The Enduring Appeal Of "Maps"

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It’s not exactly a one-hit wonder. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs have almost ten million followers on Spotify, they’re still touring, they’re still making music. Their track “Heads Will Roll” has nearly 900 million Spotify plays across three different remixes. By contrast, “Maps” has just 269 million plays. Not that much in the greater scheme of things. A month’s worth of Sabrina Carpenter Spotify traffic, if that.

But everyone knows “Maps” — and when it came on at the Outback Steakhouse last week, I saw heads tilt all around the restaurant. Everyone knows it. They might not who sang it, the story behind it, or even most of the lyrics. But they all know the most important part:

Wait! They don’t love you like I love you.

It was a different world twenty-four years ago. The record labels bitched and griped about Napster or LimeWire but they still had unlimited power, they still controlled the world. They could still, for example, offer my brother a record contract so bad he decided he would rather go work in a cell-phone store kiosk than be hobbled by recoupables.

And that’s basically what they did to Karen Lee Orzolek, known professionally as “Karen O”. Her baby band, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, had some buzz in New York, and there were contracts on offer. Presumably awful ones. But they also had some money from touring — and while the official biographies never mention it, Karen was NYU-via-Oberlin and Nick Zinner, the guitarist, was at Bard College, so they had family money, too. So they financed their own EP and used the leverage from its success to get a decent contract with Polydor for Fever To Tell, their proper debut.

It was an era of self-conscious indie rock, and Fever To Tell was yet another fairly anodyne exercise in same… but the third single off it was “Maps”, and that was when everything changed. The song was written in five minutes, which is probably why it comes off as incoherent and brilliant at the same time. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs had been touring with Liars, another cookie-cutter NYC post-pop-punk band, and Karen was in love with Angus Andrew, their singer, but at some point their tours diverged — remember, the labels had total control back then — and Karen found herself alone as Angus presumably tore through a double-stacked line of groupies and club meat.

The first line is officially

Pack up, I’m straight enough

And that’s how I hear it, both on the studio version and a couple live takes — but Karen comes off the end of the last word so much that some people hear it as

Pack up, I’m strayed enough

As in — I’ve strayed far enough, or too often, from you. And then after a few “Oh, say say say” we get right to the meat of it. Wait — they don’t love you like I love you. Karen claims that this comes from a letter she wrote to Angus.

(People wrote letters back then. On paper.)

Maps — they don’t love you like I love you!

Which makes sense, of course. Back then, people toured with a map. One guy drives the van. Another guy reads the map. It didn’t work that well. Any touring musician of the era has stories about getting lost, and about the van breaking down. Sometimes both at the same time.

The second verse is

Made off / Don’t stray / My kind’s your kind / I’ll stay the same

I’ve heard it said that “A woman chooses a man in the hopes he will change. A man chooses a woman in the hopes she won’t.” What a great lyric. My kind’s your kind. What a reassuring and wonderful thing to believe about someone. It’s the opposite of, the antidote to, the loneliness that it’s possible to feel even in the midst of the most intense relationship. Is this woman really my kind? Or is she alien from me beneath the skin, irrevocably differentiated and distanced by the circumstances of her upbringing, her culture, her luminescently awful past? In the critical moments where we need to completely understand each other, how much of her will be… inscrutable?

Then we return to the single line of the chorus, sung with increasing energy, increasing desperation. Wait! she cries, again and again. The song wraps up quite deliberately, descending to a single chord. This was popular at the time as well, a deliberate and conscious response to the artsy and complicated radio fade-outs exemplified by “Don’t Stop Believin’” or “Ride Like The Wind”, and I blame 10,000 Maniacs for it. Natalie had three albums in a row where each song would end with her singing some minor third or something as the band crashed to a sodden halt behind her.

Here’s an example: the last ten seconds of “Gun Shy”.

“Maps” owes a lot more to 10,000 Maniacs than Karen O would probably like to admit. The whole Millennium NYC pop era lived on the back of Natalie Merchant like the Lilith Fair depended on Kate Bush for primal motion. But that in no way diminishes the brilliance of “Maps”, which is solely due to how it expresses…

…and my long-time readers know what’s coming, maybe…

…what Robert Bly called “yearning and longing, those strangely un-American feelings.” To hear “Maps” is to be dropped in the middle of yearning for someone. And how much more resonant is it now, when Tinder and Bumble and Seeking and “the socials” have put each and every one of us in the position of a rock star, when a thousand potential partners for tonight are little more than a swipe away? There was once a time when normie men and women could separate for a night or a week or a year and not have to worry, Ulysses-like, that an infinite number of suitors would present themselves in our absence. Now people are getting picked up on LinkedIn, for God’s sake. On Facebook Marketplace. A friend of mine met his girlfriend in some kind of nerd-ass online sorcery game. She left her current dude for him. How did that conversation go?

“Can you get takeout on the way home tonight? And oh, yeah — we’re over, I agreed to hook up with some guy I’ve never met in real life. We were online and he was pretending to be a scarlet-scaled dragon while I was pretending to be an ancient wizard.” What can you possibly say to that except…

“Wait! They don’t love you like I love you!”

The video for “Maps” focuses on Karen shedding a single tear. Supposedly it was legit, because Angus the boyfriend was supposed to show up for the session and he didn’t bother. But let the record show that Karen then dated Spike Jonze, the BMX wannabe who directed said video. It’s possible to be a helpless victim and a predator at the same time.

The hallmark of a great love song is that it feels universal, heartfelt, relatable. Like Robin Pecknold, on his own self-financed EP, crying out that

"I wouldn't turn to another," you say
On the long night we've made
Let it go

Anyone who has ever been… un-chosen… knows what that’s like. And anyone who feels on the verge of being un-chosen knows what he wants to say.

Wait! They don’t love you like I love you!

That night in the Outback Steakhouse, I saw a young man turn to his girlfriend beside him as the song played. He put his hand on hers and silently mouthed Karen’s plea. Then he smiled, but without much hope.

Readers, he is cooked. You know it. I know it. And as previously-cooked yearn-ers and long-ers, can’t we, each and all, relate? Wait!