This IS It: A Letter to the Perfume-Shilling Julian Casablancas

Something stinks, and it's you.

Remember how the Strokes were good that one time in 2001? Yeah, we're ready to forget that ever happened -- but then again, we're pretty sure you already have.

Once upon a time, you brought us the bouncy, gritty swagger of "Last Nite" and helped herald in the garage rock revival. We had hope for you, Julian. Maybe it was a mistake, but we looked to you and your classmates (the Hives, the Whites Stripes, etc.) to save us from the Limp Bizkits of the world and prove that rock could be great again, that rock didn't need anything other than brilliant songwriting -- and it certainly didn't need rapped verses.

Even while the last few Strokes albums underwhelmed us, we were hoping that maybe, just maybe, you were still a dirty New York post-punk at heart, teasing us with sub-par albums only to blow our minds again in a few years. But we're pretty sure you can't do any of that when you smell like "The essence of rock."

Yes, we're talking about Azzaro's new French perfume for douchebags, Decibel, and how for some reason you, Julian Casablancas, are its poster boy.

The TV ad you're featured in for the fragrance doesn't even make sense. It starts with your close-up, and then, at one second in, you're wildly swinging a guitar around onstage, Pete Townshend style. (We're pretty sure you never did that at any real concerts, because we would have just laughed at you.) After you make some weird gestures around the microphone, you're suddenly stage-diving backwards -- and we notice for the first time how sparkly (and weird) your jacket is.

And then there's the bottle of perfume, shaped like a microphone. In the name of all that was exciting and promising and almost holy 10 years ago, we hope you just didn't know the bottle would look like that when you agreed to this. Please say it ain't so, Julian.

Sure, Angles had some redeeming moments. But to answer the once-rhetorical question your band posed a decade ago, this is it. You are officially irrelevant. Now excuse us while we spray some of Rihana's Reb'l Fleur into our pillow and cry ourselves to sleep.

Jack White was always cooler anyways,

The World

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