"Reptilia" is the best rock-and-roll song written and released in my lifetime, probably the best in any genre of popular music, and possibly the greatest piece of music released in any Western genre in that time. Its only fault is that because time itself is linear the song does not extend forever.
It's only because the downbeat is so fixed, so conspicuously present, that The Strokes can afford to fuck around a little. Most of the time you've got drums, bass and rhythm guitar all keeping a beat, with lead guitar and lead vocals trading off a melody. And sometimes, "Reptilia" is like that, but in its greatest moments, has all five instruments off doing different things.
In the intro, the rhythm guitar and bass keep the eighth note beat during the lead guitar solo. In the first verse, everything but the drums and lead guitar back off under the lead vocals, leaving no melodic instruments to keep the beat--it's just the two major melodies twirling around each other in space for a while, before the bass and then guitar come back in.
Then we get to the chorus, which is just erotic. Rhythm guitar melody, bass guitar melody on a similar rhythm, then a more legato lead vocals layered over yet another countermelody, of running eighth notes on lead guitar. That's four variations on one theme, each building on top of the last with only a measure or two to process the whole enterprise, with each melody simple and regimented enough for the whole song to remain intelligible--but only just. It's just on the good side of being too much to handle at once.
And all of that--the drums dropping in and out, the running triplets in the bridge, the fugue in the chorus--is only possible because of the slavish dedication to the beat. They've run a spike midway through your foot so you can't step off the all-important quarter note, but the nail is far enough back that you can still tap your toes.
The full force of the quality of the composition and execution of "Reptilia" gets lost, even as The Strokes are in their second decade of worldwide stardom, and even as Room on Fire, the album from which "Reptilia" originated, achieved nearly universal critical acclaim, because Julian Casablancas looks like a dweeb and an asshole. You don't think of The Strokes, whose most popular album, their debut, Is This It, is a little raw and boozy (as it was at the vanguard of the grodj rock revolution) as being able to bottle up compositional genius and feed it through a pedal board.
But whether the hype ever catches up to the quality of the song is irrelevant. This is an all-time great song.
