"A stillborn revolution"

Not that you'd necessarily have known it (from reading this site as much as any other), but Nevermind isn't the only era-defining, game-changing US rock record celebrating a milestone birthday this year. A decade younger than Nirvana's breakthrough LP, the Strokes' Is This It was better dressed and cleaner cut, but in many ways had a similar impact - at least initially.

Much as it pains me to agree with an article published by the Spectator, but Michael Hann's take on the album, the band and their legacy is largely spot on. Most importantly, he doesn't try to sniffily deny Is This It's quality, describing it as "11 fantastic songs". Revisiting the record recently, primarily for research purposes, I was astonished by how sharp and fresh it still sounds - even to a pair of ears that have now heard Marquee Moon and the Modern Lovers. C'mon - that solo in 'The Modern Age', that ending to 'Hard To Explain', the whole of 'Last Nite'...

What Hann doesn't do (perhaps due to a restrictive word count, let's be fair) is set the scene for the record's release. Britpop was long dead and, while - as is ever the case - there were good things going on on the margins (hello Mogwai!), mainstream rock was in the doldrums. Desperately scrabbling around to find the Next Big Thing, NME had surprisingly but pleasingly thrown their weight behind At The Drive-In and Queens Of The Stone Age, but neither band was really ever going to click with their core readership. That led to the promotion of the likes of Terris and attempts to stoke interest in what they branded the New Acoustic Movement - moves that looked embarrassingly undignified at the time, let alone with the benefit of hindsight. So when the Strokes emerged - practically fully formed and with an album as good as Is This It ready to roll - it's understandable that they were hungrily seized upon by a press starved of excitement.

As Hann suggests, the Strokes proved to be "on the breaking crest of a wave" that saw the likes of the White Stripes, Interpol and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (from this distance, all very different bands with a disparate set of influences) come to prominence. But inevitably everything went downhill from there - at first gradually and then rapidly.

Duly anointed as figureheads for this New Rock Revolution, the Strokes themselves descended into ironic detachment and laziness on subsequent albums. Those "11 fantastic songs" became less important than their "sharp cheekbones" and "tight jeans" to Conor McNicholas, the supremely twattish NME editor of the time who shamelessly instituted "a 'good hair, good shoes' policy" that helped to kill off the publication as a serious entity. Meanwhile, the logic of transatlantic one-upmanship and patriotic pride that had seen Britpop boom in response to grunge gave birth to the Libertines - palatable in their very early days, but before long a powerful emetic and directly culpable (I would argue) for the horrors of landfill indie that continue to haunt us today.

The title of Hann's article, "The Real Death Of Rock", might be a sub-editor's doing, but it's not much of an exaggeration - at least as far as the mainstream goes. He argues: "What is apparent now, two decades on, is that Is This It was the point at which rock music's tendency to fetishise the past took over from its ability to look to the future." Some of us would venture that that had already happened with Britpop, but I don't think there can be much dispute with the claim that "at two decades' remove [the Strokes] sound like a stillborn revolution".

While there are sound reasons to be wary of revisionism, it's also true that the longevity and value of cultural artefacts is never established in the heat of the moment; on the contrary, it's important to allow time for the dust to settle before passing judgement. Twenty years is long enough to agree with Hann that while Is This It remains a great record and changed the game, it didn't do so for the better.