'Is This It'

When The Strokes released Is This It in 2001, it was really the first and only time I felt like I was standing on the ground floor of something big.

I almost felt like what teenagers in the early 1960s felt when The Beatles and The Rolling Stones hit. Almost. However, given some time, maybe 30 years, looking back at the early-2000s and rock music might mean a bit more than it does today.

It's been a decade. A full 10 years since I felt everything changed.

I remember exactly how it came down. I heard about The Strokes and the album from a friend, Lauryn, who had a British version of the record, with the provocative photo of the naked woman's hips and ass and the leather glove.

I don't know if it was the same day or the next, but I went to Hastings -- as I was a junior in college living in a university town -- and purchased the album.

I remember unwrapping it in the car, putting it in the CD player and having my rock aesthetic changed forever. I'd look at music completely different. I aged 10 years in the matter of an hour, listening to Is This It and driving to work. My juvenile tendencies and sophomoric taste in music was forever buried, six feet under.

At the time, I swore that Julian Casablancas' vocals reminded me of someone from the 1960s or 1970s. I still almost feel that way, but now I realize that I was wrong. It was a perfect homage to a wide swath of garage rock that had come down from those decades. Yet, for us 20-somethings on the brink of having our global perspectives completely wrecked on Sept. 11, 2001, it was new. We were baptized in the rhythms, the metronomic drum beat and the slipshod, raucous guitars.

After Sept. 11, 2001, as we graduated and entered the rest of our lives, we asked on some level, "Is this it?" It's sounds sanctimonious and dumb. But we did.

We knew we'd never be the same.