I think an important element of stomp-clamp-hey historiography is that the most crystalline example (and probably the one people were thinking of subconsciously when they coined the genre name) is that song by Of Monsters and Men, an Icelandic band. It's a perfect example because the whole thing is a completely abstracted sense of being "genuine" or "earnest" with no actual relationship to a historical referent. Intransitive authenticity.
I’d argue the stomp-clap commercials were all trying to chase the vibe this ad delivered. Gonzales’ cover is definitely a mile marker on the transition from indie-sleaze club aesthetic to the lumbersexualization of hipster meccas though
Talking with a friend, both of whom of us were adjacent to/dated among but weren't really "of" hippies in the late oughts, early teens, Edward Sharpe is clearly of the "we haven't come up with 'poly' as a term yet" live in a converted short school bus with multiple bead curtain dividers and an impossible number of residents with a combined trust fund in the tens of millions, chasing that 1960-70s hippie vibe.
Whereas stomp clap hey was as you point out, people from nowhere (britain or utah) cynically or naively (who cares) affecting the aesthetic of americana and specifically this weird period when youd walk down like, North 4th and some trust fund kid in sleeve garters and a waxed mustache would be giving out switchel samples and trying to make home pickling happen. But yea, they saw a hipster dressed like Huck Finn in Brooklyn in a Magazine and assumed that was the Real Shit man, and made their identity a xerox of a xerox of a 4th grade Social Studies textbook.
Whats overlooked here is Wagon Wheel and OCMS in general. The sound isn't even close, but the warmed over sense of Appalachian Americana for hipsters who want to imagine themselves as hitchhikin moonshinin sons of the soil - you cant look at Mumford or the Dead South or any of them and tell me theres one inch of daylight between their idea of what "Americana" looks like and the vibe of that song that hit big the decade prior - has to be acknowledged.
Would we hate these dorks SO much if they didn't dress like that?
I mean, speaking of OCMS, we could take it all the way back to the real progenitors: The Band! Everywhere you look Canadians are behind this somehow...
Also Home is a fine song jesus christ. 6/10. Not making the desert island rotation but its not the first thing I throw over board as as the boat sinks.
There's a difference between "bad song" and "song the normies glom onto and overplay so much you get sick of it".
Their whole vibe was a little twee and off putting and annoying especially that spoken word breakdown?
But if someone puts themself in the kind of milieu where you heard that song so much we're doing Disco Demolition Night on it on bluesky fifteen years on, you have yourself to blame.
I haven't heard that song in probably a decade. Wouldn't lose my shit if it came on, probably wouldn't notice it WAS on till it was over.
Fuck You by Cee Lo (Gnarls?) was same deal. we'd still be playing it today if mainstream culture didn't squeeze every drop of juice out 2010-12.
There's infinity music to listen to, even if they never made another good song (which they absolutely are) there's more good shit recorded than you will ever be able to discover, let alone listen to in a lifetime. Stomp Clap Hey hasnt been a thing since Obama.
People who 'hate' songs don't know their own taste, never learned how to find music to thet taste, filter feed off whatevers popular and get mad when the sewerpipe discharges a load of shit into the lagoon. Last time I got big mad about music I didn't like being popular was when I was in middle school/high school then Napster was invented and it stopped being my problem forever.
Reminds me of the AV club's review of Death To Smoochy, something to the effect of "After years of every school child memorizing songs about killing Barney, and the entire culture moving on, here comes Danny Devito swinging a tire iron for some reason"
Download your own mp3s onto your own hard drives and make your own play lists. Stop listening to algorithmic spotify playlists made by white male nazi virign capitalist CS bachelor degree holders, drink less Starbucks, go to fewer Plantation Weddings, dunno what to tell you, hypothetical Edward Sharpe haters.
Also, every goddamn song everyone made a big deal of being performatively "sick of" gets dusted off twenty years later by crate digging 20 year olds with no context except liking a bop and the harder we act like the Apple Jacks Parents about this the more we guarantee its gonna blow up among the youth of 2044 or something.
I was talking to a friend that you can Google any image of Richard Brautigan and see that you can be aping the 1970s counter culture and look kinda 1870s cowboy-y which I think is where Edward Sharpe is on the spectrum, and part of the confusion.
Checked out OCMS's wikipedia and apparently a documentary was made linking them, edward sharpe and mumford so not exactly a novel insight.
One of the main guys started the band when he was "homesick for the south" at Phillips Exeter Academy.
There really isn't a single hippie, hipster, gutter punk whatever kinda countercultural non-capitalistic artist who isn't an Etonian, is there?
The things is Edward Sharpe is both I think? The band was from LA and the main guy was the son of a lawyer and an actor. It was imo 100% cynically affecting a particular aesthetic of Americana.
See my other comment about the OCMS guy starting his down home old time country pickin and grinnin band while at Exeter Academy.
All hippies are rich. Anyone who ever learned what money was by watching their parents worry about it would NEVER.
I mean you can have any politics, this isn't an "I was a liberal till I grew up" thing. But if your parents combined was less than say 100k today money? You know how far you can fall and how bad they'll fuck you once you're down. Get a day job, get health insurance, and get condescended to by some wealthy scion at the socialist meeting who makes ends selling macrame at farmers markets.
Need to know mom and dad have a VP position or a trust fund when you get back from those five ywars following Phish around or living in a punk squat for that lifestyle to pencil out.
Did not know that about Ed Sharpe though. Unsurprised.
Elara Voss sat trembling at her personal computer, the crys-screen pulsing in time to her flickering heartbeat. Dr Read's words haunted her like an unwanted ghost. Was she really only a random pattern, mindlessly repeated across the machine-spun multiverses? Was this what Erebus had been trying to tell her?
As someone who was very into both Mumford & Sons and Edward Sharpe, I think the country cosplay of it all is a crucial link - and also ubiquitous in music of that time well beyond those genres. It feels on a spectrum to me with e.g. Lana del Rey's first album, which though very different musically is infused with plastic Americana.
Your flowchart is grand, but we can take the roots of stomp clap back to the Gap swing dancing ads of the late 90s, and the Apple iPod ads of the early 2000s. Heavily aesthetic, ironic nod to retro, the blending of entertainment with advertising, and floppy haired men in unusual pants. Mumfords and Sharpes are just extensions of that same vibe.
With a joint I could take this back to the Irish step music/monk chant phases of the early 90s.
As a precursor to the more commercial era of unconventional popular music, we have to look at this through a slightly different lens.
Heavily aesthetic - check
Ironic nod to retro - fail, but there is a case to be made that stomp clap is a more sophisticated and self-aware saccharine slop in the same genus.
Blending entertainment and advertising - check. "Return to Innocence" lived for more than a decade on compilation albums advertised on late-night TV.
Floppy hair, unusual pants - unclear, I forget what enigma looks like. I Googled, and check.
BONUS:
Odd religious tie-ins! There was a huge Boomer Yuppie trend with health food, mixing Buddhism and Hindu with a side of yoga, post-EST weirdness going on at the same time. Enigma could be the soundtrack to that.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc, Lord of the Dance >> Monks >> Enigma >> Gap Ads >> iPod Ads >> Mumford >> "Home"
Wow. The emergence of Elara Voss suggests another LLM near future dystopia where they act as a gigantic ouija board, the twisted demonic fantasies of the public effectively summoning themselves into existence.
There's a great research paper on Elara Voss and related phenomena titled The Platonic Representation Hypothesis: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.07987
This paper really should be more well-known.
The abstract: "We argue that representations in AI models, particularly deep networks, are converging. First, we survey many examples of convergence in the literature: over time and across multiple domains, the ways by which different neural networks represent data are becoming more aligned. Next, we demonstrate convergence across data modalities: as vision models and language models get larger, they measure distance between datapoints in a more and more alike way. We hypothesize that this convergence is driving toward a shared statistical model of reality, akin to Plato’s concept of an ideal reality. We term such a representation the platonic representation and discuss several possible selective pressures toward it. Finally, we discuss the implications of these trends, their limitations, and counterexamples to our analysis."
Wow, not only did this edition of Max Reads deliver 110%, but the comments are turned up to 11 as well. If I can ever get myself a job, this will be the easiest $50 I ever spend. tremenndes Content!
Took me a minute to remember where I had heard that name before.
AFAICT, that character name has not been confirmed by Cregger. Which makes me wonder: Did an IMDb poster use an LLM to generate a fake plot summary for the movie? Did Cregger use the name as a placeholder in a draft of the script, which has apparently leaked? Is this all an elaborate joke?
Crown me dead... Has multiple of these names. All of them. Elara. King Kyael, and vale. So clearly AI lmfaoooooooooo.. I bet there's an "Elias" in there too
incredible edition of read max top to bottom
I think an important element of stomp-clamp-hey historiography is that the most crystalline example (and probably the one people were thinking of subconsciously when they coined the genre name) is that song by Of Monsters and Men, an Icelandic band. It's a perfect example because the whole thing is a completely abstracted sense of being "genuine" or "earnest" with no actual relationship to a historical referent. Intransitive authenticity.
"intransitive authenticity" describes so many social movements I've seen in my lifetime. Thank you for that.
to me, that's preposterous. Young Folks, Pumped Up Kicks, Somebody I Used to Know, things of that nature
i feel like the sony commercial with the jose gonzales cover of heartbeats should be on that diagram too
I’d argue the stomp-clap commercials were all trying to chase the vibe this ad delivered. Gonzales’ cover is definitely a mile marker on the transition from indie-sleaze club aesthetic to the lumbersexualization of hipster meccas though
Talking with a friend, both of whom of us were adjacent to/dated among but weren't really "of" hippies in the late oughts, early teens, Edward Sharpe is clearly of the "we haven't come up with 'poly' as a term yet" live in a converted short school bus with multiple bead curtain dividers and an impossible number of residents with a combined trust fund in the tens of millions, chasing that 1960-70s hippie vibe.
Whereas stomp clap hey was as you point out, people from nowhere (britain or utah) cynically or naively (who cares) affecting the aesthetic of americana and specifically this weird period when youd walk down like, North 4th and some trust fund kid in sleeve garters and a waxed mustache would be giving out switchel samples and trying to make home pickling happen. But yea, they saw a hipster dressed like Huck Finn in Brooklyn in a Magazine and assumed that was the Real Shit man, and made their identity a xerox of a xerox of a 4th grade Social Studies textbook.
Whats overlooked here is Wagon Wheel and OCMS in general. The sound isn't even close, but the warmed over sense of Appalachian Americana for hipsters who want to imagine themselves as hitchhikin moonshinin sons of the soil - you cant look at Mumford or the Dead South or any of them and tell me theres one inch of daylight between their idea of what "Americana" looks like and the vibe of that song that hit big the decade prior - has to be acknowledged.
Would we hate these dorks SO much if they didn't dress like that?
I mean, speaking of OCMS, we could take it all the way back to the real progenitors: The Band! Everywhere you look Canadians are behind this somehow...
Also Home is a fine song jesus christ. 6/10. Not making the desert island rotation but its not the first thing I throw over board as as the boat sinks.
There's a difference between "bad song" and "song the normies glom onto and overplay so much you get sick of it".
Their whole vibe was a little twee and off putting and annoying especially that spoken word breakdown?
But if someone puts themself in the kind of milieu where you heard that song so much we're doing Disco Demolition Night on it on bluesky fifteen years on, you have yourself to blame.
I haven't heard that song in probably a decade. Wouldn't lose my shit if it came on, probably wouldn't notice it WAS on till it was over.
Fuck You by Cee Lo (Gnarls?) was same deal. we'd still be playing it today if mainstream culture didn't squeeze every drop of juice out 2010-12.
There's infinity music to listen to, even if they never made another good song (which they absolutely are) there's more good shit recorded than you will ever be able to discover, let alone listen to in a lifetime. Stomp Clap Hey hasnt been a thing since Obama.
People who 'hate' songs don't know their own taste, never learned how to find music to thet taste, filter feed off whatevers popular and get mad when the sewerpipe discharges a load of shit into the lagoon. Last time I got big mad about music I didn't like being popular was when I was in middle school/high school then Napster was invented and it stopped being my problem forever.
Reminds me of the AV club's review of Death To Smoochy, something to the effect of "After years of every school child memorizing songs about killing Barney, and the entire culture moving on, here comes Danny Devito swinging a tire iron for some reason"
Download your own mp3s onto your own hard drives and make your own play lists. Stop listening to algorithmic spotify playlists made by white male nazi virign capitalist CS bachelor degree holders, drink less Starbucks, go to fewer Plantation Weddings, dunno what to tell you, hypothetical Edward Sharpe haters.
Also, every goddamn song everyone made a big deal of being performatively "sick of" gets dusted off twenty years later by crate digging 20 year olds with no context except liking a bop and the harder we act like the Apple Jacks Parents about this the more we guarantee its gonna blow up among the youth of 2044 or something.
I was talking to a friend that you can Google any image of Richard Brautigan and see that you can be aping the 1970s counter culture and look kinda 1870s cowboy-y which I think is where Edward Sharpe is on the spectrum, and part of the confusion.
Checked out OCMS's wikipedia and apparently a documentary was made linking them, edward sharpe and mumford so not exactly a novel insight.
One of the main guys started the band when he was "homesick for the south" at Phillips Exeter Academy.
There really isn't a single hippie, hipster, gutter punk whatever kinda countercultural non-capitalistic artist who isn't an Etonian, is there?
The things is Edward Sharpe is both I think? The band was from LA and the main guy was the son of a lawyer and an actor. It was imo 100% cynically affecting a particular aesthetic of Americana.
See my other comment about the OCMS guy starting his down home old time country pickin and grinnin band while at Exeter Academy.
All hippies are rich. Anyone who ever learned what money was by watching their parents worry about it would NEVER.
I mean you can have any politics, this isn't an "I was a liberal till I grew up" thing. But if your parents combined was less than say 100k today money? You know how far you can fall and how bad they'll fuck you once you're down. Get a day job, get health insurance, and get condescended to by some wealthy scion at the socialist meeting who makes ends selling macrame at farmers markets.
Need to know mom and dad have a VP position or a trust fund when you get back from those five ywars following Phish around or living in a punk squat for that lifestyle to pencil out.
Did not know that about Ed Sharpe though. Unsurprised.
fwiw "elias vance" sounds a lot like half life 2's "eli vance"
Elara Voss sat trembling at her personal computer, the crys-screen pulsing in time to her flickering heartbeat. Dr Read's words haunted her like an unwanted ghost. Was she really only a random pattern, mindlessly repeated across the machine-spun multiverses? Was this what Erebus had been trying to tell her?
As someone who was very into both Mumford & Sons and Edward Sharpe, I think the country cosplay of it all is a crucial link - and also ubiquitous in music of that time well beyond those genres. It feels on a spectrum to me with e.g. Lana del Rey's first album, which though very different musically is infused with plastic Americana.
Your flowchart is grand, but we can take the roots of stomp clap back to the Gap swing dancing ads of the late 90s, and the Apple iPod ads of the early 2000s. Heavily aesthetic, ironic nod to retro, the blending of entertainment with advertising, and floppy haired men in unusual pants. Mumfords and Sharpes are just extensions of that same vibe.
With a joint I could take this back to the Irish step music/monk chant phases of the early 90s.
wow taking it back to the monk chants seems a bridge too far for me but I encourage your effort on this
Exhibit A: Enigma, "Return to Innocence"
As a precursor to the more commercial era of unconventional popular music, we have to look at this through a slightly different lens.
Heavily aesthetic - check
Ironic nod to retro - fail, but there is a case to be made that stomp clap is a more sophisticated and self-aware saccharine slop in the same genus.
Blending entertainment and advertising - check. "Return to Innocence" lived for more than a decade on compilation albums advertised on late-night TV.
Floppy hair, unusual pants - unclear, I forget what enigma looks like. I Googled, and check.
BONUS:
Odd religious tie-ins! There was a huge Boomer Yuppie trend with health food, mixing Buddhism and Hindu with a side of yoga, post-EST weirdness going on at the same time. Enigma could be the soundtrack to that.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc, Lord of the Dance >> Monks >> Enigma >> Gap Ads >> iPod Ads >> Mumford >> "Home"
this is excellent work I feel should be behind a paywall
Wow. The emergence of Elara Voss suggests another LLM near future dystopia where they act as a gigantic ouija board, the twisted demonic fantasies of the public effectively summoning themselves into existence.
Just an additional point, in Magic: The Gathering, one of the main characters is Liliana Vess.
There's a great research paper on Elara Voss and related phenomena titled The Platonic Representation Hypothesis: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.07987
This paper really should be more well-known.
The abstract: "We argue that representations in AI models, particularly deep networks, are converging. First, we survey many examples of convergence in the literature: over time and across multiple domains, the ways by which different neural networks represent data are becoming more aligned. Next, we demonstrate convergence across data modalities: as vision models and language models get larger, they measure distance between datapoints in a more and more alike way. We hypothesize that this convergence is driving toward a shared statistical model of reality, akin to Plato’s concept of an ideal reality. We term such a representation the platonic representation and discuss several possible selective pressures toward it. Finally, we discuss the implications of these trends, their limitations, and counterexamples to our analysis."
Wow, this is a great paper--thank you for sharing!
The type of reporting I come here for!
Wow, not only did this edition of Max Reads deliver 110%, but the comments are turned up to 11 as well. If I can ever get myself a job, this will be the easiest $50 I ever spend. tremenndes Content!
After watching Resident Evil, I was curious about Zach Cregger's next film. According to IMDb, the protagonist is named ... Elena Voss:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt38581828/plotsummary/?ref_=tt_ov_pl
Took me a minute to remember where I had heard that name before.
AFAICT, that character name has not been confirmed by Cregger. Which makes me wonder: Did an IMDb poster use an LLM to generate a fake plot summary for the movie? Did Cregger use the name as a placeholder in a draft of the script, which has apparently leaked? Is this all an elaborate joke?
Crown me dead... Has multiple of these names. All of them. Elara. King Kyael, and vale. So clearly AI lmfaoooooooooo.. I bet there's an "Elias" in there too
I don’t know exactly where, but I’m pretty sure “O Brother, Where Art Thou” fits into this somehow