The Strokes – Hard to Explain
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'I cannot heave my heart into my mouth' says Cordelia in the first scene of King Lear. While this wouldn't have been as catchy a title for The Strokes as 'Hard to Explain', released as part of their 2001 debut album Is This It?, it's offering the same speechless sentiment.
Is this the greatest rock song of the twenty-first century so far? It's definitely a contender. Two of my formative music memories involve The Strokes: 1. buying Is This It? from HMV in Belfast City Centre. 2. Watching them live at the Ulster Hall. There are so many great tracks on that album I want to write about, but there's something about the distorted, staccato, high tempo, loud, strobing guitar riff of this one which makes it distinctive and a bit of signature track from this New York five-piece.
So, I love the musical quality of this piece, but I think there's something a bit deeper at play with it. While the lyrics of this song are largely disjointed, at its core it's a song about the difficulty of saying what you mean. It's called 'Hard to Explain' after all. They say we live in a time of a crisis of masculinity, where young men are going off the rails; bound up with that, in my view, is the male tendency towards silence over speech, whether this is through choice or an inability to find the right words to say in the first place, the difficulty of articulation. I think there's some truth to that, but I think that one of the best vehicles we've had to counter this, particularly for young men, has been rock music and male role models who can articulate the difficulty of articulation for them (okay, not all of these rockers have been pristine role models, but most of them are good eggs). We think of that line from Wonderwall, for example, 'There are many things that I would like to say to you, but I don't know how'. Inarticulation, speechlessness, wordlessness, the ineffable, seems to be a strong running theme in much rock music. Rock music, then, becomes something of a yelp in the dark for young men who have no other way to express themselves, albeit accompanied by electric guitars and drums.
And this leads me to think that one of the great values of rock music in our age of lost young men (and okay not all of them are lost) is how it can articulate the mood of a generation on their behalf, make them feel less alone, and therefore give them hope. Even if the message they are conveying is about the difficulty of articulating their thoughts, even if the message is 'it's hard to explain', it's still a message of empathy, in a way, just a very loud and fast one, with lots of shouty vocals, and distorted, downward RSI inducing strumming.
