Blog Rock Revisited: Musing the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah 10th Anniversary Tour

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah are responsible for one of my most cherished memories of music consumption, because it’ll be the last of its kind. They inspired a visceral compulsion to spend $18 on an album from a band I had never heard of based on a rave review I read online. But that’s not what I’m talking about: most of those memories are vivid and they just trigger regret over a temporary internal economy that valued an Architecture in Helsinki or Edan album more than nine cans of Sparks Ultra and a Pot Pie Express. Rather, for the span of maybe three or four days in late June 2005, it was spring semester of high school senior year all over again, checking my mailbox for the big envelope. Had Insound.com finally delivered the most talked-about album at the current moment? I didn’t know if it was actually any good and I had heard maybe one song from it. It didn’t matter—Clap Your Hands Say Yeah had my money and I needed to know if they deserved it. I would have you believe that my 110 or so Blogspot followers needed to know as well. And so, an experience like none other in the time since: no YouTube, no Bandcamp, no Soundcloud, no nefarious means of acquisition, nothing to do but wait for a commercially available album that was rightfully mine.

2005 was my favorite year as a music consumer—maybe because it was the one before I started writing about music in some "professional" capacity. I don’t remember feeling particularly obligated to listen to music I didn’t care for, or discuss what it said about "us" or "the problem with Art Brut." From a personal standpoint, a perfect balance had been struck—information felt unlimited, access did not. There had to be some inspirational spark that could drive me to head out to Criminal Records, or spend money on iTunes, or put my laptop at risk for a potentially corrupt file of 128 kbps quality. But once that spark caught, there was something at stake. I loved and regretted harder. That’s something I’ll always be willing to celebrate. I imagine most of the people at a sold out Troubadour in West Hollywood were feeling the same way as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah honored their 10th anniversary.

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Look, they had to be celebrating something in addition to the actual album Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. A round-number anniversary can be grounds for any kind of ceremonial recognition, but I don’t foresee any controversy stemming from the following opinions: 1) Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is a very good indie rock album that is very much of its time. 2) The reputation of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, the band, experienced a sharp decline between 2005 and 2007 and has since been on a slow, steady decline to the point where I’m not sure if most people in attendance knew that CYHSY had released an album just last year—while their 2011 LP Hysterical was available on vinyl at the merch table, Only Run was not. 3) Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is so far from where "indie rock" is right now that it’s way more novel than it was back in 2005.

It is, however, the definitive article of "blog rock"—for a record that was initially praised for having no context, it’s nothing but context in 2015. I’m going to assume that some of you would’ve been in grade school or even kindergarten when Clap Your Hands Say Yeah was released. Thus, a debriefing on "blog rock." It’s a very silly genre name, like pretty much all genre names. Most give some indication as to its sound, its scene, maybe even a description of how one should listen to it. Though blog rock eventually took on a definable set of characteristics, it’s a unique case where the name references the delivery system of the people who write about it. It has extremely little to do with the actual music, which is the entire point.

In that sense, "blog rock" can be tough to grasp right now—if something is "blog rock" based on the degree to which it is discussed online compared to its real world impact, Ed Sheeran and Zac Brown Band might be one of the few remaining examples of what it isn’t. Likewise, how can one group be the band that made it on the Internet, even in 2005? It’s a process of elimination.

Indie rock had already supplanted alternative rock as the nomenclature for popular, guitar-based music that wasn’t exactly pop. Bands that would’ve seemed too wimpy, too twee, not photogenic enough for alt-rock fame (the Shins, Death Cab for Cutie, etc.) became stars, but did so that through fairly conventional channels: appearances in movie soundtracks, commercial placements, legitimate hit singles. You also had acts whose meteoric rise was launched by rave reviews. Yet, Broken Social Scene, the Rapture, Sufjan Stevens, and Arcade Fire were established entities and had standard, low level music industry machinery working for them. Sure, Funeral’s impact felt instantaneous and nuclear, but a record released on Merge doesn’t come out of nowhere.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah was buzzing despite having no label and no PR behind it, but 2004 was an incredible year for Internet discoveries from mostly unknown acts—M.I.A., Annie, Dungen, the Go! Team, the list can go on. And besides, you can look back at decades of rappers becoming local legends selling cassettes and CDs out of their trunk if self-releasing a record is supposed to be considered something far out of the norm.

So what exactly did Clap Your Hands Say Yeah do here? In retrospect, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah was the record that felt most proprietary to blogs—early tracks generated praise on mp3 sites and culminated with a 9.0 Best New Music in this very publication, which I recall most people still referred to as a blog back then (hey, it sure as shit got me to buy it). They did not emerge from any kind of scene. They had not developed a passionate fanbase based on their live performances, David Byrne and David Bowie showed up to their gigs because that was how bands were knighted back in 2005. There was no single that started to circulate until it broke through into the mainstream. They did not represent some kind of innovative new sound. However, the trajectory of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah provided a clear-cut, linear example of how music blogs could provide a version of farm-to-table service for music listeners—they could serve as talent scouts, PR companies, and the distribution wing.

And for a minute, or really the next few years, "blogs" seemed like the "next Seattle," so to speak. The excitement was understandable, as it is any time a perceived barrier is broken down between fan and artist—in this case, it appeared that if music websites kept an open mind and advocated more passionately for bands that didn’t have the clout to generate interest in long-lead mags, there might be a new Clap Your Hands Say Yeah out there every single day and we’d no longer be at the mercy of labels, PR companies, and the industry allegiances and ossified standards that lead to Mick Jagger solo albums getting 5 star reviews.

Yet, this narrative suffered from a common journalistic mistake, wherein the most extreme example of a phenomenon is also portrayed as being common. The problem is that, soon enough, blog rock actually could describe a certain stripe of music. Most of the time, "the next Clap Your Hands Say Yeah" was taken too literally; as Pitchfork contributor Steven Hyden points out in a very astute history of blog rock, the beneficiaries of CYHSY’s immediate success were Tapes ‘n Tapes, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, Cold War Kids, Black Kids, and many others long-forgotten. The Internet offered unlimited breadth, but we just dug slightly deeper. It’s easy to see now that blog rock ended up serving mostly white male guitar bands and yet, these bands failed to pass muster under the codified rockist standards that typically helped them against what was unfairly perceived as flash-in-the-pan, artistically bankrupt pop or hip-hop—most had a couple of hot singles but couldn’t put an album together and also, most of them were terrible live.

This last aspect might’ve done the most damage to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, though bad luck played a major role as well. Pressed into capitalizing on their buzz, CYHSY were about what you’d expect in the early days—not sloppy in a punk or confrontational way, not really incompetent either. They just hadn’t road-tested their material, certainly not to the point where it wasn’t going to go unnoticed by people paying for actual concert tickets rather than a cover charge. As legend has it, CYHSY packed the house as the opening act and it would clear before the night’s nominal headliner, a struggling Brooklyn act trying to push their overlooked third album. Perhaps Clap Your Hands Say Yeah might have weathered this inauspicious beginning had they opened for, say, French Kicks or Longwave. Instead, this was the National, who had yet to reap the rewards of Alligator’s slow burn success.

By 2007, these bands became inextricably linked in a way that could only hurt Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. The latter released Some Loud Thunder, a record which I find to be more interesting and unique and ambitious than the self-titled. However, I’m biased by having a copy that, unbeknownst to me, had a "fixed" version of the opening title track. I just heard the original earlier this year and it’s clear that Clap Your Hands Say Yeah had become both chastised by the backlash and welcoming of it—the distortion on "Some Loud Thunder" was self-flagellation, a preemptive apology. You wanted to leave them alone, they wanted that too. Meanwhile, the National’s Boxer was framed as a well-deserved triumph, a testament to slowly fashioning one’s craft and relentless touring—everything that Clap Your Hands Say Yeah hadn’t had the time to accomplish.

Boxer is not the comet that killed blog rock, no more than Nevermind truly nuked hair metal. In this case, listeners just weren’t going to fall for bloggers playing indie rock A&R, grasping for "firsties" over the kind of music that may or may not have gotten a second listen in the demo pile at Polyvinyl. The blogs themselves seemed like they wanted to be the star-making machinery (queue Joni) if not stars themselves. Yet the ones that survived are still thriving—Passion of the Weiss, Aquarium Drunkard, Gorilla vs. Bear, to name a few—perhaps in part because they bore many of the same characteristics as bands that tended to have legs; they had a distinct aesthetic capable of evolution, they offered something new rather than a more amateurish amalgamation of the big guys.

While the National vs. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is framed as a too-perfect tortoise and the hare paradigm, in a sense, the hare here is in fact blog rock itself; frontman and creative engine Alec Ounsworth has kept fairly busy, self-releasing three subsequent CYHSY LPs and numerous solo projects while the likes of Voxtrot, Sound Team, and countless others evaporated the moment they were faced with scrutiny outside of blogs that had a vested interest in seeing them thrive. It makes for a strange double standard; CYHSY was praised for its unassuming nature and later bashed when Ounsworth failed to adapt to a spotlight never wanted. The narrative may have shifted around Some Loud Thunder and Hysterical had the self-titled just been a warmly received indie rock record rather than a small seismic shift for the entire music industry. But without that initial album, it’s unlikely there would have been a narrative at all.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah sure as shit wouldn’t have the juice to put together a 10-year anniversary tour. As Stuart Berman mentioned in our review of Only Run, CYHSY’s last tour was conducted in venues far smaller than the ones they played nearly a decade ago. Whether or not any old Clap Your Hands Say Yeah show could fill a decent-sized venue in Los Angeles is up for debate—this past October, they had the second biggest font on the poster for Culture Collide, a weekend festival headlined by Cloud Nothings and filled with sync-friendly synth-indie acts whose names ring vaguely familiar from the PR emails that fill my inbox daily.

These anniversary gigs tend to bring out the hardcore fan but we can safely assume the ones who stopped with the self-titled and wouldn’t have shown up last year are the casual Clap Your Hands Say Yeah fans. So who comes out to this show? Who wants to relive their decade old good ‘ol days with this soundtrack? Did blog rock create any sustainable crowds? Who are these people? These dudes in untucked business casual shirts with jeans? Were these people reminiscing over the music or its context? Was "Heavy Metal" there for anyone during a painful breakup? Was there a time when you couldn’t stop listening to "In This Home on Ice"? Did "The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth" redefine the parameters of what you believed indie rock was capable of? Is there anything to gain from a communal viewing of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah being played in its entirety, in order, almost exactly like it was on the record? Or would it be more interesting to just have 12 people come up on stage and share their fond recollections of blogging in 2005?

Maybe we’d have been better off. I’m not sure what the proper equivalent for having a "face for radio" is in this situation, maybe just that Clap Your Hands still have a stage presence for blogs. Opening carny barker "Clap Your Hands!" was meant as a dare on Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, the equivalent of an intro skit. Seeing it live caused a surge of embarrassment, maybe it was collective. The megaphone vocals, the off-key, nasal Pet Sounds harmonies, the canned polka beat, the overly enthusiastic bassist, the sarcastic calls to clap your hands contrasting with the chipper face, an uncomfortable relationship with synthesizers. An onlooker yelled, "I REMEMBER THIS FROM THE ALBUM!", which could double as the tagline for every single anniversary show. This felt like an "I told you so" aired out after a decade of repression.

But that corrective would’ve fallen on deaf ears. Going forward that night, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah were what they always wanted to be, or what they perhaps should’ve been—a solid, tuneful, workmanlike band that took advantage of a lucky break. And if the crowd seemed like an embodiment of "Lifelong Love Affair With Music Ends At Age 35", that’s OK too. As with a lot of what you read on the Onion right now, this piece was so on-point that it was actually confirmed by scientific research (OK, it was off by two years). But you can’t blame these people for not feeling the same connection with the process of finding and discussing new music as they did in their younger days, since this show wasn’t an indictment of the band or its fans, just the genre it unintentionally created. In 2005, blogs could’ve offered almost everything—and this is what we chose?