2003: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Fever To Tell

By Micheal Foulk

I bought a pack of charcoal filtered cigarettes using a 500 yen piece from a blue vending machine in the Harajuku district. Cigarettes in Japan are so fucking cheap. Poor Song, the hidden track on the Yeah Yeahs Yeahs debut album Fever To Tell had just started humming through my headphones, and as Karen O sang “Baby, I’m afraid of a lot of things,” I lit a cigarette and quietly, solemnly, I agreed. I adjusted my backpack, and looked around at all the people I probably would never know, walking in the neon lit street around me. I was freshly eighteen, closeted, and I was terrified.

I went to visit my mom in Japan in February of 2004, she had been working there for two months, and even though I had already missed a lot of my senior year of high school going on tour with my band, a band I joined because I was secretly in love with the guitar player, my Mom insisted that I shouldn’t miss an opportunity to visit a foreign country while I was young. My mom is like that, always pushing folks towards the exciting, enriching options rather than the arguably sensible ones.

I had just finished a run of playing piano wunderkind Schroeder in the Stony Point High School production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. My normally dark brown hair was bleached a pickled yellow for the part, so the night before my flight out I dyed the bulk of my mop top an oily midnight black, L’Oreal box dye if I remember correctly, leaving one uneven chunk of blonde on the side of my head. It was a look that was very “of the moment,” that is to say, yes, I packed my flatiron and some Murray’s hair dressing to make sure my moody bangs were showcasing an appropriate level of teenaged ennui.

One eighteen hour flight and five rotations of the in flight movie, Sophia Coppala’s Lost In Translation, later and suddenly there I was, across the ocean skulking through a metropolis I didn’t belong in. Being an American in Japan confirmed all of my fussy outsider dreams. I was stylishly lonely, smoking cigarettes, rolling my eyes at other tourists who didn’t “get it,” eating noodles, remembering to slurp because of something I read in a “things to know before visiting Japan” article, and blowing thousands of yen a night in arcades. It all felt very punk. Never mind the fact that I was spending my mom’s money, I was a rebel.

During the day I would go sightseeing, visit temples, go to the base of Mount Fuji, and shop with my parents but at night I was on my own to wander through a city full of people I could barely communicate with. I bought a copy of Fever To Tell on my first day in Tokyo at the 9-story Tower Records in Shibuya. I was already a fan, I had snagged a copy of their self-titled EP from the CD Warehouse in the Super Wal-Mart shopping center near my house the previous year. The song Art Star had made its way onto most of the mix CDs I burned for the straight boys who I had foolishly fallen in love with during my junior year.

While I wandered around Tokyo, the CD hadn’t left my purple Aiwa Cross X Trainer Walkman (the supposedly “joggable” portable CD player with a weird little locking circle thingy on the top) once. The album has so much movement, each song is an emergency, it’s urgent and immediate. Walking through a crowded city while Date with the Night blasts into your ears feels like you’re in a hurry, living out a montage or one of those time lapse videos of a busy intersection. Nick Zinner’s guitars are erratic and shrill, Brian Chase’s drums tug at your hips and suddenly you’ve got swagger in your step.

Karen O is iconic for me, like the punk front women Siouxsie Sioux and Poly Styrene before her. I ripped the pages out of music magazines featuring the YYYs and taped them to the wall next to my bed, imagining myself fashionable and loud. O was weird, her lyrics reveled in taboos, songs about a man who made her “wanna kill babies” and sisters and brothers who “do it to each other.” Her weirdness resonated for me, it felt right to squeal and trill along with her, natural. I struggle trying to define Karen O’s energy, she’s like some sort of bastard daughter of Mae West and Bela Lugosi, an awkward art school vamp wrapped in eldritch plastics from designer Christian Joy. The whole situation worked for me.

Listening to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to this day brings out all of my sassy. As a young queer kid, not yet able to articulate my shifting gender identity, songs like Rich and Man made me feel violently femme, like Blaze from the Streets of Rage games I played growing up. I wanted to wear high heels, ripped shorts and fishnets and fight skinheads in the street. I wanted to drink too much cheap wine and put cigarettes out on my tongue. I too had men in my life who made me “wanna die.” When I heard Karen O wail “she doesn’t exist” on Rich, she was talking about me, the woman I couldn’t be, the non-binary person I didn’t know I was.

As much as this album pulls at a wild movement inside of me, I always fall in love with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs in the moments in between the panic. Maps, the surprise hit of their first album is a forever classic. This song became a mantra. It was the first song where I learned the context and began to share it with other folks. When it came on, I would excitedly explain “Oh, this song is about the guy from the Liars, they were dating,” and people would politely nod, gracefully masking their disinterest in my full blown music dork outburst, “She was crying in the video because he didn’t show up to the shoot after he said he would be there!”

“Wait, they don’t love you like I love you,” is a universal sentiment. It works for everyone who hears it, it’s a feeling that transcends identity and community specifics. The “you” is whoever or whatever you love desperately, there is nothing vague about it. In a 2003 interview with Jenny Eliscu for Rolling Stone, O explained “We’re a pop band...playing for the popular vote,” the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were making music that resonated with the weirdo, the romantic, the fuck up in all of us. “The masses? I say grab their attention while you can,” O continued, “Show them a thing or two about feeling a little sick or feeling really good in a way they don’t usually feel, and then just give it to them in lethal doses.”

In Maps, I would sing along  “I’m straight enough,” and pray that it was true. That maybe I could be straight “enough,” even though I knew that wasn’t what Karen O was singing about. I was convinced that there was no future for the love that I needed. In my limited understanding of the world, there was no queer future, no room for queer love in the rigid and unyielding structure of an oppressively straight society. When one of the first boys I had ever hooked up with took his own life a few months later, I listened to Modern Romance over and over again trying to reconcile the loss with my memory of our brief intimacy. He was an EMT, trained to save lives, and yet so overwhelmed by this world that he took his own.

“Time time is gone

It stops stops who it wants

Well I was wrong

It never lasts

And there is no

Well this is no

Modern romance”

It’s always been easier for me to place myself in songs of longing that are written or sung by women. I’ve certainly cried my eyes out to the heartbreak songs of Bruce Springsteen, Al Green, Leonard Cohen, and Prince, but I often have to leave a part of myself behind. In songs like Maps, Modern Romance, and Poor Song, a vulnerability is revealed behind all the spit and bluster of Karen O’s presence. The duality of raucous banshee and lovelorn woman was one I could internalize, it has always rang true for me.

In 2016, the lyrics “they don’t love you like I love you” were featured as the hook in Beyoncé’s song “Hold Up” on her essential album Lemonade. O, Zinner, and Chase received a writing credit on the track. I was going through the beginning of the end of what was at that time my longest relationship, and when I heard that refrain circle back into my life I was reminded of how true it was. No one can love anyone or anything “like I love you.” My love is mine, your love is yours, even after it’s changed or transformed into something new, the specifics of that love remain unique. I know that I’m still afraid of a lot of things but I ain’t scared of love. In those words, in the simplest terms, the universal becomes the personal and back again.

Micheal Foulk is a non-binary queer writer, comedian, and organizer thriving in Oakland, California. They are the co-creator of the LGBTQ+ storytelling show Greetings, from Queer Mountain and the film screening series Queer Film Theory 101 produced in collaboration with Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas. Their work has been published in Slate, Vice, Into, and TimeOut NY.