The Strokes - New York City Cops
They Ain't Too Smart
Prior to my second deployment, the music press lost its collective mind. The hipster echo chamber couldn't shut up about this angular, irony-slicked band from New York, some post-punk upstarts swaddled in thrift-store leather and dead-eyed apathy. A revival of that classic New York sneer, in the mold of the Velvet Underground or Television, but with enough detached cool to make your teeth ache. Their debut, Is This It, was on everyone’s lips except for the unlucky bastards who weren’t industry insiders or vinyl-hoarding NYC rats. It was 2001, and I couldn't get my grubby hands on a copy before I shipped out. Happy fucking 21st birthday to me.
I didn’t even get to hear Is This It until I hit Australia a month later. I ran straight into the first record shop I could find, and slammed that album into my CD player like a desperate addict. And there it was — the version with that original, oh-so-pornographic cover art, the kind that would make puritans clutch their pearls.
The overseas cover of Is This It was IT! I listened obsessively, every note burned into my head as I tried to reconcile the sounds with a world that was about to break. We were in the Persian Gulf when the world as we knew it got rearranged. While the rest of the civilized world was catching the first whiffs of a global cultural moment, I was sweating it out on a metal box off the coast of Pakistan.
And break it did. Four planes, a day that made history's worst instincts look like a joke, and a newfound national worship for anyone with a badge. Is This It came out in the States after the towers fell, but with one conspicuous absence. New York City Cops was yanked off the U.S. release faster than you could say "bad PR." Because suddenly, making fun of the NYPD wasn’t cool anymore. The song wasn’t just pissing off the cops — it was flipping the bird to a sacred cow America had no intention of slaughtering, not after the smoke cleared from Ground Zero.
But here’s the thing: you can’t keep the truth buried forever, no matter how many flags you wrap around it. The song stayed on the international releases and popped up in live sets, a defiant roar from a bunch of twenty-somethings who’d already seen too much bullshit to stay silent. "New York City Cops, they ain't too smart," Julian Casablancas growled, and it became a rallying cry for anyone who ever got their teeth kicked in by the people who were supposed to "serve and protect."
Flash forward to now. The NYPD just shot a man over a goddamn $2.90 subway fare. Two-fucking-ninety. The price of a cheap coffee or a pack of gum, and some trigger-happy bastard decided that was worth a death sentence. Not just one body, either — two bystanders, and another cop. They shot each other in the chaos, as if to prove Casablancas' point all over again. And now, to top it off, they’ve “lost” the knife they claimed the dead guy was brandishing. The whole thing stinks like the underside of an unwashed rat cage.
This is where New York City Cops stops being a snarky critique of a bloated institution and becomes something more. It’s prophecy. "They ain’t too smart" feels less like a sneer now and more like an ugly, obvious truth. The NYPD of 2001 might have been untouchable in the eyes of a grieving nation, but today? They're the poster children for unaccountable violence, a perfect symbol of a culture that defends shooting a man over subway fare as “law and order.”
When The Strokes pulled the song in 2001, they were smart. Back then, cops were heroes draped in post-9/11 glow, untouchable symbols of sacrifice. Nobody wanted to hear a band of scruffy downtown kids piss on the cops when America was busy canonizing them. But now, in 2024, we’ve all seen what happens when that glow fades. We’ve watched the list of dead men grow longer — Eric Garner, George Floyd, and countless others whose lives were ended by the arrogance of a gun and a badge.
The post-9/11 cover of Is This It. What makes New York City Cops even more relevant today is that it’s not just a relic of youthful rebellion. It’s a blunt-force critique from a bunch of guys who knew better than to fall for the heroic cop myth in the first place. Casablancas wasn’t aiming for respectability points. He was aiming to rip the whole facade down, piece by piece, and show you the shit rotting underneath.
We live in a world now where a man can be gunned down over subway fare, and the system barely shrugs. “They ain’t too smart,” indeed. The song was yanked from its original release because it hit too close to home. But now? It’s practically a theme song for the dystopia we’ve built, where cops and their brutality are just one more American tradition that refuses to die.
New York City Cops is no longer just an album track or a fun little slice of New York swagger. It's an indictment, a warning shot, and a grim fucking reminder that the more things change, the worse they get. And if that doesn't make you want to howl in frustration, you haven't been paying attention.
