Patrick Carney is pretty sure he knows what's ailing his chosen genre these days. "Rock & roll is dying because people became OK with Nickelback being the biggest band in the world," he says, blowing cigarette smoke out the window of his rented East Village loft a few days ­before the band heads to L.A. "So they became OK with the idea that the biggest rock band in the world is always going to be shit – therefore you should never try to be the biggest rock band in the world. Fuck that! Rock & roll is the music I feel the most passionately about, and I don't like to see it fucking ruined and spoon-fed down our throats in this watered-down, post-grunge crap, horrendous shit. When people start lumping us into that kind of shit, it's like, ‘Fuck you,' honestly."

There's an endearingly cartoonish quality to Carney, as if everything about him is slightly off-scale: He's at least six feet four; the frames of his Buddy Holly glasses are deliberately a little too big for his face; he's both a social guy who makes friends easily and a collector of oversize grudges who routinely works himself into fits of semicomic rage. He has to remove his glasses onstage so they don't fly off – nearly blind, he slams through exhilarating, off-­kilter beats as if he'd never seen anyone else play drums before, in a hunched, painful-­looking posture: "I get really bad hand cramps," he says, "and sometimes my sternum gets all fucked up."

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As he drums, his face is often contorted in what looks like fury. It's actually fear and self-loathing. "I suck at the drums, so it's terrifying," he says. "Just trying to keep it together. I see a lot of comments on Twitter and stuff about how ugly I am, how bad I am at the drums, how awkward I look, and I'm like, yeah, I agree with most of those things. The thing is, what I can't do is individually go up to these people and call them each out for what they are, just by judging their picture, and I'm the kind of person who would actually do that to somebody."

It's nearly 2 p.m., and Carney needs to head up to the Ed Sullivan Theater in midtown for a Late Show With David Letter­man performance. First, though, he has to "see what shirts make me look less fat" – right now, he's got on a blue button-front from J. Crew, a brand he wears as a sort of anti-hipster statement – and clean up the apartment.

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He and his fiancee, Emily, moved from a Lower East Side walk-up to a house with a pool in Nashville in 2010, but they got restless there, so they rented this pied-à-terre, a fully furnished loft in a building with neighbors including Fabrizio Moretti, Bret Easton Ellis and, apparently, Tom Cruise (who may or may not live on the same floor). The place has a hotel-­room feel – the only signs that anyone in particular lives here are the empty whole-wheat-pizza box by the kitchen, the high-end tube-amped stereo by the TV (Carney blasts the Johnny Burnette Trio's oft-covered 1956 tune "The Train Kept ­A-Rollin'," which he says inspired part of the Keys' new single, "Lonely Boy"), a recent Rolling Stone on the coffee table and, oddly, two matching copies of The Hunger Games.

This is an excerpt of the cover story from the January 19th, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone.

To read the rest of this cover story, pick up the January 19th, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone, on stands and in Rolling Stone All Access January 6th.

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