On Mapping New Territory to "Maps" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs

I am not here to convince you why “Maps” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs is the greatest song of all time. You should already know that. Instead, I want to talk to you about music and memories, about how what we listen to defines parts of our lives. We all have a song or two we know we would not be the same person without. “Maps” is one of those songs for me.

The first time I heard it was towards the end of my junior year of high school, sitting in sculpture class after a long day with nothing but cold clay to look forward to. My art teacher always played music on days when the class was particularly restless, but on this day she had a song stuck in her head that would not leave. “Do you guys know the Yeah Yeah Yeahs?” she asked the table of myself and two other people, all three of us shaking our heads, slightly embarrassed, knowing we should have because she was way cooler than us. “Oh come on. You have to know this song” she stated as the iconic guitar began to play from her laptop, a far cry from the usual lofi-chill-beats-to-do-homework-to YouTube channel we’d play. And she was right.

Although I don’t believe I had heard the song before, there was something about “Maps” that felt like I had heard it a million times in the best way possible. A song so deceptively simple that still managed to sound like a heart beating out of its chest. A song so unapologetically itself, wearing all its messiest feelings and grimiest guitars on its sleeve. And that hook– so straightforward yet so cathartic. From that day forward, “They don’t love you like I love you” was engraved in my brain. After a long junior year of unrequited crushes and friendship complications, it felt like a song I had been waiting for my whole life. When I had my first kiss just a few weeks later, “Maps” was the song I listened to as I smiled and jumped up and down in the afterglow. But “Maps” soundtracked more than that; it stayed along for the aftermath. Whenever anything that felt remotely pivotal happened to me, be it a cute boy or a college application, I turned to that song for a moment of joy and freedom, of unabashed love.

Now, as I enter a new chapter in my life, the music changes but “Maps” still remains, raging along through all of the ups and downs. I’ve been at Kenyon for a month now, but it honestly feels as if I’ve lived here for years. Moving here felt the same way I did upon hearing “Maps” for the first time in that junior year art class– like I had found a piece of myself I didn’t even realize was missing. Like I was coming home to a place that understood me.

Once the thrill of that first week before classes wore off, once I remembered this was not a summer camp but a place I would live for the next four years, “Maps” still remained the soundtrack to my Kenyon life. Every time I walk down middle path from class to class with the bookstore’s knockoff airpods in my ears, chances are high they are playing Karen O’s dizzying, inescapable hook– “They don’t love you like I love you”– because really, no one does!

When my emotions are strong, I tend to believe that nobody in the universe has ever felt this way but me and that, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, nobody ever will again. Maybe I never will either. But that’s why the lyric and its repetition, gradually building until the guitar can’t contain itself and the emotional flood finally breaks the dam, hit so hard despite the simplicity of it all. Instead of describing the love, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs let it take over; the guitar solo rushing like blood to your head. You can practically hear the blushing in O’s ferocious yet tender howls, the passion completely unashamed of itself, roaring over everything in its way. And just as quickly as the song builds, it ends, leaving you as bewildered as your first kiss, your only desire to hit play again.

It’s such a complicated, terrifying feeling to feel love take over your body with no idea when it will retreat. It’s a feeling I have gotten to know well in these past five weeks– easily some of the best five of my life, yet still part of me is waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the bad I have gotten used to coming after the good. But when Karen O begs, “They don’t love you like I love you”, all I can think is: me too. All I can think about is how much there is to love here– the people, the buildings, the desserts in Peirce, the bagels at the deli after a long class, the new friends I have laughed with every night and want to keep laughing with for the rest of my life. When I listen to “Maps” now, I’m not begging someone to love me anymore– instead, I am celebrating the depths of my love and its mercurial highs. I look out at this uncharted territory, so tempting that all I can do is fall in and hope the music will guide me.