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The Rundown: Is Gus Fring Lying About His Chicken?

Post author By GoneTrending
Post date April 3, 2020

The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.

ITEM NUMBER ONE — Explain yourself, Gustavo

I usually try to avoid spoiler-heavy discussions of recent episodes of television in the opening section of this column, but there’s no way around it this week. There is an important issue that needs to be discussed. It happened on Monday’s episode of Better Call Saul. I will attempt to explain it in a way that non-viewers will understand, but if you have yet to see the episode and plan to see it, go do that and then come back here.

Okay. For reasons relating to ongoing drug wars and subterfuge, Gus Fring — the ice-cold Chilean drug kingpin introduced in Breaking Bad who runs a chain of fried chicken restaurants as a cover — trashes and blows up one of his locations. The way he did it was wild and involved a kind of Rube Goldberg set-up with a frozen chicken on a sheet pan that was angled down toward a bubbling deep fryer in a kitchen that was filling up with gas rapidly. It was genius and kind of funny and until a few people reached out to me on Twitter about it, I did not see any issue.

But.

BUT.

Let’s jump back to the first episode of this season when Gus was discussing the construction of an industrial refrigerator for his restaurants as a cover for the actual construction of a drug-making superlab. Someone makes the mistake of referring to it as “a freezer.” This offends Gus Fring deeply, for reasons explained in this screencap, which I am including as evidence.

It will never not delight me that Gus takes such pride in the food at his restaurants even though their primary purpose is to give him cover to transport a massive amount of drugs through the American Southwest. He probably earns, what, five percent as much at these restaurants as he makes moving drugs for the cartel? Less? I am not joking when I tell you that I think about this as much as I think about, like, planning for my retirement.

Anyway, you see where this is going, right? Gus says his chickens are never frozen. And yet, when it came time to blow up his restaurant, he marched right into his cooler and pulled out a frosty bird. More evidence.

There are, as far as I can tell, three possibilities at play here.

Possibility Number One: Gus Fring is a damn liar.
Possibility Number Two: Gus Fring is not a liar and he froze this chicken special and by itself for the sole purpose of blowing up his restaurant, which is backed up by the fact that there is clearly only one chicken on a cling-wrapped sheet pan on the shelf.
Possibility Number Three: I am thinking too much about this, by a lot.

Right now, after almost a full week of thought, I’m leaning toward a combination of numbers two and three. Part of my reasoning is the thing about the chicken being alone on the individually wrapped sheet pan. If he was freezing all of his chickens, he could have just pulled one out of the pile. No, this was planned out very deliberately. I like to think he spent no less than 25 minutes selecting the chicken he would use for the arson. The man is nothing if not meticulous.

The other part of my reasoning is that, for some reason, I don’t believe that Gus — a notorious drug dealer and murderer who may or may not have committed a number of war crimes in his native country before fleeing to America — would lie about or take shortcuts with the preparation of the food at the restaurant he runs to hide his lucrative narcotics business. Is that weird? Is it weird that I’m willing to accept him as a cold-blooded killer and criminal but not as a man who tries to pass off frozen chicken as fresh? I don’t think it is, which is itself pretty weird. Gus Fring has respect for a quality product. It’s the same with his meth and his chicken. It’s why he eventually brings in Walter White. The man demands the best and there are consequences for failing him.

Still, though. The chickens are “never” frozen? That’s been proven false. A more accurate statement would be “our product is never frozen unless I need to stage an explosion to blow up the restaurant as part of ruse involving my hated partner and nemesis in the drug cartel that employs me.” I guess that’s a bit of a mouthful, though. I’ll cut him a little slack, mostly because I’m terrified of him.

Look at this guy. Come on.

Freeze all the chickens you want, buddy. Just please do not hurt me.

ITEM NUMBER TWO — A perfect song

Adam Schlesinger passed away this week from complications related to the coronavirus. I’ll leave the eulogies to the people who were more familiar with his entire body of work, but it is important to note here and everywhere that the Fountains of Wayne frontman wrote the titular song from That Thing You Do!, a perfect little song in a mostly perfect little movie. It’s not just that the song was relentlessly catchy on its own, in the way that timeless pop songs often are. It was that the entire movie hinged on the song being relentlessly catchy. No pressure or anything.

My colleague Josh Kurp wrote a lovely tribute to the song this week that said all of this better than I have or can. Let’s blockquote him:

The drums! The harmonies! The hook! The bridge! Every time I hear it, I turn into Liv Tyler running down the street, losing her mind when she hears the song on the radio. “That Thing You Do!” sounds effortless, but it’s not like “I Want to Hold Your Hand”-level bops come out of nowhere; Schlesinger had to write a song from another era that you hear multiple times in its near-entirety, and if it wasn’t instantly irresistible and you didn’t believe it was the biggest song in the world, the entire movie would fall apart. (It’s one of the reasons, among many, that Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip failed: the in-show sketches were supposed to be funny; they weren’t. Unlike 30 Rock, where “Fart Doctor” is intentionally awful, and therefore, hilarious.) “That Thing You Do!” was a 1960s song written for a 1990s movie that still sounds great in the 2020s. It’s timeless.

This is all correct. Let’s play this song all weekend. And a bunch of Schlesinger’s other songs. And let’s also try to remember to be better about honoring people while they’re alive, too. While they’re around to hear it. Tributes are great. Celebrations are better. I know it’s hard to think about that now, but try letting someone you admire know how important their work has been to you. Do it this weekend. Do it today. You never know, you know?

ITEM NUMBER THREE — Please kneel before the Queen of America

Ina Garten is the greatest. This much we knew already, although the video embedded above is a nice little refresher. Just the Barefoot Contessa quarantined at home in the Hamptons and mixing up a cocktail as big as her entire head. It’s perfect and beautiful. She’s one part Queen of America and one part everyone’s fun aunt, which I believe makes all of us second-tier princes and princesses, the kind that have money and jewels and castles but no actual responsibilities. The best kind. Queen Aunt Ina rules the land with her giant cocktails. The people love her and she loves the people.

This also gives us a great excuse to go back and read Choire Sicha’s wonderful profile of her from 2015. Does it give you some background on her rise to fame? It does. Does it feature hilariously alpha quotes from Martha Stewart? Yes, plenty of them. Does it include a number of paragraphs about her husband Jeffrey, a fascinating man who may or may not have secrets? I am pleased to report that it does. Here, look:

Jeffrey appears in the show as comic relief, a bumbling Jew doing big shtick. Ina likes to use the hashtag #drunkhubby to describe him on Instagram. In the season eight premiere, they’ve rented a house in Napa, so that, ostensibly, Ina can get away and Jeffrey can write a book. There is a whole subplot in one episode that amounts to absolutely nothing, in which Jeffrey, having flown in for Friday night chicken dinner, is filmed driving through the Napa roads. “I hope I can find the rental house,” he says, in an example of how people say everyday, totally acceptable things which then come off on the show — or, to be fair, on all such shows — as flat and deranged and even a little Lynchian. He really hopes he can find that rental house!

Haha, what a silly man. Who is also an extremely successful financial wizard. And again, may or may not have secrets.

Jeffrey Garten is not a bumbling idiot. He finds the house in Napa without difficulty. After all, any reasonably close reading of his resume suggests that he certainly either was, or equally likely was not, working for the CIA in Asia and Latin America for decades.

What a fascinating couple. I want to live in their guest house and observe them for weeks on end. Months, perhaps. Not even for a profile or a documentary. Just for my own curiosity. Especially when you consider this…

“Personally, I’m a big vegetable fan and I have to be very cautious of what I eat and how much I eat of it. And yes, have they had to come up to me and say ‘Chef, you’ve got two more locations today. You cannot have all the enchiladas’? And have they taken them out of my hands? Yes, they have.”

Ahhh, whoops. It appears I have accidentally included a quote from another Food Network icon, Guy Fieri, from a piece in Variety this week. I wonder how that happened? I guess we’ll never know. Or we will know because I will tell you: It happened because the visual of a producer yoinking an enchilada out of Guy Fieri’s hands has been cracking me up for days. Picture his face. He must have been so sad. Let Guy have his enchiladas!

I would pay top-tier boxing title fight PPV prices for a three-hour special where Guy and Ina criss-cross America in a Winnebago.

ITEM NUMBER FOUR — “Ba-wubb-ah bayyyyy-eth”

Two things that are true:

Maya Rudolph’s pronunciation of the phrase “bubble bath” in character as Connie the Hormone Monstress on Big Mouth is one of the truly great things in the world and we should stop to remember that from time to time
I have always wanted to see her say it in real life because — like all of the other voice actors on the show — she appears to be having an absolute blast with it

That wish was granted during the Big Mouth quarantine live-read that took place last weekend. Behold, a champion.

SHE SAID BUBBLE BATH @MayaRudolph pic.twitter.com/S952OkL2Iq

— Big Mouth (@bigmouth) March 28, 2020

You know what? It’s exactly like I pictured it, right down to the puffed lips as she blasts out air on every hard b. I’m so happy and grateful I got to experience this. Dreams do come true.

ITEM NUMBER FIVE — I feel like this will help

Hey, do you like fun things that are probably good? Great, me too. That’s what I am happy to inform you that John Mulaney and Nick Kroll are embarking on a new project: a weekly podcast, in character as the maniacs from Oh, Hello, George St. Geegland and Gil Faison, who they played on Broadway and in a Netflix special and in the above clip, in which Mulaney, as St. Geegland, sets up a prank involving O.J. Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark and an absolutely mammoth tuna sandwich by saying “You’re about to get the second biggest surprise of your life.”

It’s a good bit. And that’s before you even get to the description of the podcast.

She was the People’s Princess and they were two men who hung out at Duane Reade. But now worlds have collided. From the stars of “Oh Hello, on Broadway” and the video taped version of “Oh, Hello on Broadway” comes a podcast on the life and death of Princess Diana.

Yes, this will do. This will do nicely. We’ve all earned this. Let’s enjoy.

READER MAIL

If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me on Twitter or at brian.grubb@uproxx.com (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.

From Danny:

I was looking for something to watch last week and for some reason your years-old recommendation of The Wine Show on Hulu popped into my head. I have now watched the entire first season of The Wine Show. It’s like televised Xanax. I would be fine with a version of heaven that is nothing but wine experts talking to Matthew Rhys and Matthew Goode about wine gadgets. This is me saying thank you for that.

Yo.

Yes.

YES.

I had forgotten about The Wine Show until I saw Danny’s email. I have now also watched multiple episodes of the show since then. “Televised Xanax” hits the nail on the head. Just two very charming British actors bouncing around Italy tasting wines and cracking jokes and doing poor James Bond accents whenever they try out a new gadget. It is especially wild to see Matthew Rhys in this if you only know him as the perpetually sad Russian spy he played on The Americans. He’s bearded and giggling and having the best time throughout the entire show. Total goofball, complete 180 from Philip Jennings.

Highest possible recommendation. Watch The Wine Show.

AND NOW, THE NEWS

To the Northwest!

A man was arrested Sunday after leading troopers on a high-speed chase with his dog sitting in the driver’s seat, a spokeswoman for the Washington State Patrol said.

Hmm. Go on.

The suspect was driving “absolutely recklessly,” and a pursuit ensued at 109 miles an hour, she said. One of the troopers attempted to corner the suspect’s car, looked inside and realized a pit bull was sitting in the driver’s seat while the suspect steered, Axtman said.

More. Tell me more.

Eventually troopers were able to use spike strips to end the pursuit. During the arrest, Axtman said the suspect gave them one explanation: He was “trying to teach his dog how to drive.”

If I were this guy’s lawyer, and if he is reading this please consider this an official offer, like I would blow the inch of dust off my decade-old law degree and fill out the mountain of paperwork to get active, I would make two arguments here: One, how can you charge my client with any traffic offense when the dog was the one driving? Two, how is the dog supposed to get good at driving if we don’t let him practice?

If neither of those work, I’ll start flinging around phrases like “in this economy” and “in these troubled times” until I see one member of the jury start nodding along. I’ve seen every episode of both Law & Order and Franklin & Bash. I can get a hung jury at least on this one. Probably an acquittal. I guarantee it.

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The Strokes’ Best Songs, Ranked

Post author By GoneTrending
Post date April 3, 2020

I’ve never been a fan of a tragically terrible New York City sports team. But I am aware of what it’s like to put your heart and soul into an NYC-based institution that you know has the potential to be great. And also how it is to feel entitled to that greatness, which makes its failure to materialize seem like a personal injury. After all this time, you deserve this, don’t you? It’s a delusion that drives normal, sane people to expect a different result from the same flawed characters, who in reality are doomed to perpetually confound, confuse, and disappoint those who care about them most.

I don’t love the Mets or the Knicks. But I will always adore The Strokes. They are my Mets and Knicks rolled into one.

I suspect that The Strokes are aware that they are perceived as underachievers. Their forthcoming, Rick Rubin-produced album, The New Abnormal, ends with a song called “Ode To The Mets.” Should they ever tour behind this LP, perhaps they will hire James Dolan’s misbegotten blues band, JD and the Straight Shot, to open. Though that might be one meta bridge too far.

I’ll have more to say about The New Abnormal — and whether it succeeds as the comeback that people like me want it to be — when I review it next week. For now, I want to focus on The Strokes’ career up until this point.

Everyone thinks they have this band pegged: Peak early with Is This It, repeat themselves with Room On Fire, slip and fall with First Impression Of Earth, and then descend further on Angles and Comedown Machine. And that … is broadly true. But even things that are “broadly true” can also be wrong in countless small ways. The fact is that The Strokes have never made a boring record. Even their failures are interesting, and contain at least two or three songs that most rock bands couldn’t touch on their best albums.

Let’s go back and explore this band’s inarguable triumphs as well as the misfires that secretly contain largely undiscovered goodness. Here are the best 25 songs by The Strokes.

25. “Bad Decisions” (2020)

A core attribute of Strokes’ songs is the ability to conjure the feel of a song you already love without (in most cases) directly ripping it off. This single from the forthcoming The New Abnormal shows that they are still very adept at this trick. The guitar tone of “Bad Decisions” instantly evokes Modern English’s heart-exploding ’80s oldie “I Melt You,” albeit with a fresh coat of urban grime. (It also veers so close to “Dancing With Myself” that Billy Idol was awarded a co-writing credit.) Of course, “Bad Decisions” also recalls The Strokes’ own pitch-perfect way with spiky power pop. It sounds like the music of the aughts summoning the music of the ’80s, a profound double-exposure of mixtape melancholy.

24. “Welcome To Japan” (2013)

Comedown Machine truly is a departure point in The Strokes’ discography, separating the casual fans who are merely nostalgic for Is This It, and the hardcore believers who have followed Julian Casablancas into the deepest recesses of The Voidz wilderness. I tend to lean toward the latter camp, which is why I regard Comedown Machine as the band’s great “bad” record, a work loaded with straight-up goofy experiments and fascinating misfires that reveal deeper truths about how this band operates. Were tTe Strokes trying to stretch themselves, or did they actually not care at all about making a new Strokes album? I’ll never tire of speculating on either scenario. One of the most successful tracks is this sort-of travelogue, which includes one of Casablancas’ greatest non-sequiturs: “What kind of asshole drives a Lotus?”

23. “You Only Live Once” (2006)

The Strokes might not be the most reliable band, but you can always count on them to deliver a killer Side 1, Track 1. This album opener from First Impressions of the Earth is so sturdy and confident that it belies what is in fact one of the shakiest and least consistent Strokes LPs of all. It’s an early peak that the rest of the record will usually fail to hit. (This track was later repurposed by Casablancas in dramatically stripped-back form for the beloved solo track, “I’ll Try Anything Once.”)

22. “Trying Your Luck” (2001)

The amount of hype that greeted Is This It in the fall of 2001 instantly divided rock fans into acolytes and skeptics. To be fair, the skeptics had reason to feel like The Strokes were being sold a little too hard. The opening sentence of Rolling Stone‘s review of Is This It was typical of the tenor of NYC-based music publications: “This is the stuff of which legends are made.” (The magazine also dubbed them America’s best young rock band, practically from the moment they arrived on the national scene.) What made The Strokes so seductive — even more than the scores of great songs larded into Is This It — was mystique. They put it on like the rest of us try on a too-tight T. Rex T-shirt. This is easier to appreciate two decades after the fact. Just play the clip above of them playing the wistful Is This It deep cut “Trying Your Luck.” This is the last band that really knew how to smoke and play guitars simultaneously.

21. “The End Has No End” (2003)

Upon the release of Is This It, eager music critics quickly compared them to the greats of gritty NYC rock: The Velvet Underground, Television, the Ramones. But in reality, they often lifted ideas from the giants of late-’70s and early-’80s FM rock, like Tom Petty, Blondie, and especially The Cars. They really get their Candy-O on this vaguely political Room On Fire track, where Casablancas postulates that “It’s not the secrets of the government that’s keeping you dumb / Oh, it’s the other way around.” Coming after Is This It, which was rock’s signature escapist post-9/11 rock album, it was as if The Strokes were subtly acknowledging that there was no hiding from a nation about to wage two wars.

20. “Machu Picchu” (2011)

Angles is the most unfairly maligned Strokes album, and that’s mostly the fault of The Strokes themselves. The album cycle, frankly, was a disaster, with Casablancas openly expressing disinterest in Angles, while the rest of the band complained that their frontman was mostly out-of-pocket during the sessions. (Apparently he communicated song ideas with his bandmates strictly via email.) This inevitably created an impression about arrival that Angles should be treated as an afterthought. This is unfortunate, as Angles includes some of the best pop songs The Strokes have ever committed to tape, starting with the album’s opener, which showcases the band’s underappreciated funky side, cross-breeding Rio-era Duran Duran with Men At Work’s “Down Under.”

19. “Between Love & Hate” (2003)

A secretly popular contrarian opinion among Strokes boosters is that Room On Fire is actually better than Is This It. I happen to hold that particular opinion, and allow me to briefly explain why: On Room On Fire, The Strokes became a great groove band. While Is This It might ultimately boast superior songwriting — though I’m not fully prepared to concede this — the band plays together much better on Room On Fire. “Between Love & Hate” is a good example of how The Strokes became a rock ‘n’ roll rhythm machine in the vein of the early-’70s Stones, with Albert Hammond Jr. and Nick Valensi’s interweaving guitars providing a powerful, ska-infused counter-groove to the simple yet potent foundation provided by drummer Fab Moretti and bassist Nikolai Fraiture.

18. “One Way Trigger” (2013)

Does any phrase sum up the batty charms of Comedown Machine than “The Strokes go klezmer”? That’s precisely what they did on the album’s initially annoying but ultimately endearing curveball single, which also manages to sneak in a subliminal musical allusion to A-Ha’s “Take On Me.” Factor in Casablancas’ affecting falsetto, and this actually sounds more like a Voidz track than classic Strokes. Though given how lost the band seemed at this point, the manic sorrow of “One Way Trigger” feels like an accurate internal barometer of deep discontent.

17. “Razorblade”

During the press cycle for First Impressions Of Earth, The Strokes were already being treated as interesting disappointments. By then, a micro-generation of bands plainly influenced and inspired by Is This It and Room On Fire had come along and lapped The Strokes commercially, including Franz Ferdinand and especially The Killers. “There were many conversations along the lines of, ‘I think our songs are better than Mr. Brightside by The Killers, but how come that’s the one everybody’s listening to?’” Valensi told Spin in 2006. Ultimately, Valensi conceded “Mr. Brightside” sounded more like a pop hit than any Strokes single, and The Killers weren’t nearly as self-destructive. For The Strokes, engaging with pop always always had to have a subversive edge. Take “Razorblade,” the catchiest could-have-been hit from First Impressions, which just so happens to sound a lot like Barry Manilow’s schlock 1973 smash “Mandy.” Even at their poppiest, The Strokes still had to subtly mock the machine.

16. “The Adults Are Talking” (2020)

Bringing in Rick Rubin to produce The New Abnormal seemed like a uniquely self-aware career move. After all, Rubin is the leading guru for aging rock bands looking for a fresh start. I’ll have more to say on whether Rubin successfully helped The Strokes rediscover their inner, indelible Strokes-y selves in my album review next week. But for now, a tip of the cap to The New Abnormal‘s opening track, a minor-key new wave beauty with gorgeous guitar arpeggios that stands as the very best song to come out of this band in some time.

15. “New York City Cops” (2001)

The one famously left off of Is This It, because insisting that NYC police officers “ain’t too smart” in the snottiest voice imaginable was suddenly uncouth after 9/11. Though for me “New York City Cops” also stands as the first great rock moment of 2020, when it was performed at a Bernie Sanders rally in February as actual cops tried to hustle them off the stage. Yes, these guys are in their 40s now. And Julian Casablancas has ditched the leather jackets in order to dress like the Riddler. But there’s no other band that could pull off this display of insolent insouciance on such a grand scale.

14. “12:51” (2003)

Another brilliant example of The Strokes not only ripping off The Cars but actually improving upon them. The Strokes sounded so much wearier and more grown-up on Room On Fire that it was easy to overlook that Casablancas had only turned 25 upon the album’s release. But you can tell when you read the lyrics to “12:51,” which could have been taken from a Blink-182 song: “We could go and get 40’s / Fuck goin’ to that party / Oh really, you’re folks are away now? / Alright, lets go, you convinced me.”

13. “Under Cover Of Darkness” (2011)

For many years I insisted that Angles was my favorite Strokes album. I think I was overcompensating for how poorly the fourth Strokes LP was treated by the rest of the world, including the band themselves. But while my love of Angles is now a little more proportional to the actual quality of the record, I remain dumbfounded that “Under Cover Of Darkness” didn’t automatically become one of the most beloved tracks in the Strokes-iverse. It’s as rousing as anything from Is This It, it has the chops of Room On Fire, and it adds an extra layer of Thin Lizzy-style muscle. One of this band’s most perfect straight-ahead rock songs.

12. “Hard To Explain” (2001)

The first single from Is This It, and the first Strokes song us normies who couldn’t get a hold of The Modern Age EP heard. Upon revisiting, “Hard To Explain” hardly seems like the opening salvo of a revolution. It’s a little too unassuming for that. However, “Hard To Explain” does demonstrate that The Strokes had their act down cold from the beginning. Mathematically placed guitars, mechanical rhythm section, a vocal that somehow sounds both bored and agitated — it was all there at the start. Which is why, unlike most revolutionary songs removed from their moment, “Hard To Explain” still sounds as good now as it did then.

11. “Is This It” (2001)

One of the great opening tracks on a debut album ever. It also showed that The Strokes had a sense of humor about being declared rock saviors before their first LP even dropped. Instead of kicking down the door “Welcome To The Jungle”-style, The Strokes instead hobbled groggily out of bed in the early afternoon, lit a cigarette, and sardonically wondered whether they were really worth all of the trouble. Turns out the answer to that question was more complicated than anyone realized at the time.

10. “What Ever Happened” (2003)

In the bruising, competitive battle for the distinction of best Strokes album opener, I give the slight nod to “What Ever Happened” from Room On Fire. Like “Is This It,” there is an unmissable meta element to this song that serves the ultimate purpose of minimizing expectations with a well-timed shrug. (Though this time, The Strokes do take the “kick down the door” approach.) If you were writing about Room On Fire, you were required to accept the opening lines as thinkpiece fodder: “I wanna be forgotten / And I don’t want to be reminded / You say, ‘Please don’t make this harder’ / No, I won’t yet.”

9. “Soma” (2001)

The Strokes were not the first band to reference the recreational drug used by citizens to distract themselves from a contemporary dystopia in Aldous Huxley’s landmark 1932 novel Brand New World. (Billy Corgan wrote a song called “Soma” for Smashing Pumpkins’ second album, 1993’s Siamese Dream, which these guys undoubtedly heard at some point in high school.) But in the context of Is This It, “Soma” has an interesting double-meaning, given that The Strokes themselves were an immediate distraction from the horrors of post-9/11 America. An old-school rock band that arrived at the outset of a new century in which old-school rock bands were increasingly anachronistic, The Strokes symbolized a classic version of NYC cool right at the time when NYC was most imperiled. Looking at the lyrics of “Soma,” it’s as if this significance was baked in from conception, especially the opening line: “Soma is what they would take when hard times opened their eyes.”

8. “Taken For A Fool” (2011)

Just as The Strokes thrived on expertly pilfering the most delectable sounds and melodies of our collective new wave and post-punk past, The Strokes themselves became a popular reference point for the bands that arrived in their wake. None more so than Phoenix, whose best work from the late aughts coincided with The Strokes’ extended hiatus from the rock world. By the time they returned after a five-year absence with Angles, The Strokes showed that were not above lifting from the people who lifted from them. Enter “Taken For A Fool,” Angles’ best pure pop song, which distills Phoenix’s Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix back down to its component Room On Fire parts without losing the French band’s impeccable gleam.

7. “Automatic Stop” (2003)

The peak of The Strokes’ under-appreciated ska period, “Automatic Stop” was actually inspired by Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want To Have Fun,” Albert Hammond once claimed in an interview. I’d like to think that these boys wanted to have fun by listening to Operation Ivy while smoking enough weed to make the rhythms feel half as slow. Beyond that baseless speculation, “Automatic Stop” is an alluring portrait of post-Is This It decadence, a kind of PG-rated “Walk On The Wild Side” in which Casablancas drones about how there’s “so many fish there in the sea / she wanted him, he wanted me.”

6. “Someday” (2001)

The Strokes were able to deflect accusations that they were mere rock revivalists because nostalgia was one of their great subjects. Even when they were young and about to embark on a great adventure of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, The Strokes were already pining for something vital they felt they had lost. One of their greatest songs about this topic, “Someday,” has the ache of a young adult who wishes he was still a kid, even if he’s still living like a kid. One thing you lose as you age is closeness with your boyhood bros, and Casablancas could already feel that. “I say alone we stand, together we fall apart,” he hollers. Of course, The Strokes did manage to stick together, though they also often fell apart together in the process.

5. “Life Is Simple In The Moonlight” (2011)

The saddest Strokes song, and also the only one that references Cornel West. It just sounds like a sonic manifestation of regret over squandered potential. When they performed it on Saturday Night Live, I thought they might break up the next day. A decade on from Is This It, they looked wasted and exhausted, with Casablancas seemingly struggling to remember his own lyrics. It wasn’t good in the conventional sense, and yet I’m always riveted whenever I revisit the clip. The tension in this performance is watching Casablancas decide in real time whether he wants this to be the best TV performance ever, or the worst, and wavering between the two like an impaired driver struggling to keep his car on the road.

4. “The Modern Age” (2001)

Is This It was an in-joke of an album title. The Modern Age EP meanwhile was a provocation, a look-at-us-in-our-f*cking-cool-ass-leather-jackets move designed to send the press into hysterics. Ingeniously, it was available in the UK first, because the press there is famously more excitable about cool-ass-leather-jacketed Americans who declare that they are harbingers of a new movement. There are those who will insist that The Strokes peaked with opening title track from the EP, which is faster and rawer than the version that ended up on Is This It. I prefer the Is This It track, which makes up in swagger what it lacks in frantic immediacy. Though maybe I’m just being defensive over not being there when The Strokes first exploded. If you value The Strokes first and foremost as a paragon of rock coolness — a totally defensible position — they never got any cooler than “The Modern Age.”

3. “Reptilia” (2003)

On the other hand, if you value The Strokes for their ability to rock, then this has to be your go-to track. Because of their inherent economical nature, this band never gets the credit they deserve as shredders. Albert Hammond and Nick Valensi aren’t virtuosos, but they are a virtuoso guitar tandem, effortlessly interlocking lines like Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd slumming it on side 1 of Sticky Fingers. When Casablancas screams that the room is on fire, you know exactly where the fuel is coming from.

2. “Under Control” (2003)

One songwriting trope The Strokes have almost entirely avoided is the love ballad. The great exception is “Under Control,” their homage to Otis Redding, Percy Sledge, and all the other makers of epic, sexy ’60s soul. Only this song is directed by Casablancas to his bandmates, and it’s about how fame is slowly but surely destroying their friendship. “We worked hard, darling,” he concedes. “We were young, darling,” he sighs. But this won’t be true for long. So why not enjoy one more round for the road, while we still can?

1. “Last Nite” (2001)

For The Strokes, “the goal was to be really cool and non-mainstream, and be really popular,” Julian Casablancas declared in 2003. In that respect, their career is a failure. The Strokes were maybe 10 percent as popular as Linkin Park in the early aughts, at least in terms of album sales. But if The Strokes were never hugely popular, they did become famous, in that people really loved to look at them, maybe even more than listen to them. And that all started with the video for “Last Nite.” While people can debate over who was the best band of this era, there was no band that was better at looking like a rock band than The Strokes. If that sounds like I’m selling the music short, I’m really not. “Last Nite” is one of the most purely enjoyable and fun rock songs of the last 20 years. But what ultimately has made me a Strokes fan for life is that, like all iconic rock bands, the music is only part of it. Maybe only about 60 to 65 percent, in fact. The rest comes from your own imagination. How fun is this band to think about? How excited do they make you to care about rock ‘n’ roll? Who else can give you the feeling you get when, at the 51-second mark, the camera pans across the band to reveal all of the cast members: The Stoic Bass Player, The Guitarist Who Rocks, The Cute Drummer, The Isolent Singer, and The Guitarist Who Rolls. This is The Strokes. But it’s also every other band, both real and imagined, that has ever been and will ever be. Just as “Last Nite” is also “American Girl” and “Mr. Brightside.” If you think that’s just hype or folly, well, some people they don’t understand.