Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Audacious And Awkward Rock Stars
Karen O, the kinetic singer of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, is notorious for her explosive and commanding on-stage performances. But as music writer Lizzy Goodman wrote in a new profile of the band for The New York Times Magazine, O and her bandmates -- guitarist Nick Zinner and drummer Brian Chase -- are surprisingly awkward and shy. It’s this quality, Goodman says, that's played a part in propelling the band -- who's set to release its fourth album, Mosquito on April 16 -- toward rock stardom.
On Yeah Yeah Yeahs' awkwardly shy nature:
“I’m talking, like, the waiter comes to the table and that’s uncomfortable. I mean, you think: 'Yes, bands, combustible in the studio, it’s so romantic, yeah.’ But also when being asked what they would like to drink, there’s a certain, ‘Oh god what do I pick?’ You know, this kind of anxiety. I really never encountered that. I should really also say awkward but sweet. Not a kind of punk, rebel, mean, awkwardness. Like a genuine kind of shyness.”
On Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ musical longevity:
"It’s really impressive because destruction in rock and roll, implosion in rock and roll, is obviously a future that many rock stars face. And they have, for all this fragility, managed to last. And one of the ways they have done that is sticking to a really long lead process in terms of their recording. They get together — Nick, the guitarist, and Karen get together — and they kind of workshop ideas, and a year later maybe they actually enter the studio. It takes a long time to make a Yeah Yeah Yeahs record, and that’s part of the reason they’re still making them."
On Yeah Yeah Yeahs as a concept:
"The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are the art school kids. Nick Zinner went to Bard. Bryan Chase and Karen met at Oberlin. What that means in a practical sense is that they each have other interests too. There’s sort of this sense of music as the channel of art that they’ve chosen to take, as opposed to the cliché of four dudes in a garage smoking a joint and playing an old Fender. That is not this band. There’s kind of a high concept nature to the way they approached it. A messiness. Wanting to be really dissonant and messy and have an idea behind this."
On Karen O’s distinctive aesthetic and sense of fashion:
"Karen is the only female frontwoman of [bands like the Strokes and Interpol]. And she’s also had what now is a common phenomenon with Lady Gaga, or you’ll look at Lana Del Ray or something — this sense of the aesthetic being really important to the identity of the band. Karen had Christian Joy, her stylist and designer from very early on, and the look — her look — was, early in the kind of internet rise of rock and roll, a part of the band’s identity. And I think that also sets them apart."
