Karen O, Destroyer of Worlds
This is no doubt a strange concept to most, on the back of a global pandemic, but sometimes you only get to realise you’re living through something after it’s pretty much over. At business school, with just about enough megabytes to haul records (illegally) from the digital wastelands, my homies and I would defend our separate relationships with the bands of the hour — occasionally vindicated by last-word reviews in stray editions of Rolling Stone, NME, and Clash. In Zambia, rock kids either caught or let on a little late, only really deprived in our mid-20s of the fucks one has to give to ‘fit in’ at high school: less Ludacris, Jay-Z, and Nas; more Coldplay (then), and Oasis and Blur. MTV was in its death throes, and soon there’d be no Total Request Live to scramble home to right after school — no obscure top ten charts to fend off sleep with in the middle of the night. What we didn’t realise is we were also living in the death throes of rock ‘n’ roll music altogether.
There were costs to those allegiances — to the Strokes, Bloc Party, Muse, Wolfmother, Foo Fighters, Green Day, Arctic Monkeys, and (for indie cred) Editors and Doves and Babyshambles and Cold War Kids and Built to Spill and Broken Social Scene. Some of us, or maybe just me, put strange ballads on mix CDs for young women who swiftly dismissed their authors as Oreo cookies, art f*gs, slightly Satanic, and even deeply perverse. Some of us went deeper and deeper down the hole when the water supply started to dwindle — when Kings of Leon started to go stadium pop, and Arctic Monkeys finally wiped their noses — and found new versions of ourselves in the darker Cobain cuts, Iggy Pop, and T-Rex, or maybe just the versions of ourselves we were always meant to have been.
Many years after the maelstrom, after the Recession, the joblessness, and after all the truly volatile music ceded to the Internet the responsibility of taking us places, Lizzy Goodman wrote and published Meet Me in the Bathroom. Of course she’d named it after a Strokes song, one narrated by a melancholic nobody, that deconstructs the basis of a tryst in the slowest, most meaningless moment possible. Of course all those bands, the New York ones, popped off at roughly the same time that we championed spirited cafeteria debates about the superiority of one outfit over the other. Of course we’d lived to see the end of it, or of a time (anyway) when it was capable of pausing or reversing time.
Quite a few of those bands were ones I enjoyed in isolation. Everyone coalesced a little quicker, in order to access sex more readily, start families, assimilate into society as former anarchists. Where I now have inexplicable jolts and twinges, in my chest, I used to have confusion at how few others could grasp or enjoy the genius of particular vocal lilts, miss the exact moments the lead guitar grabbed the Molotov cocktail from the bass, or weren’t remotely compelled to at least die for Zack de la Rocha and Rage Against the Machine. You’d find a band first sometimes, rush back to the circle screaming, “Look at what I bloody found!”, only to trudge back alone with the sense of revelation. This is how I felt about the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who somehow compacted all of our favourite things — gnarly guitars when required, soft melodies when appropriate, and even Spider-Man — into (say) monstrous love songs like ‘Turn Into’; whose opening patter of drums, carefully sidestepped by the incantations of lead singer Karen O, is ritualistic, romantic, obsessive, and macabre.
When I heard that she and some assortment of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs would be in town, I dropped several inexpensive things and purchased a ticket immediately. As in business school, in my 20s, in Zambia, I couldn’t convince anyone else to come along for the ride.
I had some of my own doubts, besides that the membership of the band had probably altered in the decade since I last played their records to death. Karen O, not just with a solo record, had instigated a turn for the band towards a softer, more electronic, but no less soulful sound — an evolution I imagined would present itself as complete, now that she has also become a mom. Maybe it wouldn’t be that kind of show, with cops and not just security nearby in case personal favourites like Bang! got out of hand. I just wanted to be there to thank her for everything, though, in case this was it. I joined the longest line ever for a Radler, and had to bail at the counter because they wouldn’t take my card. I thought I had a decent station right by the stage, where all the space between bodies was quickly taken up by more bodies. It got so hot in there, under my hoodie and in my Timbs, that I honestly considered leaving before the main show began.
Neither Karen O. nor the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, I’m pleased to report, have lost any of their pep. She wore a dress whose glitter allowed all the strobe lights onstage to bounce off or shine right through her, its slinkiness enabling her to swap energies as quickly as the songs did. When they opened with the slow-burn of ‘Spitting Off the Edge of the World’, a track off the quite recent and mostly mellow Cool It Down, I knew there’d be no lime for the razor-slice of ‘Black Tongue’ or the gung-ho holler of ‘Way Out’. I also sensed — from the quality of the acoustics overall, and how Karen O. had to lift her voice above machinery that mined rock (pardon pun) from the core of an alien planet — that the night wouldn’t last very long; or that it would pass very quickly, like kissing your crush in a dream.
But these are not downers, not at all, with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. With ‘Lovebomb’, which I’d never heard before tonight, but was totally familiar with through some kind of alternate universal intimacy, Karen O. was able to reset a room populated by at least 300-ish people. I felt both the super-fan and the slick casual, either side of me, surrender and succumb. This was an unexpected highlight of my evening and no doubt everyone else’s because it was a religious experience.
I am of course in disagreement with the band and their managerial team (and probably fanbase) about what we feel the absolute must-playables are, as classics like ‘Cheated Hearts’ and ‘Gold Lion’ got (nevertheless) worthy blasts. The super-fan, to my right, funked out with elbows everywhere to ‘Zero’ in a manner that made me want to ask her hand in marriage, right there and then, as my face evaded her swings. Even songs I only ever had mildly pleasant relationships with found new potency from Karen O strutting around up there like we didn’t just survive a whole pandemic to get here, and Donald Trump, and Brexit, and algorithmic recommendations.
At the very end of the evening, appropriately, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs turned the dial all the way up with the laser incinerator that is ‘Date With the Night’ — just like that they were gone, like a cohort of cackling supervillains, and I fear they took all the danger with them. On the way out, for good luck, I tapped the Death Grips poster I suspect no one has taken down yet.
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