The whole idea behind “Tuesday Tune Two-Fer” was to find unexpected connections between songs, and then ride that train of thought into something else. And I thought this would be the perfect, quintessential example: “Hold Up” from Beyoncé’s Lemonade, and “Maps” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs from Fever to Tell.
As it turns out, it’s not-at-all tangential, and not really much of a story: The guy from Vampire Weekend riffed on a variant of “Maps” and sent it to Beyoncé, who turned it into “Hold Up.” Even if it’s not that complicated a story, it still is interesting to me just how much that article in Billboard is a bizarre time capsule. How many of those words would be recognizable to somebody reading it 100 years from now?
Or even farther? It’s fun to imagine a far-distant civilization that had never heard of Karen O, Vampire Weekend, Diplo, or Twitter, and had only vaguely heard of Beyoncé (in the same way that we know of pharaohs only by mention of their names), somehow discovering this pop culture Rosetta Stone and suddenly being able to piece together entire sub-genres of 21st century popular music.
And they’re both great songs, without feeling like just a cover or a sample. “Hold Up” not only borrows a lyric from “Maps” and a hook from Andy Williams, but even the idea to combine them from Ezra Koenig. But it’s still undeniably a Beyoncé song, something powerful built on top of a base of something clever.
My only context for “Maps” was playing it in Rock Band enough times for it to become a favorite. And then hearing it in countless karaoke nights, with the entire room singing along by the end. All my connotations of the song feel completely separate from the “meaning” of it, and couldn’t possibly have been in mind when it was written and recorded, so it seems like it’s gone on to have a life all its own.
Except that the reason the song is so memorable is because its hook isn’t just musical, but meaningful. I’m not sure I understand the lyrics to the original song, but I feel like I get the hook, and it’s universal. So maybe it’s not getting reinterpreted and reinvented, but actually Karen O was so good at capturing an intense emotion inside a single lyric, that she’s shared that exact feeling with everyone who’s ever sung it.
Funny, when I saw you were going to talk about Maps I had my comment formulating that it is seared into my head specifically because of Rock Band. It was fun on every instrument. Then I get to the part where you mention this connection as well and I was like, man! Now I don’t need to comment. But I will because I enjoy these two-fers and don’t always say so. And the whole complicated connection to Hold Up was news to me!