The trailer for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie begins with the doll (played by Margot Robbie) describing her modest plans for that evening: “A giant blowout party with all the Barbies and planned choreography and a bespoke song.” Sure enough, there’s a big, pink, extremely sequined party, soundtracked by Dua Lipa’s Dance the Night. The song provides the Barbies’ slick choreography with a gesture that’s very familiar to pop music fans: the disco double clap.
Like the disco string sound, gated reverb or the orchestra stab, it is traceable through generations of pop.
Made up of two quick claps and usually found at the end of a repeating four- or eight-bar phrase, the motif’s musical function is to gather the energy of the bars before it, and release it into the next. But the double clap feels cheeky, silly and faintly magical – the musical equivalent of waving a magic wand with a big shiny star on the end and watching the next phase of the song appear from nowhere.
Lipa is a master of the form. Take Levitating, a track in which the double clap is practically woven into the lyrical flow: try to sing the line “If you wanna run away with me, I know a galaxy / And I can take you for a ride” without adding two claps at the end. (It’s impossible.) “It’s a little hook,” says Jamiroquai musical director and co-producer Matt Johnson. “We think of hooks as being a lead keyboard line or a guitar line that catches your ear, but certain drum patterns catch the ear too.”
Johnson points to Patrice Rushen’s 1982 song Forget Me Nots as the classic double clap track. (Jamiroquai’s Little L has a subtle double clap mid-chorus, borrowed from Rushen.) A sleeper hit deemed a flop by her label executives, Forget Me Nots earned Rushen a Grammy nomination for best female R&B performer, and the track has been revisited by successive generations: in the late 80s, with the trampoline scene in the Tom Hanks movie Big; the 90s, as the title track of Will Smith’s Men in Black; and the 2020s, in a TikTok dance where participants would freestyle for a few bars before gravitating back to the rhythmic hook. Every generation that revisits the track focuses on the clap, although as Rushen reminds me, the opening is “actually snap clap – everybody makes this mistake”. (It changes to two claps later on in the track.)
In turn, Rushen points to its presence in Motown and gospel, and in moments such as the intro to Car Wash, originally released by Rose Royce in 1976. The double clap is “part of the legacy and history of American dance music,” she says, “whether you think of the Latin clave, or pop music, all of it leads back to Africa. Its derivatives, where and how it’s placed – in music that’s particularly for the purpose of movement – that’s where you’ll find the double clap used.” Musically speaking, she adds: “It gives a certain kind of rhythmic pull.” The double clap in Forget Me Nots really pops “because it’s in the clear”, fitting especially well within funk’s sparse rhythmic architecture.
One Spotify user has compiled a 21-hour playlist of the double disco clap, featuring everyone from Diplo to Lizzo to Kylie. The double clap “is a cliche in a sense”, Johnson says, “but cliches become cliches because they’re so effective”.
For younger producers reviving the language of previous pop generations but undaunted by – or actively seeking – cliche, there is a new function for the double clap. “It’s almost like a call and response thing” between audiences and performers, says producer Lucy Tun. (She uses a relation of the double-clap motif in the rhythmic stabs on her 2020 track Another Week). “It feels a little bit twee to have everyone interact in that sort of way. It reminds me of school discos or holiday dance things that you’d do with all the other kids, something that people connect to in a campy, fun way.”
For those with natural rhythm to the most casual of dancers, the double clap is a perfect congregating force. “When you’re dancing around with your handbag, you can easily do a double clap,” Johnson adds.
Its participatory call-and-response element makes the double clap perfect for TikTok, a platform built on reciprocation and collaboration. You can trace the double claps across the platform: from the anchoring rhythm on DJ Smallz’s 732 Cupid Pt 1 (where the double clap is often the only standard element amid dancers’ elaborate variations), to fans documenting Taylor Swift’s various double claps (complete with audience participation) in live versions of You Belong With Me.
“It might not be a clap, it might be more subtle – a snap or something,” Tun says. “But the rhythm is still there, as a collaborative cue in a song.” A piece of pop culture iconography and a camp way of introducing variation into a formulaic structure: it seems Barbie has found her perfect dance move.
