Why I write about musical failures, and how that led me to the Strokes
by Steven Hyden
September 03, 2026
This essay is based upon a conversation with Reed Fischer, The Current’s senior digital producer.
I started writing about music when I was pretty young. The first record reviews I ever wrote were when I was 14 for my junior high paper. I wrote about Automatic for the People by R.E.M. and Dirt by Alice in Chains. That's 1992. So, for almost as long as I've been a music fan, I've been writing about music. I grew up in a time when bands were prevalent, and it wasn't just in rock music.
I'm more similar to my younger self than you would believe. I’m a dad and a husband now, but when it comes to what I want out of music or how I consume music, it's not that different.
Dave Marsh’s biography of the Who, Before I Get Old: The Story of the Who, was really influential to me as a young person. He was able to write about a band that he clearly loved in a critical way. It had never occurred to me as a kid that you could do that. I would get mad at the book sometimes because I thought he was being unfair. He clearly thought about the band at a much deeper level than I ever had.
Reading that book opened me up on how to think critically about art that you love. It's not just about being a fan or not. You can have a perspective on the flaws and also love the flaws. Your love of it is not the most interesting part of writing about something. That's actually boring. What's the next level? What is this thing trying to do? Why is this thing important? Why is this significant to people? That's when you start to find, as a critic, the stuff that's much richer to write about. The “hot or not” aspect of it is the least interesting a lot of the time.
Greil Marcus’ Mystery Train is my favorite music book ever written. I remember reading that when I was a teenager and not really understanding it but being really blown away by its scope. It opened something in my mind where I felt like writing about music could be an avenue for writing about anything. He's writing about this set of artists that he's a fan of – Elvis and Sly Stone, and this guy Harmonica Frank – but he's really writing about America, and how these artists represent what the country means to him.
I started writing professionally in daily newspapers. For my first job, I was a general assignment features reporter. I worked for alt-weeklies, I've worked for websites, I've done podcasts, and now I'm in the Substack world. It's constantly changing. There's no endpoint where it's like, “Okay, now that's the way it's going to be now.”
I'm probably more interested in endings than I am beginnings. I always love that part of documentaries or books when it starts to go bad. There's a two-part Elvis biography that Peter Guralnick wrote. One is called Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, which is about the first part of his career, and the second book is called Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley. I've read Careless Love more than I've read Last Train to Memphis.
Failure to me is more interesting than success, which is partly why I wanted to write about the Strokes. Failure is baked into a lot of what they do, even though they are this iconic band. It's a great mix, because if they were just a failure, they probably wouldn't be worth writing about.
From the very beginning, there was this way they were talked about. Even as they were being praised, it felt like there was a simultaneous skepticism of them. They're the future of rock, but they're also rich kids from New York. They're the most exciting new band, but they're also derivative.
A lot of times, writing a book is the excuse to do the research, and to just listen to this artist more than I would otherwise, or to really immerse myself in a particular era of music, which is what I think I did with this one.
“Someday” is a great example of Julian Casablancas’ songcraft. In another timeline, he would be viewed as a Tom Petty type of figure, just in terms of his ability to write these perfect three-minute rock songs. He has an underrated talent for that. And clearly you hear that obviously on Is This It, and even on Room on Fire. But it feels like he's been running away from that for all of his career. But “Someday” is the Platonic ideal and it’s also a sweet, nostalgic song in a way that he doesn't really allow himself to be most of the time.
I had the ability to geek out and to go on eBay and buy every Strokes magazine I could find, which is not something I would be able to justify normally. Because I'm writing a book on it, I can do that. It's an excuse to be obsessive. Whenever you decide that you're going to write a book on something, you are making a commitment to be obsessed with this topic for a year or two.
I was reading old magazine articles, because to me, one thing that I wanted to talk about is how the Strokes were talked about in the past, and how, in a lot of ways, that has been how they've always been talked about. Mapping that out feels interesting.
A song like “15 Minutes” from First Impressions of Earth was really interesting as just a self-referential song about how Julian sees the Strokes. He's done that throughout his career, where he'll write these songs that feel like they're allegories for this thing that I write about in the book, this sort of never-ending rise and fall of the Strokes. “15 Minutes,” of course, is making an obvious Andy Warhol reference, and it's really telling that that appeared on the third Strokes record, only five years into their recording career. You read articles from that time, and people were writing about them like they were 20 years into their career and were already “over the hill.”
I was also tracking down bootlegs and live recordings. A band like the Strokes is not necessarily doing anything radically different live, but listening to live recordings, there's a documentary aspect to it. One thing I love is listening to the room as much as the band and using that to transport yourself to a different time.
This was a little bit different than other books I've written because the Strokes are basically the same age as me. We were all born in the late 70s. I was in my early 20s when Is This It came out. So, it was an easier book to write in a lot of respects because I just had a lot of same reference points that they did, and the beginning of their career coincides with the beginning of my career. I was writing about a lot of this stuff as it was happening.
With the books I write, it's never only just about the band. I like to use the subject as a vehicle for talking about something bigger. I'm not writing a biography. I'm a music critic, so I'm writing commentary-type books.
Criticism places a work of art in a larger context, in a way that you don’t get from a biography. Some biographies do that, but most of the time it really is about the particulars and how it worked in the band.
Musicians themselves often don't have as much perspective on their own career, music, or life as you would expect, especially when you read a lot of memoirs of musicians. They often don't know what's interesting about themselves. They'll write about their collection of antique cars for a long time, and then they'll spend a page and a half writing about the most important album of their life. Their cars are more interesting to them than the album that they made, but that's not true for anyone else.
When you write these books, sometimes you're also plumbing your own history. I'm constantly questioning my own memory. Especially as I get older and especially being a writer, I'm always very self-aware about how I remember things.
I try to foreground my own perspective in the things that I write about, that I'm not some omniscient, all-knowing, unseen narrator of these books, that I'm a character in the book, and I've got my own biases, and I've got my own perspective. And hopefully people who enjoy seeing it through my perspective when they read the book, and it will stimulate their own way of thinking. You owe that to the readers, and they can decide on their own. Like, “I don't like this album, but also it came out at a terrible time in my life. So that might influence that.” That's just honesty.
I was thinking about what my life was like in 2001. At the beginning of the book, I'm writing about this guy Craig Arnold who I grew up with. I used to see him from time to time in my early 20s, because I was living in my hometown. I had a random memory of talking about the Strokes with him. I corresponded with him a little bit. It wasn't some big conversation, but it's something I always think about when I think about Is This It and when it came out. It felt like a good way to set up things in the book in terms of how the Strokes were received, the idea of cycles in music, how we're due for another band like this to come along and change music, and how that symbolized how music culture has changed.
I love that music culture changes. It's a little weird for the music fan in me to be confronted with that, but I love it as a critic because it reinvigorates the story of music constantly. It gives me a perspective on it that I didn't have as a younger person. I've been around long enough to know that the same conversations happen over and over again. Not just with the Strokes, but just generally. A lot of people get burned out by that, but I find it fascinating.
There's a fair amount about the media in this book because the media changing in the last 25 years is really important in terms of how bands are perceived and talked about. Having worked in the media during that time, I had a different perspective than I had as a kid reading record reviews or profiles in the ’90s.
Using my own writing as a reference point was very handy with this book, because that could also capture how I felt at the time, which keeps changing. I've written about Pearl Jam and about Radiohead, that was a little bit different because I experienced those albums in real time, but I was obviously much younger than the musicians.
I'm working on something about U2 [U2: The Last Biggest Band in the World, set for release in 2028]. The thesis statement of it is that no band has succeeded and failed as spectacularly as U2. No band that is as big as them has fallen on their face as often as they have. That is the nutshell of what attracts me to writing about them. Because it's so fun to parse failures. And it's also more relatable.
Most of us fail more than we succeed, and it's such a big part of life. In a weird way, the Strokes and the U2 books are connected in a lot of ways because, in that respect, they have a lot in common. Even though U2 is way more successful. Their drive to always be the biggest band in the world is the seed of when they fail. I would love to write about Ben Affleck one day, because I think he's had this similar trajectory.
I love the continuum of music and, in a lot of ways, all my books are about that. I love seeing how that evolves. John Lennon was probably the most revered musician in rock when I first started learning about music, and now I feel like his reputation has kind of changed a little bit. I love that Steely Dan was this really square band that only baby boomers liked 25 years ago, and now you see teenagers and 20-something people love Steely Dan. Stocks of legacy artists are changing all the time. Artists that haven't put out any new music. It's the same music, but it's like a different audience that hears it, and they feel differently about it than how people felt before.
Steven Hyden’s latest book, Is This It: The Never-Ending Rise and Fall of the Strokes (And Rock ‘N’ Roll) is out Tuesday, Sept. 8. To mark its release, Hyden will be in conversation with Steve Gorman at Turf Club at 7 p.m. on that day. Tickets and info
