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I just wanted to make sure...

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Gryff:
"Garage rock" is a stupid term that has no real definition. People who get worked up about bands being "not real garage" are fools. The Strokes are a very good band who play tight pop songs with a kind of lazy Velvets-metronomic thing going on. Who cares if they are "garage" enough or not?

I like Room on Fire best ('Repitilia' is fucking amazing), Is This It second, although those two are pretty close in terms of quality. The new one is pretty patchy, but contains a few good bits.

nescience:
Um, Garage Rock and its revivals are actually fairly well-defined and easily discernable.  It sounds like your issue is less with the term itself and more with some group of critics who equate the quality of the Strokes' music with their adherence to the genre.  First off, you don't need to defend yourself or the Strokes against bad criticism (partly because they're flat-out wrong by saying the Strokes aren't garage rock revivalists and partly because the Strokes don't need defense to keep their fans), and second, your complaint has nothing to do with the genre itself.

Where did that come from?

Gryff:
I was mostly resonding to Combinethresher's "They make boring, sterile "garage" music for hipsters and wannabe artists who've never heard real garage music before," comment.

Hence me saying "Who cares if they are "garage" enough or not?"

The problem I have is that "garage rock" is used to describe so many disparate bands that as a genre definition it has lost all meaning. The Datsuns and the White Stripes are two bands that are supposedly "garage rock", but their sounds and influences are almost completely different. Even bands like the Dirtbombs, who are pretty fucking garage rock, hate the term.

Combinethresher:
I'd also recommend Back From the Grave for a great look at the 60s garage rock sound. That said, Nuggets is a good one too.

And my beef with the Strokes isn't that they aren't "garage" enough, it's that I think they suck. What makes it worse is that critics eagerly compare them to music I like, music that I think is a lot more fun and a lot less focused on image, and declare that they are reviving that style, when in fact their music is boring and overproduced. I'd be more inclined to call Jet, the Hives, and the Teenage Harlots (I spelled it wrong before) garage rock bands because they understand that garage rock was supposed to be fun and silly, for Chrissakes. In fact, the Hives' Barely Legal is an amazing album; along with being fun to listen to, it rocks hard. The Strokes can't keep up.

That's my take, anyway. If I sounded like a genre fascist before, my bad. That's the last thing I wanted to do.

Rubby:

--- Quote from: Gryff ---Even bands like the Dirtbombs, who are pretty fucking garage rock, hate the term.
--- End quote ---

Yeah I'd hate it too if my band was constantly brought up in these debates.

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