“You can’t beat them”: Karen O’s three favourite frontwomen
As the frontwoman of the celebrated indie rock outfit Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Karen O has long been one of the most celebrated voices in her field, and her influence on the current crop of acts emerging in indie music can’t be understated. Her band were undoubtedly at the centre of the New York indie rock boom in the early 2000s, surfacing at the same time as other acts such as The Strokes and Interpol, and the fact that they remain a culturally significant act today is a signifier of how arresting O’s presence at the front has always been.
Their debut album, Fever to Tell, was met with a flurry of excitement in 2003 as they rejuvenated the garage-punk sounds of acts like The Stooges and The Cramps and brought these ideas to a modern audience. However, by the time they reached their third album, It’s Blitz!, in 2009, Yeah Yeah Yeahs had undergone a complete transformation and evolved into a dancier incarnation of their previous sound, tapping into electropop and new wave influences.
Following the release of their subsequent 2013 album, Mosquito, the band entered a hiatus and didn’t release any new material for another nine years, but their buoyant return on 2022’s Cool It Down was proof that there’s still gas in their tank and that their significance hadn’t waned in their absence. Much like their contemporaries, audiences were still smitten by their innovations in indie rock, and there was still an ardent fanbase waiting for them on the other side.
With the band announcing worldwide tour plans for 2025, they’re clearly still going strong after two decades in the business, but they wouldn’t have made it where they are today without the influence of notable figures across a multitude of genres. In a 2009 interview with The Times, O was questioned on some of her favourite things that have inspired her career, and when quizzed on her three favourite frontwomen of all time, she gave some revealing responses that straddled various different scenes and time periods.
Her first response was to single out the funk provocateur Betty Davis, telling the publication that she adored everything she had to offer. “Her persona; this raunchy antagonist nasty gal, the way she mashed up the genres; her lyrics, her vocals punctuated with those sort of guttural noises,” O enthused, particularly highlighting the sexually charged nature of songs such as ‘Anti Love Song’ as her best work. Not only was it her musicality that O admired, but also her iconic style: “Huge afro, platforms and micro-short all-in-ones — she was as sexy as hell. I feel as if she is my long-lost sister.”
As mentioned, The Cramps were a clear influence on the music of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and O would also single out Poison Ivy’s significance to the garage-punk and psychobilly pioneers. “Her stoic, mysterious stance, hardly moving or showing emotion, completely won me over,” she told the news outlet before adding, “As a companion to my other favourite, Lux Interior, you can’t beat them.” While The Cramps were technically fronted by Interior as the vocalist for the band, Ivy’s prominence as their guitarist was ultimately the crucial element that saw them gain such a feverish following.
Finally, O would delve into her personal adoration of ‘60s girl groups and selected Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las as her personal favourite. While musically, there may not be a huge amount of overlap between O’s music and that of Weiss, she noted how her strange and seemingly contradictory existence felt almost defiant and unique for the time, stating, “There is something really great about this suburban white gal singing about leather jackets and biker gangs in the ’60s. I just love the hypocrisy.”
These influences may not always be fully on display in the music of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but they’ve ultimately been pivotal to O’s life and career to a degree, highlighting the wealth of musical knowledge and dedication that has always gone into their music.
