A rumor spread across my college campus in the fall of 2001 almost as quickly as the album and band it concerned. It was the blue, halcyon September before September 11th, and each of us arrived at college toting cardboard boxes of CDs, hundreds and thousands of petroleum cases containing our musical lives. Some of the cooler among us had acquired a burned copy or the import original of The Strokes’ Is This It, released at the end of that July in Australia and in late August in the UK. The record circulated our small college campus that September with the viral vigor of an engaging secret. The music was passed with a rumor: “I heard they recorded it for less than $10,000,” we murmured and repeated. It was absurd and apocryphal, but we spread this too as we burned the music onto CDs and into our computers.
Is This It wouldn’t officially arrive in U.S. record stores until that October with a new puritanical album cover and the replacement of “New York City Cops” with “When It Started” in the wake of September 11, but the music was already rippling outwards at our school, connected to our weird rumor of its supposed “cheapness”. It was an exciting vulgarity, an invocation of a new age of free and freedom: $10,000 was nothing for a mainstream band. We knew just little enough to believe in its truth. The Strokes represented the laconic and edgy rock from downtown New York, a place of cheap or expensive thrills — a place few of us knew then — and $10,000; it seemed like a shockingly small sum of money in these last decadent years of the music industry.