My Name is Rhythm, and I am Going to Get You

Has anyone else noticed how, when a crowd starts clapping along to live music without any encouragement from the performer, they always clap on the offbeat? What’s that about?

I’ll tell you what it’s about: it’s about winding me up. Not me exclusively, of course, but all people of a finickety aural nature. If I look around I’ll see other people in the same situation, hands poised a foot apart with a look of pained confusion on their face. They want to clap along, but are faced with the Dutch choice of either clapping out of time with everyone else or doing it properly and looking like a complete spazz for being different. I’ve taken to sitting on my hands.

At first I thought this phenomenon was unique to the Big Session Folk Festival (officially the Third Whitest Place on Earth, after Oxfordshire and Parliament), but over the past few years I’ve noticed it more and more in a number of different venues, and it utterly beggars belief. There isn’t a more wrong place to clap without arhythmically flailing your hands together at random intervals.

Many years ago at a work Christmas party, I spent the entirety of Sisters are Doin’ It For Themselves trying to convey the alien concept of “beat” to a Belgian work colleague. How can you not hear it? How? What’s wrong with you? It’s right there! And there! And there it is again! I’ve just about learned to accept the existence of these people, but I can’t lay all the blame for this offbeat clapping madness at their feet alone.

It’s not that the audience can’t identify the beat, but that they’re clapping exactly out of phase with it. With this in mind, I’d like to propose a theory: people inclined to start clapping to music have no natural sense of rhythm. Everyone else follows suit, either out of politeness or ignorance, and the crowd aggregates the clap to keep time exactly out of sync with where it’s supposed to be.

The solution is quite straightforward. Everyone in the audience wears a set of gloves wirelessly integrated into a system that monitors the drummer’s high hat and bass pedal movements. When these gloves come into contact with each other, they administer an electric shock, the intensity of which is determined by how far away it is from one of the pedals going down. No penalty if you’re bang on the money, a mild irritation if you’re slightly out of step, and blinding agony if you put your hands together at that dreaded perfectly incorrect moment.

Might make applause a little tricky.