‘Date with the Night’: the perfect song for a summer night in NYC
Summer in New York is not for the weak.
At times, the season is miserable, when there is no reprieve from the stale air, overtaken by the heat and the reflective skyscrapers blind you along the way. But, for those like myself who live in and around the city, we make the best out of the unavoidable warmth and see New York for what she always remains: a primarily concrete oasis that, no matter what, harnesses an indefinable energy that we cannot help but love.
Plenty of musicians, either from New York or those who have adopted the city as their home, have attempted to bottle this energy into songs, and personally, when I think of the city, a distinct soundtrack comes to mind. There are the obvious voices, like Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Debbie Harry and Julian Casablancas, to name a few, and the waves of ‘movements’, if you will, that defined the streets and whose ghosts still haunt them, from the folk circuit, to punk, to the inevitable sleaze, and countless others.
However, no artist got the balance of so-called sleaze that soaked a night out and the shocking jolt of reality in the morning-after quite like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. While technically not from New York, with vocalist Karen O and guitarist Nick Zinner first playing together as an acoustic duo, Unitard, in Ohio, once they reinvented themselves as Yeah Yeah Yeahs, there was no extracting them from the dual glitter and grime of the city.
“When we were all living in New York, and we started the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, I was 21. I was at the peak of being completely absorbed in the New York night scene and the New York music and social scene, although there wasn’t much of a music scene at that point,” O explained, in conversation with Carrie Brownstein for The Believer in 2005, “But the whole hedonistic side of me was kind of trumping everything else. We were feeding off that manic street energy. It really did feel much dirtier and more antagonistic.”
In the burgeoning “scene”, as it were, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs stuck out with their art-punk gaze, a melding of neon and metallic glamour mashed together with a sound that heard guitars mangled into a dance-crazed frenzy. Where bands like The Strokes and Interpol followed in the footsteps of Lou Reed, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs carried with them the art world that Reed and The Velvet Underground inhabited: a decadent, imperfect storm of sound and vision that saw music as the ideal artistic medium.
They quickly became known for their outrageous live performances: O, in particular, turned her role as a frontwoman into an act of performance art entirely her own, and her stage antics grew wilder over the years, performing with a thrash of energy that is brilliant, strange and truly unique, in every sense. If New York was truly going through something of a rock renaissance in the new millennium, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were an unpredictable, unruly force from the very beginning.
With the immediacy of their first major single, 2003’s ‘Date with the Night’, the band honed their signature quirkiness with a driving punk force. From the opening churn of Zinner’s guitar that builds into a metallic groove with Brian Chase’s drums, you can picture the exhilaration that courses through the veins of the song. You’re immediately thrown into a fast-paced vision of running down a crowded street or thrashing around in a crowded club; wherever riotous energy is centred, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are to be found.
On ‘Date with the Night’, O sings in her unmistakable snarl of the excitement of a night out: “Gonna walk on water,” she declares, buoyed by her adrenaline. The song’s vision has a sexual charge, as many of the songs on the debut Fever to Tell do. “Both thighs squeeze tight,” O sings, before the repeated chorus of “choke” hears her screech over thundering percussion. O communicates desire and its pursuit with a chaotic thrill, telling NME, “We did all the tracks twice: once with me totally wasted and then again with me sober. Then used whatever worked best”.
The electrifying force of the song runs full-speed into indulgence: it is pleasure-seeking unleashed, with a brazen defiance, with O shouting, “Don’t tell me to fix her / Well, just take a bite” at anyone who stands in the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ way. With every vocal, whether O moans or shrills through the speakers, we’re caught in a dazzling pandemonium that has only just begun.
Fever to Tell does possess a range beyond the wild abandon of songs like ‘Date with the Night’; from the heartbreak of ‘Maps’ to the reflective melancholy of ‘Modern Romance’, O defined this as co-existing between “inner” and “outer turmoil”.
“And as the years have gone by, I think we’re more removed from just being there. So we had to rely on other things that were more inside of us,” she explained to The Believer, “I think that’s when the second half of our Fever to Tell album started happening, like ‘Y Control’ and ‘Maps’, and this whole other side of us was starting to get nurtured. We were relying more on our emotions and what was going on inside. The inner turmoil rather than the outer turmoil.”
I’d like to think of ‘Date with the Night’ as a balance of the two halves of revealing desire that is informed by the palpable excitement at the prospect of a night out of facing the unknown and revelling in whatever is to cross their paths.
