It Could Be Dangerous Living In This Valley

If there's a contemporary band that's fallen prey to the cult of the serious, it's the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Their first EP had a song about b-movies, and their early shows generally involved lead singer Karen O getting soaked with beer, whether by her own hand or by others'. They put out an album that was mainly about fucking and being awesome. Then their second album came out and it was about loneliness and sadness and ennui and it sounded like a cut-rate Nigel Godrich (that signifier of sincerity) had been allowed to spew his seed all over the tracks. What happened?

What happened was "Maps," and more specifically what happened was people missing the point the first time around. Initial reactions to the YYYs were either predictably rapturous or skeptical, reading their exuberance as shallow, fashion-victim Brooklyn kids playing simple music for simple times. But upon the emergence of "Maps," and its ascendence to minor-hit heaven, critics changed their minds. Oh, it was said, they can be serious! How great!

And look what happened: Karen O started taking herself seriously. The songs on their debut, Fever to Tell, were made from riffs and chants and sounded amazing. The songs on their second album, Show Your Bones, sounded like songwriting. We could get songwriting anywhere. Fever to Tell sounded like experimental music (Nick Zinner's playing may have recalled tha blooze, but it also sounded like Alan Licht) that functioned as rock and pop. They had managed to be experimental (notably, "Maps" was about the lead singer of furrowed-brow noiseniks Liars) without taking it seriously. But when they got so much positive reinforcement for "Maps," it signaled that this was the direction in which they should continue. What got lost was that no one might care about the YYYs in the first place without "Art Star" and "Pin."

And so Karen O embarked on one of the most symbolic journeys a rock musician can take: she moved from New York to LA.

New York is audible in almost every song the Yeah Yeahs released before the move. Sex is a quality New York and LA share, of course, but they approach it in different ways. Where, musically speaking, New York is dirty, cheap, snotty, and brash, LA is sleazy, opulent, self-important, and emo. Both of these sets of qualities can produce great music, but the Yeah Yeah Yeahs thrived with songs that strutted--musically and lyrically--and fed off the energy of a city that's covered in grime, unforgiving, and intolerant of anyone taking themselves too seriously (unless you take yourself really seriously). Los Angeles encourages indulgence, but "Maps" was great because of its context within a set of songs that seemed to express an entirely different attitude. Its beauty and sincerity seemed to be let go reluctantly--it was buried on the b-side, after all--and so it came across as a kind of secret, a glimpse of the soft side of a strong, charismatic person. This is appealing in a way that an entire album of "Maps" is not. Because of the refusal to acknowledge the majesty of "Our Time" and "Tick," to recognize the entirely valid (and even important!) things those songs were doing, the exception got emphasized, and the context was lost.

Now, this is not to say that I entirely dislike Show Your Bones. The referentiality and undeniable strut of "Phenomenon" is great, and "Cheated Hearts" is as good as anything on Fever to Tell. But I think the Yeah Yeah Yeahs of that first EP and first album filled a void in music extremely well. They made really great, noisy, shouty music that, as I say, worked as rock or pop. Many (many!) other bands tried to do this, but the YYYs suceeded because they had the right attitude and because every member of that band is really good at what they do. With Show Your Bones, that was lost, and the void returned.

Which is all a very long way of saying that the void has been filled quite well by Be Your Own Pet.

Now, it's a little off-putting at first to hear lead singer Jemina (!) because she does sound a whole lot like Karen O. But, crucially, she sounds like the Karen O of Fever to Tell, and since the YYYs are not making that kind of music anymore, the slot is up for grabs. I'm not entirely sure they did that on their first, self-titled album, but their new one, Get Awkward, hits the mark with room to spare.

If there's an explanation for their success, it's probably their focus on youth. As Mark Richardson says, "Much has been made of the members of Be Your Own Pet's average age," but when you're face-to-face with the album, the actual hard fact of how many years they've been on earth doesn't matter all that much. What matters is that their primary subject is the actual experience of being a teenager. Anyone could write these songs, and musicians of BYOP's age can, and do, focus on more "adult" (think "serious") themes and sounds. Karen O doesn't really sing about being young very much, except for maybe on "Our Time," and Nick Zinner's guitar doesn't sound as indebted to contemporary sounds as do BYOP's riffs. BYOP's breakthrough, then, is that you can capture the Fever to Tell energy by writing punk versions of High School Musical.

The most successful song by this criteria is "Becky," a story-song (like "Down By the Water," or "Art Star") about a girl whose friend betrays her trust and who she subsequently murders. (And which you can find here, for a while, at least until the album is out and you can buy it yourself.) It works because it is the exact opposite of high school poetry: instead of translating the banal emotional crises of adolesence into the astract language of the moon and suffering and so forth, Jemina sings very matter-of-factly about what's going on: "you signed my yearbook and that was pretty rad," "I really loved going to your slumber party," "now I'm stuck in fuckin' cellblock two." (Were I to be going through such an experience as a teenager, I would've come up with something more like "lost in a black cloud" or something. Boring!) Moreover, the actual emotions aren't dramatized, so we get "you told my secrets and it caused me a lot of pain." In other words, it refuses to take itself seriously. What it is is what it is: not timeless emotion but a simple tale of betrayal and homicide. And this is great, because timeless emotion dramatized into abstract language of the moon and blood is, generally, the same everywhere, and done better by adults. But this is specific, and therefore interesting, because it's different.

What really makes it work, though, is the attitude, which is why it can lay a claim to that YYYs energy. The character's reaction to this pain and hurt is not to go off and write poetry, but to fight back. It "doesn't matter anyway," she yells in the chorus, and "we'll kick your ass, we'll wait with knives after class!" When there's not beauty, this is what you want--action, violence, attitude! Familiar situations made awesome. And when she finally does the deed, no Lars van Trier art-directed execution for her, just the workaday grind of "juvey." It's dirty, cheap, snotty, and brash.

None of this is to say that the song is one-dimensional. She's not an unstoppable badass, but a kinda crazy kid who has regrets, who's sad, but who still blames her victim for making her into a murderous felon. The heightening of an everyday situation makes it fun, but the confusion and denial make it believable. When, at the end, she declares that "I don't regret what I've done,'cuz in the end, it was fun!" it's a good motto to live by, but in the context of the song it comes off as maniacal.

The key point, though, the part that really makes this rich and complex, is the breakdown, in which the male members of the band, who had been howling "Beckyyyy!" under the chorus, chant, "We don't like Beck-y, anymore!" But who is Becky? The only other time she comes up is in the line "It was great how you made me a friendship bracelet, but I didn't know you made one for Becky's face lift!" This implies that she's the girl to whom the vicitm betrayed the narrator, the "other girl." So why don't they like her anymore? Shouldn't it be the killer they dislike? Well, no--the killer is their bandmate, so they're on her side. What this does is to bring the other girl into the story, to give her a little spotlight. In the midst of all this over-the-top killing, we get a little glimpse of the third character standing in a corner, sad and left out--her best friend killed, another girl in jail because of it, and arguably because of her, and thus made an outcast by the other kids, who blame her for the whole thing. It's like Blur's "Country House," where after a whole song of arguably simplistic stereotype-bashing, a chant emerges of "blow, blow me out, I am so sad, I don't know why," humanizing what had previously been a cipher. We see it from their perspective. This is art.

The funny thing is that there is an entire song on Get Awkward about the perils of moving to LA. It's called "The Kelly Affair," and it's available here, where you can also read Marc Hogan's take on it. Of course, it's mainly about Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, since the fake girl-band in that movie changes its name from "The Kelly Affair" to "The Carrie Nations," which is mentioned in the first line of the song, and Jemina yells a famous quote from the movie over the breakdown. ("Nothing like a Rolls!") But why does the movie resonate with BYOP enough for them to write an entire song about it? I think it's because they're from Nashville, an industry town but not for teenage punk bands, and they see moving to LA as a step toward being assimilated; it's their way of dealing with the minor fame they've built up, just as Show Your Bones was at least partially about the same thing. But where Karen O sings of alienation, Jemina makes fun of the whole idea by relating a career move to a camp classic. "It could be dangerous," she sings, and while the lyrics list pills, sex, and parties as the dangers, for a band like BYOP the danger is in losing the energy and snottiness that people have responded too--in becoming the YYYs. That, two albums in, they've managed to avoid that fate says good things about their music and their future.



(For the record: I previously worked as an accountant for the company that booked Be Your Own Pet's tours, but I no longer have any association with them. And, believe me, they book lots of bands I've bad-mouthed.)

Labels: be your own pet, pop, teenpop, yeah yeah yeahs

posted by Mike B. @ 12:30 PM