and two planes slammed into the World Trade Center.

Our memories of music are tangled up with our memories of history. This fall, two decades after that debut, the Strokes occupy the center of