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A Gentle Reminder That The Clap Your Hands Say Yeah Album Clap Your Hands Say Yeah Exists, And It Is Amazing |
Retrospectives are a lot of fun. When 2010 rolled around you could pic up any culture rag and find articles entitled the “best album of the decade” or “best band of the decade”, which really did nothing but illustrate the difficulty in setting criteria for what is “best”. Perhaps The White Stripes were the best band, based on number of alternative Grammy wins. Perhaps it was Coldplay, based on sheer number of records sold. Perhaps the best band was LCD Soundsystem, on the grounds that I will fight you if you say otherwise.
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God bless you, James Murphy.
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Critically speaking, Kid A by Radiohead and Is This It? by The Strokes could both reasonably claim the title of “best album”, but a certain album just turned 10 years old and nobody seems to give a damn. That album is Clap Your Hands Say Yeah by the band of the same name. Now, last year around this time I know all the websites I frequent were abuzz over the 10th birthday of Hot Fuss by The Killers, and I frankly expected that those same critics and music pundits would be just as excited about Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s 10th anniversary tour and album rerelease. Nobody was. Nobody…but me.
Now, here is my criterion for nominating Clap Your Hands Say Yeah as best album of the 2000s: musically, lyrically, and even production-wise, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah perfectly encapsulated what it was like to be young in George W Bush’s America.
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Remember this guy? (source) |
Remember when this guy was president for eight years? Yes, an eight-year period that began with the September 11th attacks and ended with a financial meltdown with two wars and hurricane thrown in for good measure. The US went from a mood of militant nationalism to weary resignation in under a decade and the music of the Bush years reflects that. Put on The Rising by Bruce Springsteen and the political overtones are obvious, but even dance-y albums like Sound of Silver by LCD Soundsystem are infected with a palpable sense of malaise, as if the musicians were saying, “What has the world come to?” and “Where are we even going?”
Take two of the best tracks from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, “Details of the War” and “Upon this Tidal Wave of Young Blood” and the allusions to Bush-era conflict are plain from the titles alone. But if the band is grappling with their feelings on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they do so in an oblique way. “Details of the War” tells a tale through disjointed images – bloody sheets, leather pants, a hundred dollars, a crucifix, a tattered dress, a sunburned chest – of a young romance that doesn’t go too well for the narrator. “I’m a wounded bird,” he sings, and “It’s over I have seen it all before.” It’s not until the very last line, once the music has built to a crescendo that he warns the listener, “Be careful with the details of the war!” This war allusion seems out of place at first, but once you hear it, it hovers over what preceded it like a specter, not unlike the Iraq war to the US. Where “Details of the War” is oblique though, “Upon this Tidal Wave of Young Blood” is direct. The narrator sings:
We are men who stay alive / Who send your children away now / We are calling from a tower / Expressing what must be / Everyone's opinion / "They are going out to bars /and they are getting into cars / I have seen them with my own eyes." / "America Please Help Them!" / They are child stars... / With their sex, and their drugs, and their rock, and rock, and rock and rock and roll, hey!
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah exercised a kind of gentle rebellion through resignation, a refusal to cooperate with the men “calling from a tower.” Sure, the idea of saying “piss off” to society or government or corporate America and living off the grid or joining a commune in Oregon wasn’t new in 2005, but Clap Your Hands Say Yeah showed that it was viable. In the words of Bob Boilen from All Songs Considered, the album “showed just how far and wide a band could be heard without much airplay or promotional support…those who loved it were able to spread the word in ways that seemed unimaginable a few years earlier.” Clap Your Hands Say Yeah changed the music game in a way that only could have happened in the internet coming-of-age ‘00s, paving the way for the anti-corporate successes of Arcade Fire and Radiohead’s In Rainbows.
Ultimately, my love of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is rooted in memory. Shortly after the album came out, I listened to it, enjoyed it, and quickly forgot about it. Almost a decade later, I picked up again and it unlocked the floodgates of memory. There, in the bass on “Over And Over Again (Lost and Found)”, I heard the moving rhythm from my favorite Broken Social Scene songs. In the layered guitar and keyboard of “The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth” lay the energy of bands like Of Montreal. In the strained Talking-Heads-ish vocals of “Let the Cool Goddess Rust Away”, I discovered the ‘80s nostalgia that drew me to bands like Franz Ferdinand and LCD Soundsystem. And in the childlike sounds of “Clap Your Hands” I found the playful charm of the Unicorns. All these evocative sounds that I stood in lines to hear, waiting outside of dive bars as a teenager in southern Missouri, waiting to get a big letter M sharpied on my hand, come together perfectly in Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. So perfectly that if the internet were to go belly-up tomorrow and we lost all the music recorded between 2001 and 2009, we could reconstruct the sounds of ‘00s indie rock from my battered CD. The album crystallizes what it meant to be a strange, music-obsessed kid in a strange world, and for that, you owe yourself a listen.
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Are you loving Vernon's musical inspiration? Give free-writing to these songs a try and let the nostalgia flow through you. And when you're done, go check out Vernon's bio to learn a bit more about him.
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