“I Gave Birth to The National and All I Got Was This Lousy Seven Million Streams”

I’m not sure what’s governing this phenomenon but Turn on the Bright Lights (2002) is a big football-watching album for me. I think it’s probably the element of drama involved in it — almost all of these songs have a strong sense of urgency, to the point even where on some tracks like “Say Hello to the Angels” I feel like Paul Banks is just stuck in this really hyperactive state of mind. An examination of his prescription medicine cabinet would certainly be an interesting endeavor. 

“NYC,” which I consider to be the centerpiece and to have just a criminally low amount of total streams on Spotify, is certainly no exception to this rule, and what’s more represents a shining beacon of how that Interpol dramatic element can merge what manifests as a genuine melancholy, within the traditional rubric of effective rock and roll. Rather than being a love song about a person, essentially, it careens up as a hate song about his city. And sure, you could say that there’s always love fused with any expression of hate. It would certainly be nice to think so. But in “NYC,” a track I also decided failed not to influence each and every session The National has ever recorded [1], Banks is pretty much at a total loss, diagramming everything from aesthetic squalor (“The subway she is a porno / The pavements they are a mess”) to a sort of disaffected ennui which could have perhaps theoretically been spawned by reliance on SSRI’s or some other prescription drug: “Though you’ve supported me for a long time / Somehow I’m not impressed”. This is called climbing your way out of your own crab bucket the world has made for you by way of pure mourning and plangent clamor to where, finally, that bewildering guitar solo acts as a hurried, frenzied snapshot of the natural response to have been born in New York City, which Interpol just happened to pinpoint on a raft of some exquisite guitar sound and patient, systematic plaintiveness. 

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[1] Although as you’ll kindly notice nobody in The National is apparently talented enough to close-pick a guitar string with flawless rhythmic exactitude for the entire second half of a song, or they just didn’t want to infringe on the copyright laws surrounding something like that.