There is a version of Is This It that most Americans never heard. The international edition — the one sold in Australia, Europe and the UK — closes with a track that the US release quietly replaced after September 11, 2001. That song is “New York City Cops,” and the story of why it disappeared, and why it refuses to stay gone, is as New York as anything the Strokes ever recorded.
“New York City Cops” is a two-minute-and-forty-four-second burst of wiry, coiled guitar rock built around one of the most provocative choruses in early 2000s indie music: New York City cops, they ain’t too smart. Recorded with the rest of Is This It in 2001, the song was released as a double A-side single with “Hard to Explain” in June of that year in Australia and Europe, reaching No. 16 in the UK.
It is a deceptively loose track — the verses wind around a woman named Nina and vaguely criminal behavior, punctuated by what sounds like a snort at the end — but the refrain is a blunt instrument.
Julian Casablancas later described it as an “overtly political song” written in response to the February 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old Guinean immigrant who sold videos and gloves on 14th Street in Manhattan. Diallo was shot 41 times by four plainclothes NYPD officers who mistook him for a serial rapist. He was unarmed. The officers were acquitted of all charges in February 2000, a verdict that sent shockwaves through New York and the country. The same killing inspired Bruce Springsteen’s “American Skin (41 Shots)”, released the following year.
The Strokes arrived from Manhattan’s Upper West Side and East Village, the Mercury Lounge and Luna Lounge on the Lower East Side, CBGB on the Bowery, and practice rooms in Midtown. Julian Casablancas, Nick Valensi and Fabrizio Moretti met in high school on the Upper West Side.
Casablancas and Albert Hammond Jr. shared an apartment in the East Village. The band played their first show as the Strokes on September 14, 1999, at The Spiral on Houston Street, and ground out their early sets at Arlene’s Grocery, Don Hill’s and the Bowery Ballroom before NME declared them the future of rock and roll and a bidding war ensued.
From Casablancas’ studied channeling of Lou Reed’s vocal detachment to the Television-style guitar interlock of Valensi and Hammond Jr., the Strokes were consciously emulating the Lower East Side’s lineage. As NME wrote in their June 2001 cover story: “The Strokes are so New York it hurts. They look New York, they sound New York, and they sure as hell act New York.”
When Is This It was released in the United States in October 2001 — delayed from its August international release by the September 11 attacks — “New York City Cops” was gone. In its place sat “When It Started,” a perfectly fine track that no one has ever gotten into an argument about. In the weeks after the Twin Towers fell, with first responders being canonized and the NYPD draped in the glow of national mourning, releasing a song with the line they ain’t too smart was untenable.
What the removal did, however, was strip the band of their most explicitly political statement at the exact moment that politics was consuming everything. Casablancas reflected on this in a 2018 Vulture interview: “When it was taken off the album after 9/11, the political element got removed from the band’s narrative.”
The Strokes became, for most American listeners, a band about girls and cigarettes and nights that went too long — not a band with something to say about the city they came from and the way it treated its most vulnerable residents.
“New York City Cops” came from a band so thoroughly shaped by the city’s textures and history that they could not help but turn their gaze toward one of its most persistent failures: the unaccountable violence of the NYPD against Black and immigrant New Yorkers. The fact that it was suppressed in the US while remaining on international editions only deepened its resonance. The song the rest of the world heard was more honest than the one America got.
The song has never really gone away. The Strokes have continued to play it live, and in February 2020 they performed it at a Bernie Sanders Get Out the Vote rally in Durham, New Hampshire — where actual New York City cops came onstage to manage the crowd that surged the rail in response. The moment was almost too on the nose.
Queens-based rapper Heems covered the song for a 2011 tribute album marking Is This It‘s tenth anniversary, dedicating his version to a list of people killed or brutalized by the NYPD: Michael Stewart, Eleanor Bumpurs, Amadou Diallo, Patrick Dorismond and others.
The Strokes did not save rock and roll, as some critics breathlessly claimed. But they did something more specific and arguably more durable: they made a document of a city at the edge of a transformation it didn’t ask for, capturing what it sounded like to be young and wired and paying attention in New York in the year 2001. “New York City Cops” is the most direct expression of that impulse.
“New York City Cops” Lyrics
Oh Ha-ha, I meant, ah No, I didn't mean that at all Ooh-ooh Here in the streets so mechanized Rise to the bottom of the meaning of life Studied all the rules and didn't want no part But I let you in just to break this heart Even though it was only one night, it was Fucking strange Nina's in the bedroom She said, "Time to go now" But leavin' it ain't easy I got to let go, oh, I got to let go And the hours they ran slow I said, every night, she just can't stop saying New York City cops, New York City cops New York City cops, but they ain't too smart New York City cops, New York City cops New York City cops, but they ain't too smart Well, kill me now 'cause I let you down I swear one day I'm gonna leave this town Stop Yes, I'm leaving, 'cause it just won't work And they act like Romans, but they dress like Turks Some time in your prime See me, I like the summertime but, hey Nina's in the bedroom She said, "Time to go now" But leaving, it ain't easy Oh, I got to let go, oh, I got to let go, oh Trapped in an apartment She would not let them get her She wrote it in a letter I got to come clean but the authorities they've seen Darling, I'm somewhere in between I said, every night, she just can't stop saying New York City cops, New York City cops New York City cops, but they ain't too smart New York City cops, New York City cops New York City cops, but they ain't too smart
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