i'm just a poor little baby ('cause, well, i believed them all).
aka - a collection of small moments from the past year soundtracked by yeah yeah yeahs' 'fever to tell,' an album made in the same city when karen o was my current age.
prelude / soundtrack / thing you should listen to even if you have no intention of reading further:
part one: “rich” / “date with the night”
I’ve embarked upon the merciless task of becoming obsessed with myself. Maybe “enamored” is the better word. I can’t be sure.
For the years that followed well-meaning warnings from mothers that I’d strike fear into hearts just with my face, even totally platonic friendships brought concessions of “you deserve better than this, you deserve better than me.” But, nothing changed on their behalf — no fight for worthiness to be found. Sometimes, it was even just a plain, stand-alone statement rather than a fake apology: “You deserve to find someone who loves you how you want to be loved.” But to “deserve” something is all platitudes. Just because the karmic clock says you should earn you a place where you’re comfortable and able to exist without fear, that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.
I spent years writing about it, worrying about it — being embarrassed about what a stereotypical-teenage-girl move that was, writing about it and worrying about it, as if teenage girls and their feelings and fears aren’t valid, visceral magic. I posed myself like a paper doll with hinged, bending limbs, accepting the base form of attention from someone who I knew wasn't worth it, would talk past me rather than to me about things I hadn’t even said, would talk to me as if I wasn’t worth being all-consumed by. I can go talk to someone who raised me if I wanted to be treated like that, I don’t need it from an asshole in a bar who’ll talk about me to his friends later.
It’s been years of trying to convince myself that it’s fine: this is what your twenties is about, you’re going to settle occasionally and that’s normal. So when does the settling stop? When does it even just become “occasional?” It’s been a few years since I’ve actually let myself go through with the whole ordeal and waste my time. If I won’t let myself be disrespected, it means I’m untouchable. Often, I’ll go through with something my heart’s not set on because I know I am respected in the situation and it’ll be forever until something I actually want happens again, and that feels only slightly less awful.
Half the time, I’m glad about it — I wear it like a war-torn badge and “tsk” at my friends’ escapades where they dodge, colorblind, through every red flag in the book. Other times, I let myself know I deserve this: someone who wants me but not for the reasons I require, someone who I’m not attracted to or could never love in the way they deserve to be loved. You deserve to be unfulfilled, to twist in arms that you physically can’t stand to be captured by just so you’re held, to be alone because you won’t just accept it. You deserve to be alone. I think of doe-eyed creatures with one stained t-shirt not absorbing a single thing I’ve said, ordering another beer, meeting my fury with a pat on the head. I think of a screaming match in a parking lot when I was 15, when a person who was supposed to protect me told me the hair on my legs was disgusting and that no one would want me, while everyone else in the vicinity of my howl stood and watched.
He still got to be loved and cared for after that, right up to this day. I still have what I supposedly deserve, which is all the nothing my arms can hold.
Now, I’m forcing myself to fall madly in love with the warped figure all of that built. Of course, I can’t stand to make it sound like a corny, new age-y “self-love” thing, so I make it destiny — demand it stand as fate. It’s pathetic, implies a failing: it’s only a step above Julianne Moore telling her frail, decaying body “I love you” over and over again in the mirror in Safe. I force myself to exist in the half of my time where I’m proud of myself and the standards I’ve set. I prepare my armor and make a ritual out of getting ready to go out. I tell myself I’m god, or maybe the next closest thing. No one can tell me I’m not desirable. No one can tell me I’m not smart. No one can tell me that no one will want me in the way I want to be wanted, because I’ll hammer all of that into myself to a point where it becomes ridiculous. No one will be able to compete with the way I fawn over and challenge and rib and adore myself. If I’m untouchable, then I’ll swallow that bitter pill and move on. If I’m weathered enough to take all of that, I can take the way they’ll make me feel once the ritual ends and I stand in the court they lord over. I devour all in my path. I’ll be reptilian and holy and clean.
I draw big, draggy eye makeup on like it’s war paint and smudge it so it touches my temple. I mismatch everything I’ve ripped from wear and put tissues in my bag for when I inevitably end the night with lipstick rubbed all over my hands. I run my fingertips up and down my arms and cherish the sensation. I jump and hiss like something feral, bleating about how rich I am along with Karen O’s voice from a distorted laptop speaker, even if I can’t afford to rent an apartment and know I can only buy one drink tonight and am worried about whether I’m going to be able to dodge the subway fare on the way home. To be fair, she was probably in similar circumstances when she wrote it: just around the same age, in the same, similarly decaying city run by people who want us all dead, who want the grime wiped off of their pristine glass playground.
There’s a scene in the short film There Is No Modern Romance — a visual document of the grueling U.K. tour Yeah Yeah Yeahs played in the weeks leading up to Fever To Tell’s release in 2003, filmed by Patrick Daughters — where Karen is listening to the intro of “Rich” play as she’s preparing to go on stage. “I hope I don’t get shot tonight,” she tells the camera, seemingly only half-joking since we’ve been watching her deteriorate mentally and physically over the course of the tour. This moment arrives shortly after an uncomfortable scene of her informing her bandmates that she doesn’t want to do an American tour to promote the album once it comes out: she’s done, she can’t do this over again so soon. Behind the stage, you see her mentally prepare her armor and make a ritual out of it, knowing she has to tap the reserves of all the anger she feels in order to project once she’s faced with the beast. She walks up the stage and emerges as something massive, untouchable.
She writhes like she’d rather you recoil from her movement. Every dance step is hulking, awkward, comes straight from the gut. She spits like it’s a line she has to sing and can’t omit. She imagines herself to be bigger than the god who told her she deserves all she endures. Sure, there’s some of the crowd that likes the challenge, that are attracted to that ugliness — but it’s always carnal, never real love. It’s easy to want to possess something, to subdue it, to cage it. I have no gold stars to give out for that. I adore her, not what she could give me. I don’t want anything. She’s holy too. I walk like I think she would when I lock the door of the house I’m crashing in behind me. I sit on the subway with my legs spread, sliding down the seat, feet flat like I’m one of them. I double down.
At the venue or the bar, I find friends and make new ones and get to talking.
“How did you break things off with the last person you were in like, a serious relationship with?” a person I knew through a couple of other friends asked me one time, looking for advice for their own escape plan.
“Oh, I was 13. He told me he would tell my mom if I didn’t leave him alone.”
I’m back on the train hours later, all smeared and exhausted, still untouched — drowning it out with our pre-game warrior’s cry: a steady whispered mantra of “rich, rich, rich, rich-rich-rich.” Animalistic, wounded noises tear at the back of the throat before that same voice sings, “Flying out of my sight, dropping brides at the altar.” It delivers the heady promise that “I’ll take you out, boy,” though my brain gently skims over the obvious come-hither suggestion and instead imagines a weapon in hand.
The night sewed a veil into my hair with all the smoky exhaust from sewer grates and vapor blown out of the side of mouths in a packed, overheated room, and now the delicate fabric hangs over my face as it declared me its bride. It tells me it loves me in horn honks and skidding boots and obnoxious laughter I let fly skyward and blurry pictures I took of my destroyed, painted face and I believe it. My feet fly up the stairs, like it’s pulling me up by my cracked jacket. Too soon, the hour says, we haven’t even written our vows yet.
“Buying out the fight, gonna walk on water.”
I pull hair straight out of my head in order to free it from the way I tied it up, clearing the tangle away from my face. I’m so enamored, I could eat myself alive.
“The walls are always speaking — no one, no one, no one, no speaking at all!”
I thrum at each sensation. I keen so severely, I almost crack my head open on the tiled bathroom wall. I swoon.
part two: “man” / ”tick”
A professor I had once told me I have an actor’s face — something you should never fucking tell someone, even if it’s a compliment. I’ve only acted in one stage show in my entire life, and that was a heavily sanitized production of Pitch Perfect that we put together in a week at summer camp, the same year it came out. I wasn’t Anna Kendrick, I was the mean, blonde girl.
Now, I put my actor’s face to work under the cover of night. I pretend to be people I’ve known, friends I’ve lost. Once I’m a few drinks in, I’ll start surveying the room like I’m one of the douchebags in the corner booth on the opposite side of the venue. I’ll stare at my choices like they’re meat behind a deli counter that I have to point through the glass at, letting my nail scrape against it. I think of how I can make them squirm under the pin I push through their center. I’ll make them feel how it feels. I push my shoulders back, imagine weight between my legs, let my stare become hooded and lazy. Or, I’ll pretend I’m a girl I used to know who everyone was in love with; she drew in and radiated light in a way that made you want to flutter around her clumsily, getting caught in the lantern’s netting. Even I understood why they kept flocking to their demise. I smile and engage in conversation, pretend it’s effortless. I pretend I’m hearing a line I don’t know. I learn that the only thing harder than pretending to be charming is pretending to be charmed.
About a month ago, when I was out with some of my oldest friends for two of their birthdays (they’re twins), I committed to the former performance for about five minutes. “Let’s go do a once around,” I said, downing the rest of my drink, reveling in how obnoxious I let myself be. I circled my prey and leaned back against the wall parallel to the bar, asking my friend to get me a water while I set my flytrap up for the guy next to me. Before I could enact my plan, he starts asking whether we were ID’d while buying our drinks, going on some long rant about the way the bartender asked him and how he was waiting for his friend and how the whole bar setup was so weird and on and on and on. I then let out a big sigh as a credit to all men’s obliviousness and decide I am not, in fact, fit to play this role where I am suddenly unsubtle about my interest when it’s clear this guy has both no interest and more pressing things on his mind. I checked back in to make sure he ended up getting his drink and told him to have a good night before joining my friends at the door and walking to our next destination.
We crossed Houston and waited outside of whatever bar we’d picked to calm down in while one of my friends finished smoking their joint. It had rained on and off all that night, so now there was a nice kind of cool stillness in the air that I didn’t mind standing in. Overall, I thought I’d done a good job of guiding the party; after dinner, we’d gone to my favorite tiki bar where the crowd mostly consists of aging punks who come out to see amateur bands that drive down from Yonkers and like to do stand-up material between songs about how difficult it was to find parking off of 14th Street. We got a booth in the corner of the back room and drank suspiciously colored, sugary drinks until I felt like I was melting into the tacky wallpaper wedged in behind the leather. We’d migrated past Tompkins down to my standby dive bar where the drinks are cheap and the vibe is good and they play a mix of 60s garage band performances and vintage porn on the TVs — this was the bar where my five-minute aborted attempt at flirting occurred. By now, I had enough tequila in my system that I was determined to dance. One of the birthday girls had mentioned she wanted to dance, and that’s what she was going to fucking get, no matter how empty this next place might be or how lame the DJ ended up being.
Unfortunately, it was both half-empty and, yes, slightly lame. None of said DJ’s picks were great to dance to — some obscure coldwave-ish revival stuff that wasn’t exactly catchy, but more about maintaining some semblance of a vibe rather than getting us to move. I found myself deeply unimpressed — and I wasn’t the only one who felt this way, because this guy had pretty much cleared the floor and crowded the bar with his playlist. Maybe that was why he’d been allowed to take the slot before midnight when business was slow. I was about to suggest another migration, thinking of other places in the neighborhood where people might be dancing, until I heard the unmistakable intro of “Age of Consent.” This sound, in all languages, translates to “get up bitch, it’s time to act out and maybe get dangerous about it.”
I start tearing at my childhood friends’ limbs, cheeks aching while some unintelligible yell of recognition leaves my mouth. I skip to the middle of the tiny dance floor — which, by this point, has not one soul on it. I plant myself right in the center and flail for all it’s worth, only processing colored lights and my hair flying into my line of sight as I shake my head. I was probably attempting to sing along too, but couldn’t form any coherent word that my slowly numbing arms and legs couldn’t spasm and express on their own. I remember being aware that a bunch of the transplants who looked like they had finance jobs and an expensive brunch date in the morning were sort of glancing back at me, noticing the feverish movement in their periphery — not judgmental, just curious. I’m sure I looked ridiculous, but I felt the shock that only hearing something you love in a hazy state can bring: the delusional notion that I have been waiting to be surprised by this song my whole life and now I can never divorce it from this sensation, and I will now always be glad that that’s the case.
Two of the friends I was with (Quinn and Vanessa, if you’re reading this, I love you endlessly and you’re the best in so many way that it pains me to even think about spelling them out) joined me in my sudden desire to move. We were the breathing, twitchy embodiment of the Three of Cups tarot card in my mind: three women so intertwined in their propulsive movement forward that they generate creativity and energy together and become impenetrable in their love for all they are and all they feel for each other and all they do.
One of the transplant boys then elbowed his way through the bar crowd to dance with us on our dance floor, obvious in his thinking, and we all looked at him like he’d just grown a third head.
These are nights where the armor doesn’t even need to be there; I am complete and know I’m complete — untouchable in a completely different way— having my onstage moment even if my only audience is some guy probably named Jared in a Vineyard Vines shirt (What happened to the theater of nightlife? Get fucking real.) and a bunch of bored thirty-somethings waiting to figure out their next move for the night. It’s the jittery nonsense syllables of “You make me wanna uh-huh-huh-huh-ha-UUUHHH” and the panicked falsetto screech of “There he iiiiis! There he iiiiis! There he iiiiiis! There he iiiiiis!” Perfect, empty nothings. Sound effects. Weightless.
It’s the reason I remember why nighttime and I fell deeply and painfully in love so long ago. It’s that little galloping guitar figure right in the middle of “Tick” that sounds like it wants to tease something out of you. Those three notes rolling over each other are more romantic than all of the lines I can pretend to be charmed by combined.
“I gotta man who makes me wanna kill and we’re all gonna burn in hell! We’re all gonna burn in hell!”
We made a CVS stop before we got on the train, loitering in the aisles and probably not looking very suspicious as we dodged finance guys in button-down shirts yelling about girls they invented and clubs they didn’t really know.
We move quietly. We wait to kill the lights.
part three: “black tongue” / “pin” / “cold light”
The last time I opted for the latter of those two performance options — to be “easy” — was almost exactly a year ago, and I don’t want to talk about it all that much so I’m going to make this quick.
There was a definite moment where my mind consciously decided to try and play “easy” — easy to deal with, easy to like, easy to talk to, easy to know just for a few hours. It was at a friend-of-a-friend’s house party in Williamsburg that I felt myself start to lean into people like I had nothing to hold back, nothing to keep them from pulling me in their orbit. Pliable, if you squint hard enough.
I attached myself to someone who’d thrown a party near my place in The Bronx a few weeks prior, and to be honest, I was more interested in studying this individual than cornering them or getting them drinks. They were charming but not in a genuine way, like they could switch it off the second they turned their back on you — which is exactly what they did to me after a few hours of hanging out and chatting. I’d gone big in my role to hold their attention too, as if their praise was proof that I’d…I don’t know? Beat the game? Broken their operating system? I felt like a trinket on a charm bracelet that this person could barely keep fastened on their wrist, only to crack when it eventually slid from its spot and onto the makeshift dance floor on the roof, fashioned from cardboard boxes and overlooking the bridge back to Manhattan.
I don’t think they remembered my name for more than five minutes every time I reminded them. Nothing remotely suggestive had happened, but I still felt gross about the whole ordeal — like a hand on my waist or a wave over my hair had tainted me for the night. Right then, my dance floor moment was worlds away from the frenetic jolt I’d feel a year on. I stood staring at my boots and the cardboard beneath them, rubbing at my lipstick as a nervous habit. That’s what we bring the tissues for, people.
“You can keep your black tongue. Well, I found it at the mortuary.”
In a real movie scene moment, someone eventually approached that point in the center where I’d been abandoned: someone toothy and tall and younger and actually rich (I almost dropped my drink when he told me where in the city he’d grown up) who was home from school in Massachusetts and obviously viewed himself as my rescuer. I let him hang on my proverbial arm and genuinely enjoyed myself until it became clear to him that I had no intention of sleeping with him. I was drunk enough that later on, when I went back up to the roof for air, I didn’t even think twice about embarrassing him in front of all his friends, loudly “wondering” why he’d lied about where he was going and disappeared after seeming so interested on everything I had to say before — a fun little question everyone within earshot knew the answer to. I didn’t give a fuck. “Easy” time was up.
“Things are feeling thin. Well, I know, I know. Lost my seat again - well, I'll go, I'll go. Pushing in the pin—” Like a voodoo doll, I’d always imagined when she sang it. It’s the satisfaction that comes with the initial stab and how quickly that thrill dissipates — delivered in nonsense lyrics buoyed by the catchiest chorus you can imagine.
Of course, after that little show I put on, my one-time rescuer was nowhere to be found once my friend, who felt super sick, and I needed to get back to the Bronx. We didn’t see our front door until 4:30 in the morning following the roughest trip home there ever was. Our apartment was nearly silent for the rest of that day.
Two weeks later, I got heat stroke during my college graduation ceremony and was visibly unwell when my parents drove me downtown to get a celebratory lunch. What they didn’t tell me before I ate and drank too fast and then started feeling even worse was that I was not getting a ride back uptown — they didn’t wanna go out of their way and veer into potential traffic before heading back to Jersey. Ten minutes after we had this conversation for the first time and they even said that I looked like I was about to keel over, I was sitting by myself outside Lincoln Center, literally swaying where I sat in the plaza in front of groups of moms and kids out for the day, trying to gauge whether I was physically able to make it to the subway without being sick.
Within another 15 minutes, I was on an uptown D train — with only my ID, Metrocard and phone in hand; if I’d known, I would’ve brought a bag and water and tissues — no longer feeling very ill. Instead, I just felt ashamed again. I played the clichéd role of white girl openly crying on the train for another 15 minutes, with some part of me mad at myself for not just staying home but another stupid part of me crying about a hand on my waist on a makeshift dance floor and no one there to help when my friend and I really needed it — just the idiotic, burning, angry sensation of it. Over someone touching me and then deciding they didn’t want to anymore. So dumb. Too easy.
I hiccuped all the way through my 20-minute walk home from the station — a little kid sniffling in nothing but a see-through white dress and worn-in Docs, sick and drunk and dizzy and alone on her graduation day.
Our apartment was silent for a while when I got back.
part four: “no, no, no” / “maps”
While couch-surfing over the last few months, I’ve pretty much been living two separate city existences: one staying way uptown in Harlem, walking hills which hold buildings that look like castles and wandering through cemeteries on Monday afternoons, and another traveling downtown to see shows (see part one). I’ve been thinking a lot about New York as an independent music force, and what people (even those who live here) think it is right now versus what I know it isn’t. I’m now kind of convinced that this big, romantic idea of a “scene” is just people who see each other at shows occasionally, playing bands that sound completely different. That’s all fine, I just don’t think anything revolutionary is happening — which certainly has to do something with the fact that very few creatives can comfortably afford to live here right now.
In this moment, I’m just happy anyone is creating at all. At some point, when it all becomes more sustainable, I can be more picky about what I think is worth our time and what is not in a live capacity. I mean, I’ll be picky now with signed bands who have publicists and the means to tour and are part of the cultural conversation, but for people playing first in a bill of five at Alphaville? I’ll give everyone a break. Please just keep filling those rooms so nothing has to close and so we have the space to be all they don’t want us to be. In a time when it feels like everything on the precipice of collapse, the venom is drained from my system. All dry.
I don’t really feel a place for me in what’s “happening” amongst the “indie/DIY” (heeeeaaavy quotes there) scene here anyway. A lot of it is sixth generation hyperpop with all the ingenuity watered down or American Apparel ad music that thinks it’s making indie sleaze its Frankenstein’s monster. A lot of it revolves around raves and a certain type of club music that just isn’t up my alley for the most part — and I’m someone who loves dance music a lot, don’t get me wrong. I know it’s a movement that spells freedom for many people around certain Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods where it thrives, so I have no reason to bitch about it based on my own personal preferences. I just feel detached from it. At this point, when I go out to hear a band or DJ I’m interested in or that I know, the critic hat comes off and the “wow I’m so lucky to meet these creative people who come in and out of my life and understand my own artistic goals and love for this type of subculture” hat is bobby-pinned in until it sits securely. It lets me be a fan and a peer for a little while.
I’ve mentioned this in a past newsletter, but it all makes me think of this Meet Me in the Bathroom, 9/11-era scene that Yeah Yeah Yeahs were central to. I was a young child when all of that happened — I have fragmented memories of hearing those bands in real time, and I only heard them if they were big enough to be played on New York alternative radio — but people I’ve spoken to recently who were my current age then say it did feel like something was happening. Were those bands reinventing the wheel? Of course not. Have we traced the Strokes back to The Modern Lovers and The Velvet Underground and Television like a million times over? Of course we have. Do I feel like Is This It is still what the city sounds like to me? Sometimes, yeah — I do. Do I think any of it was effective in a political or social sense? No. I think it was music that helped phase out nu-metal and that people enjoy but don’t have to think about all that hard. Again, Karen O existing was probably the most groundbreaking element of the whole thing, even if others like her had come before. Unfortunately, we will always be shocked by women being demonstrative or vulgar or messy because it contradicts everything we are taught about femininity at such an extreme level that our urge to flinch or gawk is internalized. The shock she sends to the main breaker will buzz on and on.
These are the things I occupy myself with on my walks from St. Nicholas Park and City College up to the graveyard of my choosing in Washington Heights or to Yankee Stadium over the bridge. I think about the train rides I’ve spent chasing my city’s history and knowing I can never outrun it. I’ve been thinking a lot about “Maps.”
If you are a friend who subscribes to this newsletter just to support me, you have heard this song before. You’ve probably heard it waiting in line at the supermarket. I think “Heads Will Roll” might be the more well-known Yeah Yeah Yeahs song at this point, but you know this, trust me. If you’ve ever heard “Hold Up” by Beyoncé (which you have), you’ve basically heard most of this song. Ezra Koenig from Vampire Weekend (a band that marked the end of this particular era in New York indie music and probably wouldn’t have made it big if Yeah Yeah Yeahs hadn’t made it big) wrote that chorus with D*plo (I won’t type out that man’s name! Sorry!) and gave all three members of Yeah Yeah Yeahs writing credits for the interpolation. They could probably live off of the paycheck that one credit provides if they felt like it.
It’s the cultural ubiquity of “Maps” that makes me think, at this point in time, that Fever to Tell is the album from this scene that best encapsulates the minutiae of what makes my city mine — what makes me feel held by it. You all scream out “Turn On The Bright Lights!!!!” from the email recipient void, and I accept that answer. It’s probably the answer that makes most sense, because it specifically refers to New York in its lyrics, but I think what could be viewed as limitation in the lyrics on Fever to Tell is, in this regard, its strength. “Maps” can be understood and felt deeply by anybody, anywhere — it almost feels corny to talk about the universality of certain songs at this stage in the game, but I don’t have any way to intellectualize it beyond what you hear.
There are 25 unique words in the lyrics; I just counted them. I sing it to myself about the city more than I do about any individual person in my life. It is eternal and magical in its simplicity. It says all that needs to be said. That doesn’t mean it’ll change anything, but at least we said it. It’s the line you’ve all been waiting for, making up seven of those unique words: “Wait, they don't love you like I love you.”
My understanding is that the video (again, directed by Patrick Daughters) was a big deal on MTV when the song came out. The band performs it in a high school gym that is clearly part of a set that was built for the shoot; there is an intentional choice to show the artifice of the situation. Here’s your big hit love song, here’s something digestible and expected that you’ll want to see while you listen to it. Of course, Karen shatters any irony it was supposed to have by showing how personal this universal, borderline-sappy thing really was to her — if you’ve ever seen the video and remember one thing about it, it’s that she slowly breaks down in tears as the song progresses. To this day, she’s maintained that no one told her to cry, it just all came bubbling up: “They were real tears. My boyfriend at the time was supposed to come to the shoot - he was three hours late and I was just about to leave for tour. I didn't think he was even going to come and this was the song that was written for him. He eventually showed up and I got myself in a real emotional state.”
If the Fever To Tell track list up to this point has been all chest-puffed-out tales of sleazy sexual encounters and thee piles of armor required to bluff your way onto the stage, the delightfully strange and dub-inflected “No, No, No” marks the moment that mask starts to slip (“Well, I'm frozen like a soldier / Don't know where it stays, all over the place / Time froze like an ocean / Don't know the taste of a never ending ache”) and “Maps” is the moment when the door closes and we all collapse. That desire to be wanted can only be tempered down for so long. It tells us we will be listening to a slightly different album from this point on.
When I’m graveyard-hopping on a weekday afternoon (oh, unemployment, both my enemy and friend), I think about empathy more than I mourn the absence of a “scene.” I think about who protects us and who harms us. I think about who I want to protect. I think about finally feeling at home when I descend the stairs of a venue where everything feels like a fire hazard and (potentially) a health code violation. I think of a different life where I could’ve been an “it girl” — an elusive title that really just means cultural influence and party invites, two things I wouldn’t mind more of — but I think of too many people staring at me and I immediately back down from this idea. I think of being pinned on someone’s wall like I’m theirs to copy and claim and an honest-to-god shiver runs through me. Not in this life. I’d rather think about who I’ll protect instead.
“My kind’s your kind, I’ll stay the same.”
I waltz among the dead and think of those once beloved all stacked on top of each other. I think I don’t care what anyone thinks about me. I think I wonder what they’ll say about me when I’m not there to catch them saying it. I think both things can be true.
part five: “y control” / “modern romance” / “poor song”
There was a long period of my life where I believed I could make people fall in love with me by making them fall in love with my writing — it’s something I no longer believe. It would be too simple, this idea that the best thing about me, which isn’t technically part of me, is what would draw someone in. I move in and out of periods where my writing is closer to who I really am as a person than anything else — it’s nobody’s fault but mine if they’re tricked by one of the times I hold my child as far from my chest as I can, like it’s someone else’s and I have no idea why it’s shrieking in my arms. I’ve made plenty of friends through my writing, and that’s a love that actually counts, evolves and tends to endure, so I’ve learned to focus on that instead.
People smarter than I am know they can’t fall for something perfectly crystallized in words but which exists as a constant work-in-progress between those flashes of workshopped, edited beauty. On the opposite side of the coin, how can I commit insurmountable feeling to a blank face that heaps praise and doesn’t see past that flash? It’s better if we read and then part. It’s better that I don’t believe in anything.
I’ve had a voice in my ear for most of my life — but especially in the past year — telling me I don’t know what I’m doing, I waste every opportunity I’m given, I’ve never done anything. As a result of it going on for years, my brain pretty much does their job for them full-time. Every day is an exercise in building my self-esteem back, and I think that (combined with, like, a literal fucking pandemic stealing a chunk of my twenties already) occasionally makes me feel much younger than I actually am. People talking to me as if I’m an actual adult freaks me out. Other times, I feel like I’ve lived five fucking lifetimes already and I’m beyond whatever gauntlet someone wants to throw at me on a daily basis. When I let that guard down — now, that’s when I get fucked with badly. It simultaneously makes me cynical and makes me want to fight that cynicism off like it’s the last thing I’ll do.
If “Maps” is the attempt to meet someone on equal footing, filled with hope that they’ll remember the light they saw in you in the first place, then “Y Control” is an admission of toxicity in a relationship. It’s a surrender. It’s the realization that you came away with egg on your face again.
Its title might have not aged too well in terms of how we talk about gender versus the sex someone is assigned at birth — in a strictly chromosomal sense — but the metaphor is evergreen: when men rant about how they don’t trust women, don’t like women, it usually stems from one specific person hurting them, and the reason they were hurt probably had little to do with the concept of womanhood. Fear of men might stem from the actions of one person, but usually relates back to the systemic advantage they hold — an advantage they’d realize they also suffer from if only all of them would open their eyes. It’s the reason incels on Twitter threaten people with violence because a man is 28 and has never had a long-term partner. It becomes an excuse to lash out or, at its most extreme, to take a human life. It’s the reason I saw a screenshot from a TikTok the other day where a woman said she’s just turned 28 and has never had a long-term partner, and all of the comments underneath it listed the ways in which it was probably her fault.
In this much less serious example the song presents, Karen admonishes herself for ever thinking they were on equal emotional footing. Maybe someone believed they weren’t being given respect that, in reality, they hadn’t earned. Maybe they viewed their partner as a means to gain any kind of respect. Maybe those expectations were killing them both.
I highly doubt this was Karen’s intention, but I think about how she would be viewed if she was anything but, as the online people say, “unproblematic.” Though I have no major beef with him, I think about the background of and occasional antics pulled by Julian Casablancas — who is probably the closest thing to an equal Karen has in her group of contemporaries — and I think about how differently those stories could’ve been perceived if they were attached to Karen instead. With the way things currently stand, they can never be on equal footing. For the four minutes of “Y Control,” Karen feels like a little kid whose naïve idealism blew up in her face — ‘cause, well, she believed them all.
With the next track, things move from slightly bitter into completely resigned. A droning slow dance commences and we all sway drowsily in place, wound up tight from the sheer rush we’ve been riding off of for the last half-hour. There’s still a childlike simplicity to it all though; no self-pity, minimal regret. Just a sense of wonder warding off any shame. It’s the place in which I’m trying hold myself.
“Don't hold on. Go get strong. Well, don't you know? There is no modern romance.” Maybe we’re better off if we get that straight, right off the bat. Maybe it’ll leave us time to shed all expectations and become better versions of ourselves sooner. Maybe it’ll let me write for myself, write for those who actually care about what I desire, what I want to achieve. Then, I would know it’s worth it to fall terribly in love with who I am. I think I love myself for the right reasons. I can’t say that about everyone. The stake they have in me makes me sick to even look at myself. What kind of love is that?
My city is my mirror and a presence in everything I do. It’s both similar and completely warped compared to the mirror which belonged to Yeah Yeah Yeahs two decades ago. That mirror is never mentioned, but implied in these songs; a vital organ that assists the heart in its drive to beat steadily and then rapidly, when the moment calls for it. I step into it, and I feel I can breathe with no constraints, at last. I can wear whatever I want and no one will look twice. I meet the most interesting person I’ve ever met anytime I walk outside. Of course, I run into people who think they’re the most interesting person I’ve ever met too, but the balance is worth what I gain in the end. I balk at this conservative, suburban myth that “danger” is something I should concern myself with. I feel like myself in its arms at a time when I feel like a completely different person stepping into anyone else’s arms. I love who I am when I’m in it. I believe in its people and its resilience to a fault. No person in power, stripping it to become a shell of itself, could ever understand that.
“And cool kids, they belong together.”
I sit in a movie theater in January, pulling my fringe jacket off — the one I bought cheap on eBay from a man in the middle of Montana, a place I can’t even picture — and I smell the cigarettes and weed and perfume stitched into the suede from last night. I inhale deeply and it feels like true love.
I catch myself in a scratched subway window in the middle of July — all exposed skin and glitter I’ve both collected and sweat out. We lurch. I swoon.