Yeah Yeah Yeahs "Zero"

The cover of the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s third LP It’s Blitz! features a striking high-speed camera-captured image of Karen O’s hand smashing a raw egg, sending its innards flying out in the shape of a Y. The 25th letter, of course, has become emblematic for the band in two distinct ways. First and most obvious, it’s the logo that signifies their name, represented on the fan-made “flag” that marked the cover of 2006’s overlooked Show Your Bones. Secondly, though, is the Y of “Y Control,” the flash half of the diptych from 2003’s Fever to Tell that opens with “Maps.” This Y is the label given to the chromosome—that last one of the 23 identical pairs—that determines a mammal’s sex as male. Thus, when Karen O sings, from the perspective of “one poor baby,” “I wish I could buy back/ The woman you stole,” she’s not protesting gender inequity, but lamenting biological determinism. That egg photo make more sense now?

That photo, along with the “Maps”/“Y Control” pair, frames Karen O’s serial negotiation of femininity, which is beautifully continued on It’s Blitz, and especially, if not necessarily directly, on “Zero.” Over the course of three albums and two EPs, she’s come quite a distance, from “as a fuck son, you suck” through “they don’t love you like I love you,” the exhilarating claustrophobia of “Way Out” (“it’s around me so tight!”) and now “Zero,” in which she advocates for a public life lived privately, a neat script-flip of “personal is political.” “Zero,” as is most likely obvious, doesn’t quite take the shape of Billy Corgan’s teenaged self-abnegation: out of his hands, leaving him only to wail at his own inefficacy. Karen O’s “Zero” is an offer to us: to purposefully make ourselves blank slates—to assert agency in the interest of anonymity—while at the same time wholly giving ourselves over to the social. In other words, no one’s gonna ask our names, but we’d still better find out where they want us to go.

It’s the perfect pop-as-everyday-performance metaphor, expressed wonderfully in the video when her “stage” turns out to be the street. More importantly, it fits exceedingly well–”Zero” being as loaded a sign as “Y”, or, why not, “O”–with her overarching political and artistic project, which has been devoted from the start to understanding how power works, and how we (especially women) can work within, and negotiate it. You can be anonymous, sure, but you’re still subject to forces beyond your control. You can’t escape power, in other words, but you sure as hell can adapt to it. Release can only exist where there once was restraint. Put your leather on.

Filed under: Karen O  song review  Yeah Yeah Yeahs