Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Stayin' Alive

Photographs by Takay

On a wintry evening in late November, Karen O celebrated her 30th birthday by throwing herself a party in the city she had fled. Raised in the New Jersey suburbs, Karen spent her formative years in New York City, crafting her identity through cherished postadolescent rituals: going to college, dancing at clubs, drinking in bars, and starting bands with people she'd meet at clubs and bars. One of those chance encounters, with a Bard graduate named Nick Zinner, turned into the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who, in a New York minute, became poster children for the Great Gotham Rock Resurgence of the Early Aughts. (Whattup, Julian!?)

So, in 2004, when Karen suddenly packed up and moved to -- of all freakin' places -- Los Angeles, she shocked her friends, family, and bandmates. "It was a pivotal moment in my life when I moved there," she tells me six weeks after the birthday party, over dinner and wine in the East Village. "New York had everything for me. It was so difficult to break free of. But I was stunted. I was running in place. I felt I had to leave. Like, what's that movie? Oh yeah," she laughs. "Escape From New York." And yet, commemorating this milestone date in her jilted hometown was a no-brainer. "For me, California is all about rest, relaxation, space. I feel really lucky to be living there. But I've been in L.A. almost five years and I still've only had, like, five friends."

The party was held in a loft space in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, and the invitations featured images of the fashion-forward gray moon boots and pink hoverboard used by Marty McFly in Back to the Future Part II. KAREN O IS TURNING 30, the invite announced in purple Day-Glo, and SHE WANTS US ALL TO GO BACK TO THE FUTURE. The dress code fit both the occasion and its honoree: '50S PROM, '80S MOVIE...AND THE FUTURE! Karen -- a downtown style icon whose onstage attire, designed exclusively by her BFF Christian Joy, mixes Ziggy Stardust future shock with home-sewn goofiness -- wore a metallic-blue taffeta gown and oversize, white-framed sunglasses adorned with cardboard birthday candles. "There was no mistaking who the birthday girl was that night," Karen says. "I looked like a brunette Barbie doll."

Zinner sported a Fonzie leather jacket, and with goth-nest of black hair Brylcreemed into a pompadour, he might have been auditioning for a high-school production of La Bamba. Karen's boyfriend, British video and film director Barney Clay, who divides his time between New York, London, and Los Angeles, donned a letterman jacket ('50s) and glazed his hair and face Tin Man silver (um, futuristic '80s?). A lifetime's worth of loved ones and creatives jammed the room in varying degrees of ironic garb, guzzling (sponsored) alcohol, cheering Karen on as she whacked away at an aluminum-foil piñata, and digging into twin birthday cakes, one reading KO, the other 30.

Sweetest of all for Karen was the live karaoke band that assembled for the occasion, a dream team of pals from the NYC indie-rock scene: Zinner on guitar, the Blues Explosion's Russell Simins on drums, the Walkmen's Walter Martin on keyboards, and Sammy James Jr. from the Mooney Suzuki on bass. "I was such a huge fan of so many of those guys when the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were coming up," she tells me. "It was amazing to have them all playing this show." For a group of black-clad artiste types who've earned their livelihoods playing noisy songs about the dark corners of life, their songbook for the evening couldn't have been less pigfucky: hip-to-be-square frat rock straight out of a gymnasium dance. Jon Spencer sang the '60s garage-rock nugget "96 Tears." YYY drummer Brian Chase, friends with Karen since freshman year at Oberlin College ("I think we met at orientation," he says), barreled through the surf standard "Wipe Out." Clay's cousin Tristan, who once led corrosive Williamsburg industrial band Flux Information Sciences, whooped through the toga-party classic "Woolly Bully." Joy's husband spelled out Van Morrison's "Gloria." Karen, no wallflower she, grabbed the mic for two songs: Madonna's "Like a Prayer" and the ultimate birthday-princess anthem, "It's My Party."

"The whole night was like living out my high-school prom fantasy," she says, adding, perhaps unnecessarily, that when she went by Karen Orzolek, she was hardly the prom queen: "I was a complete outsider in high school. For a little while, in seventh and eighth grade, I played the game. I was, like, the class clown for the popular girls. But because I was half-Korean, I always felt set apart."

Face to face, Karen is far prettier and less androgyne than photo spreads, or seeing her spit beer live, would lead you to believe. At dinner, she's wearing black suit trousers and an oatmeal cable-knit sweater with fake-fur shoulders, chic and professional, the way an editor for French Vogue might dress for the office. With her wide-set cheekbones, long brunette bangs, comedienne's nose, and slender build, she brings to mind a foxier Shelley Duvall. When I ask if turning 30 was a big deal, she cocks her head in amazement, incredulous at how dumb guys can be. "Of course it was! I'm 30! I'm ancient! But," she promises, "I'm gonna be even weirder this year than I ever was before."