“…The book: a reductive binary between acts identified as “Manhattan” vs. those labeled as “Brooklyn.” The Manhattan bands are sexy, genially seedy, coke-sweating old-school Lower East Side rock stars of the first half of the decade: the Strokes, Interpol, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. In contrast, the so-called “Brooklyn bands” of the second half “remaking New York in their own nerdy image” (as the book’s jacket puts it) are a caricature of sexless, pretentious, dressed-down, “uncool kids”—“very technical musicians” who “don’t really present themselves as rock stars,” and are “bright,” “more grounded,” “less sensitive,” “reasonable,” and “practically minded”: TV on the Radio, the National, Dirty Projectors, Grizzly Bear, Vampire Weekend (also, confusingly, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a self-consciously artsy band who are held up in some passages as hard-drinking East Village party-starters and in others as reluctant, unglamorous anti-stars living and working in Brooklyn).” –Franz Nicolay Slate Magazine Review
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