TUNES // Sun June – Karen O

Post by Misha

New York has such a lore to it. Even before I moved here I came to recognize the look in people’s eyes when they talked about this city. Asking them to explain what it was and getting unhelpful tautologies in response. It’s just… New York, they would say, in a way that suggested nothing less than magic.

Several weeks ago it was seventy degrees in Brooklyn, which I’m told is unusual in November. I walked across the Williamsburg bridge all the way to Bryant Park, stopping to eat samosas in Murray Hill and browse the sale stands outside the Strand Bookstore, where I picked up a copy of Patti Smith’s Just Kids. Patti’s New York is grungy, exciting, and almost painfully cool. Patti’s New York takes my breath away. So does Ilana Glazer’s New York, and Carrie Bradshaw’s New York, and High-Fidelity-Zoe-Kravitz’s New York, and the New Yorks belonging to every ode that’s ever been offered at its alter.

It’s strange to be living in the shadow of so much greatness. I type my address in a box to get groceries delivered to the apartment and, although I recognize in it the name of a place that’s synonymous with adventure, breathlessness, fast talking, thrills, loud sleepless nights, it hardly seems possible that that is the same place that I’ve spent the last seven months.

“I saw Karen O live in a basement in Brooklyn” goes the opening to Sun June’s latest single, a lovingly told chronicle of the kind of night that New York is most famous for. Nameless characters singing karaoke in $2000 suits. Midnight rendezvous with old friends. Camaraderie. A basement show in Brooklyn. I find myself thinking longingly of New York, as if it’s a place I might like to go someday.

I’ve lived in Brooklyn for almost a year and all the normal parts of moving to a new place (the outsider feelings, a sensation of impenetrability) have the unpleasant weight of literalness to them. Walking around the city, looking into store windows from the sidewalk, ordering food and eating it at home on the couch, they’re all reminders of the ways in which I’m not allowed to be part of this city.

I am, in nearly every meaningful sense, a visitor, except for the fact that I happen to live here.

Of course, it will not always be like this. I will have my chance to discover New York’s magic for myself. Someday. Presumably. But for now, living here is a kind of limbo in which the streets are museum corridors where I make memories through plastic barriers. I start over every day, and nothing I do makes me less of a tourist.

For now, I’m still experiencing the city through others. I haven’t been seeking out shrines to New York, but they keep finding me just the same. In story, on the page, in song. This song has been out for a while, but somehow in the intermittent despondency of this year I must have missed it. It caught up to me as the city entered our second wave of covid restrictions. The weather has turned and outside my window, things are quiet. But in Karen O, the high rises spark electrically across the water. Every twist of neon is ignited, every story more interesting than the last. Even secondhand, the magic shines.

Pre-order Sun June’s forthcoming album, Somewhere, here.