Yeasayer, boxing, and horse-riding Nazis

"...and that's why I'll never play shuffleboard again.  But enough about me, what are you in to?"

"Um, well I like to ride horses..."

"Really, that's so interesting." (I'm not really sure if it is at this point, but she's cute, so I do my best.)

"Yeah, I ride at a farm outside the city. I was just training this sort of wild horse to amble the other day..."

"Sorry, amble?"

"Yeah, it's like the right way for a horse to trot..."

"Like, if the horse was doing it right, they'd be 'ambling'?"

"Right...." (I don't pay attention for the next few minutes. I just nod and mm-hmm approvingly. It's crossed my mind that I never knew what the title of Yeasayer's "Ambling Alp" meant. Not just that I didn't know what it meant, but that there was even a word like 'ambling' out there, and that I could be using it in all sorts of conversations! And then I remembered the dark horse from the Yeasayer video, and it all started making sense. I didn't know then, but I'd later find out that the song had little to do with equines and much more to do with Nazis and boxing, but we'll get to that in a minute.)

"...but Tanya's an Appaloosa and she's so gorgeous."

"I thought Tanya is your friend."

"No, that's Christine. Tanya's her horse. Haven't you been listening to me?" (Well, no, but I'd never got to have written this blog post if I hadn't of daydreamed about it first.)

Describing their music to a Washington Post reporter as "Middle Eastern-psych-pop-snap-gospel", Yeasayer hail from Brooklyn, but they tote their music like a weathered suitcase, collecting trunk labels from the far reaches of the globe. Drawing on "Bollywood soundtracks, Chimurenga music, and a lot of Sacred Harp singing", Yeasayer holed up in a snowy cabin in Woodstock, NY to record their sophomore album Odd Blood in 2010. After putting in a day of recording the band's nightly ritual was to pile up on a bed together to watch a movie. Studying filmmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design, keyboardist and lead vocalist Keating says he crafts his songs the way a director would a film: "every time I think up a song or a cool sound I have to kind of have a visual in my mind. If I think the sound is good it'll definitely cue some kind of visual idea. Sometimes you can have a little narrative going on and then you can start to picture it as a little movie." So for the opening track of Odd Blood, Keating sponged inspiration from David Cronenberg's 1979 psycho-horror movie The Brood. In the film, Samantha Eggar spawns a brood of evil mutant kids, which Keating found to be "an appropriate precursor to the overall tone of the album: this very alien landscape, and these kind of maniacal little devils running around." That Keating is serious about all of this is evidenced potently in the mutating meta-narrative that is Yeasayer's video for hit single "Ambling Alp".



While the video features cryptic imagery, psychedelic Nickelodeon goo, romping nudists with huge plumes of pubic hair, and faces that stretch out on waves of metallic liquid à la this scene from Jame's Cameron's 1989 deep ocean sci-fi epic The Abyss, there is a richer context being played out that transcends this lysurgic mish-mash of eye candy.

A rallying cry for sticking up for justice in an unjust world, "Ambling Alp" opens with the following verse:

"Now kid, I know I haven't been a perfect man/ And I've avoided doing things I know I can/ But if I learned one thing, to tattoo on my arm or burn into my thumb/ It would be that"

Its a fantastic lyric, but its unclear whether Keating means he has always avoided the things he has the ability to avoid, or rather, that he has avoided doing things he knows he is capable of accomplishing. Perhaps its both, and he'd canonize it in needled ink on his arm as a reminder you might not always be inspired, ambitious, and successful in using your talents to their fullest, but at the very least you can do the right thing, and avoid causing other people harm. Keating's not naive though, and he recognizes that even if you try to live with fairness, you might still be treated unfairly:

"Now, the world can be an unfair place at times/ But your lows will have their complement of highs/ And if anyone should cheat you, take advantage of, or beat you/ Raise your head and wear your wounds with pride"

These lyrics illustrate the overarching theme of the song, with its wildly noodling synth-organ flourishes and wave crashing cymbals: that to bring justice to an unjust world you must first fight your self-doubt. And so it's while Keating sings "You must stick up for yourself, son/ Never mind what anybody else done", that mirror faced prize fighters slug at each other in a battle of self.

But these boxers weren't just chosen for the video as a ham-fisted analogy of personal struggle. The begloved brawlers are a visual cue to the song's most interesting verse:

"Oh Max Schmeling was a formidable foe/ The Ambling Alp was too, at least that's what I'm told/ But if you learned one thing, you've learned it well/ In June you must give fascists hell/ They'll run, but they can't hide"

Maximillian Adolph Otto Siegfried Schmeling became the world heavyweight champion in 1930, but his boxing success would reverberate far beyond the squared circle as the National Socialists used his achievements as symbolic vestiges of their own strength. Schmeling was not a Nazi party supporter, and it became known long after the Second World War that Schmeling had risked his own life to save the lives of two Jewish children in 1938. His popular identification with Nazism, however, would lead to a Rocky-like microcosmic battle of democracy versus fascism when Schmeling faced the great American heavyweight Joe Louis in the late 1930s. After defeating Louis in 1936, Schmeling was denied a shot at the heavyweight title as the American boxing association was afraid of the possibility of a Nazi champion. After Louis regained his title from another American fighter, Jim Braddock, he offered Schmeling a rematch for the belt in what would become the most anticipated fight of the century. When the hulking German walked to the ring at Yankee Stadium on June 22, 1938, he did so under a hail of garbage thrown from the stands and suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Louis.

The Yeasayer lyric is a clear tribute to Joe Louis' symbolic victory over a fascist opponent, but its historical references don't stop with Schmeling. Primo Carnera was a towering Italian heavyweight of six feet five inches--at a time when the average height in Italy was a full foot shorter--who earned the nickname "Ambling Alp" because of his size. Before his epic battles with Schmeling years later, Joe Louis was a promising up-and-comer with something to prove, and he got his shot against the gargantuan Carnera at Yankee Stadium on June 25, 1935. Fittingly, the fight was a parallel of the same geopolitical tensions the Schmeling fights would take on later, as Carnera was exploited as a symbol of the might of the fascist regime in Italy under Mussolini (who dressed Carnera in military uniform and distributed pictures of him executing the fascist salute). Italy had recently invaded Ethiopia in the lead up to the fight, and ethnic tensions were high in New York City, where the bout was to be held, as spectators took up sides for either the African-American Louis or the Venezian Carnera. While Carnera had a significant weight and reach advantage over Louis, the fight was a brutal clobbering in favour of the fleet-footed Louis. This, along with the fact that many of Carnera's earlier victories were called into question as rigged fights, explains why Keating hedged his lyric that The Ambling Alp was a formidable foe with the qualification that "at least that's what I'm told".

That Louis' fights with both Schmeling and Carnera were in June is in keeping with the Yeasayer lyric that "In June you must give fascists hell", especially when the context of those fights as analogies of the war between democracy and fascism is extrapolated to the real wager of war on the shores of France; the D-Day invasion by the Allied Forces of mainland Europe hazarded, of course, on June 6, 1944. Further, using Louis as an example of fighting for justice in an unjust world is well-suited given that the "Brown Bomber" was an African-American who struggled against racism in his native America and broke down barriers with his athletic prowess much the same as baseball legend Jackie Robinson would a decade later.

These pugilistic details simply enrich what it is a bubbly psychedelic dance-charmer, so that hopefully the next time you have an underwear dance party in your bedroom, they'll give new meaning to the words "Keep your fleet feet sliding to the side, to the side".