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Dear listeners,
On Sunday, the N.F.L., Roc Nation and Apple Music announced that Usher will headline the 2024 Super Bowl halftime show. Only one reaction will suffice: “Yeah!”
Such was the refrain heard everywhere in 2004, when the singer’s enthusiastically titled club banger “Yeah!” topped the Billboard Hot 100 for a whopping 12 weeks (only to be dethroned by “Burn,” the next single from his blockbuster album “Confessions”). Slick, strobe-lit and infectious, the smash featured a dexterous guest verse from Ludacris and production and assorted yeah!s and OK!s from Lil Jon. “Yeah!” remains irresistible — and among the most successful homages to one of pop music’s trustiest syllables.
The word “yeah” — or, even more emphatically, “yeah!” — is so entwined with the history of modern pop that when the critic Bob Stanley published a 2014 book charting “the story of pop music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé,” he titled it “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” Stanley was probably referencing the specific yeah!s that punctuate the iconic chorus of the Beatles’ “She Loves You,” but the phrase also captures something quintessential about the exuberance of popular music.
“Yeah” is slangier, more irreverent and often more musical than “yes,” and it bypasses that pesky hissing sound, for one thing. “Yeah” is also younger than its stuffier counterpart “yea” (as in the opposite of “nay”); its earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1905 — not too long before the popularization of recorded music, incidentally. “Yeah” is both question (“yeah?”) and answer (“yeah!”). “Yeah!” can be used in a song as a vehicle for both percussion and melody, an easy call for audience participation or an ecstatic place holder for those moments when more complex language just won’t suffice.
Am I suggesting that this glorious word is worthy of its own playlist? Oh, yeah!
With Usher, Lil Jon and Ludacris as my inspiration (and with all due respect to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs), I have chosen to limit today’s playlist to songs with “yeah” in the title, and specifically songs that revolve in some way around that particular lyric. This still left me with an eclectic collection to pull from, including songs from Daft Punk, Blackpink, LCD Soundsystem and the Pogues.
Does this playlist also include a certain zany theme song from a certain 1980s teen comedy about playing hooky and hanging out with Connor from “Succession”? I think you know the word I’d use to answer that question.
Listen along on Spotify while you read.
1. Usher featuring Lil Jon and Ludacris: “Yeah!”
What van Gogh is to sunflowers, Lil Jon is to yeah!s. I cannot imagine — and do not even want to imagine — this song if he had not produced it and blessed it with his gravelly, prodigious exclamations. (Listen on YouTube)
2. Daft Punk: “Oh Yeah”
Perhaps the greatest musical qualifier of “yeah”: “Oh.” Gently ups the ante but doesn’t take too much attention from our prized word. (That attention-seeking “ooooh” is another story.) Daft Punk certainly knows how to spin that titular refrain into mind-numbing bliss on this hypnotic, bassy track from the duo’s 1997 debut, “Homework.” (Listen on YouTube)
3. The Pogues: “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah”
Five yeahs in a song title? These guys mean business. This 1989 single finds the English rockers the Pogues at their most jubilant, leading the way toward a fist-pumping, shout-along chorus. It also features a midsong saxophone solo, which is basically the nonverbal sonic equivalent of “yeah!” (Listen on YouTube)
4. Pavement: “Baby Yeah (Live)”
The phrase “baby, yeaaaaahhhhh” comes to hold an almost talismanic power in this Pavement B-side (a personal favorite), released only as a live cut on the deluxe reissue of the band’s 1992 debut album, “Slanted and Enchanted.” (Listen on YouTube)
5. The Magnetic Fields: “Yeah! Oh, Yeah!”
A (very) darkly funny duet between the Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt and Claudia Gonson that relies upon the tension created by their contrasting vocal styles, “Yeah! Oh Yeah!” appeared on the group’s 1999 epic, “69 Love Songs.” (Listen on YouTube)
6. Yolanda Adams: “Yeah”
“Yeah” becomes a spiritual affirmation on this uplifting song from the gospel singer Yolanda Adams’s 1999 album, “Mountain High … Valley Low.” (Listen on YouTube)
7. Blackpink: “Yeah Yeah Yeah”
“Yeah” also transcends language barriers, as the K-pop girl group Blackpink remind us on this track from the 2022 album “Born Pink.” Most of the lyrics are sung in Korean, but the quartet deliver that catchy chorus in the universal language of “yeah.” (Listen on YouTube)
8. Yello: “Oh Yeah”
An early exploration of pitch-shifted vocals, the Swiss electronic group Yello’s absurdist “Oh Yeah” was used heavily, and memorably, in the 1986 comedy “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” Yello’s Boris Blank once recalled that the group’s vocalist Dieter Meier initially came up with more lyrics, but Blank told him that would make the song “too complicated.” Said Blank, “I had the idea of just this guy, a fat little monster sits there very relaxed and says, ‘Oh yeah, oh yeah.’” Sure! (Listen on YouTube)
9. LCD Soundsystem: “Yeah (Crass Version)”
Our grand finale is a nine-minute extravaganza of yeah (extravaganz-yeah?) from LCD Soundsystem. By the end of this mesmerizing 2004 single, on which James Murphy and company chant the titular word ad infinitum, “yeah” has transcended language, and maybe even music itself, to become a state of mind. (Listen on YouTube)
Yeah, yeah,
Lindsay
The Amplifier Playlist
Listen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.
“9 Songs That Will Make You Say ‘Yeah!’” track list
Track 1: Usher featuring Lil Jon and Ludacris, “Yeah!”
Track 2: Daft Punk, “Oh Yeah”
Track 3: The Pogues, “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah”
Track 4: Pavement, “Baby Yeah (Live)”
Track 5: The Magnetic Fields, “Yeah! Oh, Yeah!”
Track 6: Yolanda Adams, “Yeah”
Track 7: Blackpink, “Yeah Yeah Yeah”
Track 8: Yello, “Oh Yeah”
Track 9: LCD Soundsystem, “Yeah (Crass Version)”
