The Strokes nowadays are just such a matter-of-fact part of the lore surrounding 2000s-era Indie-Rock and its peculiar crossover success into the mainstream, that it can be easy to forget just how divisive they were when they first debuted in 2001. As numerous critics noted at the time, the hype surrounding the band was just as top-down manufactured and artificial as that of the various Boy Bands and “nu-metal” acts they were clearly being positioned to replace.

It was also painfully obvious that all those Modern Rock radio DJs breathlessly comparing the Strokes to The Velvet Underground at the time had never actually listened to the Velvets themselves, and were clearly being paid off to say so. The Strokes arrival overall felt strangely clockwork and pre-programmed: It had been a solid decade since Nirvana had exploded out of left-field with Nevermind (which in turn was only a decade and change after The Sex Pistols–an outfit also as manufactured as any Boy Band–had briefly mainstreamed Punk Rock in the late-70s), so it was hard to escape the feeling that record execs had merely decided to get ahead of the next Indie-Rock resurgence by manufacturing one of their own. Is This It?, the title of their first LP, was as much a wink at their own over-inflated hype as it was about the modern condition generally.

Nevertheless, as George Orwell repeatedly stated, the only real test of art is that of longevity; and the fact that you can still occasionally bump into Gen Zers who stream The Strokes’ first two albums long after all the manufactured hype and ensuing backlash (not to mention numerous of their peers) have been forgotten, indicates that there really was something behind their earliest songs at least. And if they were comically never the second coming of The Velvet Underground, well, there are far worst influences to be compared against.

The Velvets, after all (as you can see from some of the links above), spent much of their oeuvre trying to see how much of a song can be cut out and still be affecting–or perhaps more precisely, how cutting notes from a song can paradoxically make a song more affecting. As frontman Lou Reed once facetiously put it, “One chord is good, two chords is pushing it, three chords you’re playing Jazz.” The Velvets in turn were a direct influence on a wide-variety of Punk and Indie acts, especially Galaxie 500 (who in turn were a direct influence upon Low, which, ya know, this site has leaned a little too hard on, as you have may have noticed)–and if there’s only one element of the Velvets that The Strokes successfully adopted, it was that same sense of getting out of the way of your own music, and the still small voice that whispers through and all things.

My Platonic ideal for a Strokes song isn’t their first single “Last Nite” (which owes far more to Tom Petty than Lou Reed), nor even their biggest hit “Reptilia” (the only memorable song on their second LP), but the haunting yet overlooked “Barely Legal,” from their first album. The title is merely an allusion to the only swear-word that appears on the entire album (and you already know my thoughts on swearing), which otherwise features some rather rote and cryptic lyrics about feeling burnt out with life that fit in thematically with the whole rest of the album.

But it’s not the lyrics that really sell the song for me, but the second bridge at 2:03, which features just the gentlest of bass drops at 2:15. On a musical and technical level, there is absolutely nothing noteworthy going on here: it’s all played at an un-challenging mid-tempo pace in 4/4 time; the lead guitar features a very simplistic two-string fingering pattern that pretty much any beginning guitarist could pick up; the even simpler rhythm guitar part is barely audible; the singer disappears completely; the drummer could be replaced with a synthesizer drum-machine without anyone noticing; and the bass-line is as basic as it gets (Charles Mingus or Flea from RHCP this is not).

Yet somehow the combination of these very rudimentary instrumental pieces creates a feeling that is positively sublime in execution, far more than the sum of its parts. It’s always my favorite part of the album, is what I insist on silence for when it drops, and for me at least justifies The Strokes’ entire existence.

It feels like there’s some Gospel Principles(TM) here, if you squint: our very humble and simple acts also add up to far more than the sum of their parts within the Kingdom of God; that it is by small and simple things are great things brought to pass; that it is not mastery of our talents that the Lord insists (there is after all only one Master), but the feeling we deploy them with; that, to quote President Dyer, the Gospel itself is a feeling–a still, small voice–simple yet profound, cutting through all the noise and burn-out of modernity and the artificiality of hype and commerce, to communicate something far more profound than words.

This Spirit, after all, is the only way we are converted. The song is perhaps also called “Barely Legal” because (to quote Paul to the Galatians), against the fruits of the Spirit there is no law. Maybe that’s why I still have some affection for The Strokes, all these years later.