‘Pin’: What does the Yeah Yeah Yeahs classic actually mean?
Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ debut album, Fever to Tell was a truly wondrous spectacle at the time of its release, and still holds up pretty splendidly over 20 years later. A heady mixture of garage rock, indie and riot-grrrl influences, the band offered up a refreshing antidote to the hyper-masculine sleaze-fest of indie with a brash yet inviting display of what New York had to offer the world in the early 2000s.
Vocalist Karen O was arguably the mastermind behind their ascent, and with a confrontational and manic style of delivery, she quickly became regarded as one of the greatest frontwomen of a generation. However, it wasn’t just her chaotic stage presence and ability to howl like no other into a microphone, but her lyricism was often praised for its frankness and honesty, and even though the band were known for their spates of aggression, they had plenty of tender moments to savour as well.
While ‘Maps’ and ‘Date With the Night’ were the standout cuts from their debut in terms of their commercial performance, one track immediately stood out to fans for capturing lightning in a bottle and being a sub-2-minute explosion of frantic punkish energy.
Sitting in the centre of the album’s tracklist, ‘Pin’ is an absolute juggernaut of a track where O launches herself into a frenzy from the outset, while guitarist Nick Zinner and drummer Brian Chase both attempt to keep up with her crazed outbursts. Every member of the band is on punishingly good form, and despite being over just as quickly as it starts, it’s one of the highlights of the record.
However, one large question that hangs over the song is its subject matter. Nobody has ever been able to definitively say what ‘Pin’ is in reference to, and while there is one camp that has a certain interpretation, it’s just as easy to see things from the opposite perspective.
The track seems to capture O’s malaise of sorts, and one school of thought is that she’s making a euphemistic reference to sex, with lines like “I like to sleep with him / pushing in the pin” making it seem like a cut and dry explanation for what she’s singing about. On the other hand, this sense of withdrawal and despondency could also line up with the song being about drug abuse, particularly any form that is injected intravenously such as heroin. The opening line, “things are feeling thin” could easily be a reference to how injecting substances collapses the veins, and the object of the pin could be a needle that she’s pushing into her skin.
And then there’s the chorus, where O just shrieks some non-verbal syllables in time with Zinner’s riffs, which is a prime example of how she would often improvise whatever she felt fit best with the song. It’s a masterful example of just how free-wheeling Yeah Yeah Yeahs were in their early years, but also how they could take something so simplistic and twist it in a myriad of intriguing ways.
