Karen O, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs front woman, talks to jiatolentino about recording the band’s new album, becoming a mother, and meeting other rock stars who look like her.
We’d never allowed ourselves this thing that hip-hop artists have been doing since the start—to nod to other artists, incorporate their work in ours. But, this time, we were just, like, “Let’s do whatever feels good.” And then it happened really fast: lyrics coming through and changing, like, the particulate matter in the room. Literally, it feels like a shift in the ions, like there’s another presence all of a sudden.
You’re referring partly, maybe, to how the first two singles are about climate change. The lyrics—“Cowards, here’s the sun, so bow your heads”—are not metaphorical. It’s hard to do this without being too on the nose, but these songs don’t operate in the “raising awareness” realm. They express the feelings that coalesce around the degrading world: anger, despair, desire, distance.
I’ve always craved maximum-intensity experiences. But then, after having a baby—and I don’t know whether it’s hormonal or circumstantial—the baby has acted as sort of a slow drip of all the dopamine and joy, and the draining difficulty, I used to run after.I’d say it’s going to come back. Those cravings. Around age four, and then, especially, when they get close to age six.
In “Meet Me in the Bathroom,” you talk about an early precursor to Karen O’s emergence being a lip-synch performance of “Wild Thing” at your elementary school, where you dressed up as a boy and put on sunglasses and couldn’t see the crowd, and you just went nuts. I wondered if you remembered being surprised, yourself, by what came out.
Typically, the people I connected to most deeply, most effortlessly, were other half-Asian kids. But the Korean kids at school, not so much, and the white kids, not so much. I tried. It’s one of those funny things—when you’re a kid, you want to fit in, but it didn’t take me very long to realize—by high school, certainly by college—what an asset it was to be half-Korean.
You’d be surprised what you can do with six chords. Pretty much every great song you’ve ever loved was written with those six chords. And I was kind of lazy, too. I knew that if you add a capo into that mix, the world is your oyster. But it was also just, you know, getting free. Getting as free as I could. I knew that music was a pathway to that. Once I started performing live with our band, it surprised me again, just like it did the first time I got onstage. I was pretty unaware of myself up there. My main incentive, I think, was to free myself and everyone else in the room. Because New York, even though it’s one of the greatest cultural cities in the world, it was pretty fucking conservative at that point, man.
That hype also gave you the power to write creative control into the contract with your label. But, at the same time, there’s commercial pressure. How have you held onto what feels meaningful to you in the midst of that pressure? You’ve talked about bringing a lot of angst to your performances—channelling it and expunging it onstage. What was the wellspring of that angst?
I was definitely very much aware of the predatory gaze. But I think I refused to feel victimized by it. I like antagonism, I like being up against stuff, I like feeling like the underdog. And one of the things that saved me in that respect was that half of our audience was women. That was really unusual and unique about Yeah Yeah Yeahs—the audiences were quite diverse, in the places they could be.
But, really, what it was, I found, when we started performing—it was self-destruction, but in a mystical sense. I think I would just enter another plane, and I’d just be. Whatever was coming out, it was really uncensored, really unhinged. And I was hurting myself more and more. I was spiralling out of control. It crescendoed until I fell off the stage.Yeah. I slipped off the monitor, then I fell off the stage, and my back hit the guardrail—you know, the one holding all the kids back.
It’s all news to me, but I get it. There’s parallels to what they’re going through and what we were going through. The world feels so out of control. And, like, millennials were so put together in so many ways. A lot of the millennials I know, at least—they hardly touch alcohol, they eat beet salads and stuff. And that little window of time was so hedonistic and Dionysian. There was less policing of culture.
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