Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: 5 Songs with Hand Claps
This week's songs are from Broken Social Scene, Black Lips, Sudan Archives, Perfume Genius, and Tinariwen
I typically work a few weeks ahead on these things, so it’s fun to see something tangentially related to a topic I’ve been thinking about pop up in conversation, the news, or on the internet. A funny example from the last few weeks is the resurgent, vocal hatred of “Stomp, Clap, Hey!” music. Now inextricably linked to the sanguine optimism of Obama-era idealism, the music aged like milk.
“I was thinking ‘Oh, what kind of music would I make as a five year old?’ That was literally my inspiration for Edward Sharpe: if I was five, how would I make an album?” - Alex Ebert
But for current purposes, let’s set aside “Stomp” and “Hey!” and focus on my original subject: clapping. Clapping is the most elementary accompaniment to a melody. The cheapest, easiest, most basic form of percussion. Even a five year old can do it.
The Stooges perfected it. Nina Simone turned it into an artform. Prince sprinkled hand claps all over his songs. Beck does it. Beyonce So does Radiohead (a lot). “Rumour Has It” has some of my favorite use of claps in recent memory—contemptuous, caustic, and also unburdened. Claps can suit any mood or genre.
Here are 5 songs with great clapping.
“I’d never sung a song on an album before, and I did that in one take. It’s hard not to be inspired by that bassline and that rhythm section.” - Brendan Canning
Broken Social Scene - “Stars & Sons”
A few years ago, my wife was in New York for work, so I met her there for a weekend away. I arrived Friday morning; she was working. It was unseasonably warm, so I spent the day taking in the weather, wandering around the Lower East Side, Soho, Greenwich Village. I popped into a tiny basement dive bar. The bartender set my beer down in front of me, walked over to her plugged-in phone and turned on You Forgot it In People and I immediately knew I stopped in the right place.
“Stars & Sons” is the third track on the album, but the first two are swelling distortion, like a rock & roll orchestra tuning up, and a stuttering burst of noise and crashing drums, respectively. “Stars & Sons” are where it comes together and finds its place. The drums snap in pace and place, trying to corner a meandering bass. The vocal melody is pretty, and right up front in the mix, but you can barely hear what he’s singing about, it’s almost like a whispered plea. And it doesn’t matter when it gets to the chorus anyway. It’s just claps. And claps you can tap your coaster against the bar along with.
“We’re trademarking our own scent, so that a smell will conjure a memory of us. The record will smell like that, and the shows will smell like that too. We’re trying to hit up all the senses. We got sight and sound, now we have smell…I guess we’ll have to work on taste next.” - Jared Swilley
Black Lips - “Veni Vidi Vici”
Black Lips are probably better known for their stage antics than their music. While fairly prolific, Good Bad Not Evil (which is almost 20 years old) is their best and best known work. It’s maybe the closest example to the Stooges in getting that overdubs-on-a-budget sound, mixed in with a vibraslap and a triangle to set an off-balance rhythm to “Veni Vidi Vici.” It’s a sarcastic and a little bit menacing tune about religious holy wars on a loose and loud album, with a surprising number of songs people would recognize from a band with a fairly narrow, but dedicated audience.
“I think my sound is just becoming more polished, which makes it feel more pop. I used to stray away from that word when I was younger because…my stepdad would always bring up pop stars and compare us to them — ‘Don’t you wanna be like that?’ He was trying to push me to think bigger. But I didn’t like the comparisons he was making. So I was like, ‘No, I wanna do what I do, which is… I don’t know what it is yet, but it’s not that!’” - Brittney Parks
Sudan Archives - “Selfish Soul”
Sudan Archives isn’t what it sounds like in multiple ways. The name doesn’t entirely fit the music, and the elements that make it don’t either. It’s something much greater than the sum of its parts. Brittney Parks sings gonzo-pop R&B, but also plays a wild violin. When performing live its fixed out from a harness on her shoulder, and she’s got an archer’s box carrying case on her back, and she’s constantly moving. But again, that’s not really what it sounds like. It’s unconventionally conventional. The handclaps are used like a punctuation mark on the rhythm of the verses, and a whip-crack in the very catchy chorus. The whole thing has an infectious bounce to it.
“I made that synth line, and I thought it sounded very Goblin-y, like Suspiria or something, so I was in a horror zone. And, what I was imagining was this like lesbian utopia where men aren’t needed for procreation anymore. Like they’re just not needed in general. And, they had this community around this big tree, and they just use men like fertilizer, they just use their flesh to feed the tree, which is where they harvest all their sustenance from. And, then the call-and-response chanting part was supposed to be like women at their posts when they’re like guarding the village and stuff.” - Mike Hadreas
Perfume Genius - “Longpig”
Mike Hadreas, aka Perfume Genius, is a operatic, theatrical, and something of an acquired taste. Calling it synth pop, or art pop doesn’t really describe it well. Some of it is very accessible, but that’s a ruse—a facade for something much more engrossing and absorbing. I can go from very absorbed in it to two songs later finding myself needing a break. I would put it in the same box as Depeche Mode. And looking at that figurative box I’ve just filled, it makes me wonder why one of them isn’t as big as the other. The reach of radio and the fracturing of audiences has done some good, but here we are, looking at the downstream effects. “Longpig,” from 2014’s Too Bright is cinematic; like a Vangelis score, but with some energizing polyrhythms to keep your attention. It’s the most absorbing song about sacrificing man to nature I can think of.
“When your music is based on a well-thought-out message, many people will understand it through your way of singing, your way of playing guitar. The audience is in expectation of these types of proposals. Authenticity does not lie.” - Abdallah Ag Alhousseini
Tinariwen - “Imidiwan Winakalin”
A number of Tinariwen songs could suit this theme. The Tuareg collective mix traditional music with Western rock music that could sit right next to Son House and have a conversation. They’re speaking the same language. I’m inclined to “Imidiwan Winakalin” because every time I listen I hear a little bit of Blur’s “Tender” in the guitar sound and it makes me smile. Both songs address a sense of displacement—whether a romantic breakup or living in exile—and the full effect of both songs is a peaceful optimism, even if not made explicit in the lyrics. While Blur’s “Tenderness” invites participation with a full choir singing in the chorus, Tinariwen’s invitation is in clapping along to the steady, simple beat; no need to speak the language to join in.
Thanks for reading. Enjoy listening.
Full playlists of songs featured in 5 Songs will no longer be supported on Spotify because it doesn’t pay artists, funnels money to weapons companies, and thinks AI-generated content is somehow better than work by actual humans. More artists are taking their music off the platform and I’ll join them.