Meet Me in the Bathroom

JENNY ELISCU: The thing we shared was the Beastie Boys. The oldsters got the Beastie Boys and the youngsters got the Beastie Boys. But the other stuff they would get excited about, it was just sort of like, “I guess you had to have been born in the sixties or something.” Circa ’94 to ’99 the thing you thought of when you thought of a rock band from New York—you might think of a hardcore band or a punk band. Otherwise there wasn’t much. It would sort of be like, “Oh, they’re from here? Bummer.”

That town can have hundreds of personalities—not the people, the town itself. I like it better from afar, but I’m always thankful it exists

JIMI GOODWIN: We wrote a song called “New York.” It was about New York as an idea. A place where anything is possible, a place where you can find complete artistic freedom. We wrote that song on a fucking Scottish island in the middle of nowhere, before we’d ever been to the city; that’s how powerful it is

CARL SWANSON: You were the weird kid, and you come to New York to meet up with people who are also indigestible to mass culture. You learn from the junkies, the drag queens, and all the other people, people who are themselves

CARL SWANSON: If you were in your right mind and could sociologically find comfort in the rest of the country, you would not live here. That’s part of the appeal

We were all—every kid in the crowd and every person on stage—chasing the same thing: a feeling of rebellion, of possibility, of promise, of chaos. We had to find it so we could figure out how to be ourselves, and we couldn’t locate it without each other

We were chasing something that called to Charlie Parker and Bob Dylan and Lou Reed and Madonna before us, something I’d been falling asleep to for years back in New Mexico, something that was synthesized for our generation by Nick’s guitar when he let it scream for a while before the Strokes crash-landed into the opening of “New York City Cops” and by Karen O’s primal yowl on “Our Time” and James Murphy’s intimate, comic despair on “Losing My Edge.” We were all chasing New York City.

We were chasing something that called to Charlie Parker and Bob Dylan and Lou Reed and Madonna before us, something I’d been falling asleep to for years back in New Mexico, something that was synthesized for our generation by Nick’s guitar when he let it scream for a while before the Strokes crash-landed into the opening of “New York City Cops” and by Karen O’s primal yowl on “Our Time” and James Murphy’s intimate, comic despair on “Losing My Edge.” We were all chasing New York City. And for a few magical years, we caught it

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

JALEEL BUNTON: You’d go around the world and you’d have respect because you are from New York. “Oh, you’re from New York?” People who don’t live in New York bow down to this mythic thing. Because you needed to have a certain courage to live here. Your exposure to everyone was full blast. If you could thrive in this little petri dish of intense humanity, that deserved a bit of honor