Is This It?

We no longer think The Iliad and The Odyssey were composed by a single poet. We have identified several different strains of authorship in The Bible. The attribution of a collection of 38 plays to a certain William Shakespeare is often disputed... Why should we then think that forth coming album Phrazes for the Young is the work of a single man, a single Julian Casablancas? It is not so much a question of whether Julian Casablancas exists, but rather what constitutes that existence... I have compared the songwriting of Is This It to Room on Fire to First Impressions of Earth and it does not seem that the same person wrote those songs. Granted these songs have all found epigensis in the same organic process known as The Strokes, but I know the DNA is not the same...If one is familiar with Borges, as I am, one must immediately think of the story Tlon, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius, in which a secret organization over the period of a few hundred years creates a series of encyclopedias detailing in minutia the workings of an apocryphal planet. Could some secret organization be behind the songs of The Strokes and now Phrazes for the Young? Could it be the same organization that has existed since The Greeks, that has taken the form of Homer, the J Writer, and Shakespeare? Is JC simply the manifestation of some greater world order propagating the literature of the ages, age by age... ever evolving, without a single form, without a face, without that long pale face we have so often seen but never felt. It is a possibility we must consider, a skepticism we must endure. 1

1. Let us not think for a moment that the songs of Albert Hammond Jr. deserve the same scrutiny. They are certainly the work of one man, one curlyhairedmongrel asshole.