Oh, Karen O!: Reasons to Love Her

By Sherrie Gulmahamad on September 21st, 2009

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I like my lady singers to be a little on the zany side. Not Lady Gaga zany mind you, who is sometimes full tilt wackamole crazy-lookin’. And besides, I will never, ever, *ever* like Lady Gaga.

No, I’m talking about category-defying, eccentric, and crazy creative ladies. Exene Cervenka, Kim Gordon, Kathleen Hanna, Beth Ditto, Bjork, Peaches – *those* kind of rock chicks.  And you can add one more name on there, Karen O.  I am firmly of the belief that the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s song “Maps” (from the album Fever to Tell) featuring Karen O’s impassioned and lovelorn vocals, will outlive almost all of the pop radio pap of the last decade. Do you remember them performing that song on the MTV VMAs all the way back in 2004?  Truly one of the most earnest and memorable performances ever seen on that awards show.

With her fellow YYYs, Karen O has continued to consistently please the rock gods since then with two more albums, “Show Your Bones” and the most recent and more dancey “It’s Blitz“.  As if you needed more ammo, here are some other reasons to love her.

1. That inimitable sense of fashion - recently this lady has some of the best stage costumes this side of Grace Jones, courtesy of her collaboration with designer Christian Joy.  At Bonnaroo this year, she wore yellow zebra patterned tights under a graphic-print top, covered in hands and eyes.  At the Reading Festival, she was treading into Bjork territory, wearing a fairy tale coat with extremely exaggerated arched shoulders.  In other recent live performances, she’s decked out in a psychedelic-colored Native American headdress. She started out the queen of the short little indie rock dress, and has emerged from that like some kind of art punk peacock.

2. She might be a mighty muse to Christian Joy, but she is also a mighty collaborator to many other musicians and bands. She’s directed videos for her own band, as well as for The Liars and Foetus. She is the musical mastermind behind the soundtrack to Spike Jonze’s much anticipated Maurice Sendak adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are She, and her collaborators on that project are from such bands as Deerhunter,  Queens of the Stone Age, and The Dead Weather. What other indie rock diva can say she’s recorded a song with Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Fatlip?  On “It’s Blitz“, Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio provided some backing vocals. So that last one’s not all that exclusive to her awesomeness. It’s still awesome.

3. You might castigate me for counting this as a reason, but…she’s had some pretty cool boyfriends, her most famous being the aforementioned director Spike Jonze.  She dated Angus Andrew from The Liars (for whom she wrote “Maps”) and her current beau is music video director Barnaby Clay.  Sorry!  I know what a guy does for a living or what band they’re in doesn’t make them particularly good boyfriends.  Just bear with me here. They all have cool-guy cred.

4. She’s half Korean! (Okay, so maybe only the Korean girls in the house will give a damn about this, but a lot of times I tell people this and they don’t believe me, which goes to show you not everyone who is Asian or half-Asian is going to look particularly Asian, and you shouldn’t “expect” people to look a certain way anyway.)

5. She doesn’t mind jamming a mike down her throat. The first time I saw her play at Coachella, I was walking through a huge swarm of people toward the main stage when I hear this terrible yowling garbled screechy hell-noise. What the heck was that? Oh, it’s just Karen O jamming the microphone directly into her mouth and in the direction of down her throat. She also had weirdly positioned rips in her tights and was in full-on batcrazy mode.  This lady has fallen off stages and broken limbs on the altar of rock. You must respect!

6. She may not have range and precision and all that other fancy singer junk, but I just love the way she sings certain lyrics in her sometimes coy-sometimes confident way: “Wait – they don’t love you like I love you” and “Sometimes I think I’m bigger than the sound” and “Shake it, like a ladder to the sun” wouldn’t be the same without her voice.

7. Lastly, Karen O wears MATTE black nailpolish.  This is the silliest excuse yet to love her, but…could it be the best one too? (available from koknockout.com, $19)