There honestly are very few things worse when it comes to music than the un-synchronized push/pull shitstorm that is the audience clapping along to a live song. Whether its a 500-person congregation of upper-middle-class white protestant sheeple clapping along to ‘Lord I Lift Your Name On High” or the Canadian-infused audience at the figure skating competition in the Olympics this year… it’s a pretty offensive sound. It’s like jamming a car into gear without clutching over and over again, or consistently using incorrect grammar in every sentence. You never can quite relax into enjoying whatever it is you’re enjoying because the +/- 0.5 measure delays are making the timing section in your brain want to kill itself.

Can’t really blame people, though. Acoustics play a large part in it, especially in large venues. But even still people should understand the speed of sound matters once you get far enough away from something, so scratch that… you can blame people.

What absolutely kills it is when the piece features tempo changes or ritardandos at the end… you hear the audience struggle and ultimately give up as their feeble understanding of musical time and temp falls apart around them like a lean-to in a category-5 tornado. I can’t imagine what would happen if they tried to clap along with an odd meter song like The Ocean by Led Zeppelin or Take Five by Dave Brubeck…

Besides, clapping along to music is just about the corniest method of music expression out there. Shake your ass, dance, fist pump even… just don’t add your own cacophony to the performance en masse with the rest of the musically challenged audience.