263. BANGING THE DRUM FOR PHILOSOPHY - How Music Can Reveal What Is Hidden
I was bought a drum kit for my birthday two weeks ago. I have never played drums before. Spending most of my younger years in bands, you might have thought I had. I had plenty of opportunity to. But not knowing the first thing about how they worked besides hitting sticks on different bits of an imposing kit, I stuck to my bass.
Not that I knew how to play that until I was shown how by a friend. He needed a bass player for his teenage punk band and I was a willing mate with time on my hands. I didn’t even know what a bass guitar was until he explained it to me. I went home from school that day and listened to my Green Day albums with brand new ears. That thing I liked so much on “Longview” — that was a bass line, it turned out. The next day my friend stuck bits of Blu-Tack on the fretboard of a borrowed school bass guitar and told me to follow along. Before I knew it, I was a bass player. I still am.
I’d never played drums before, but I’d programmed them for songs. Made decisions in Logic Pro and GarageBand about beats and fills, sequences of patterns. I had a good ear for it and had some of the most fun songwriting putting together drum parts for my music. But I wouldn’t have had the first clue how to play any of them myself on an actual kit.
I always knew I liked the drums. Mike Dirnt’s bass was a powerful part of what made Green Day great to my young ears, but the older I got the more I appreciated the power and ingenuity of Tre Cool’s pounding of the skins in tandem with the bouncing bass. One of my favourite bands, NoMeansNo, featured a brother and brother combo on drums and bass. Rob Wright, the bass player, continues to be my musical inspiration, but his bass-playing was made all the more exciting to listen to because of what his brother, John, did on the drums. Recently, John Wright started a new band — Dead Bob — and the drums there really are the main focal point of every song. I adore them. But it never occurred to me to think about the mechanics of what John Wright was doing to create those sounds. What was the point? I’m a bassist, not a drummer. I don’t really know how all that drum stuff works?
But two weeks ago my wife bought me this drum kit. On January 10th, I set it all up in my office and sat behind it for the very first time. Predictably, I was terrible. No lessons, no experience, no understanding of how it all worked. But on January 11th I sat behind it again. Watched a few videos on YouTube. And, as I had all those years ago when my friend showed me what a bass guitar was, I put on a few of my favourite songs and finally paid attention to the drums. Really paid attention. Noticing what was being done with feet and hands in ways I’d never considered before. Noticing when the kick drum was used, the snare and hi-hat. The cymbals. The rhythms, the beats, the rolls. I listened and tried to mimic what I could. Learning new things about my own coordination (or lack thereof!) as I did and figuring out how to get sounds through trial and error. I was still pretty terrible, but I was enjoying myself a lot. And I remembered those early days with the bass. Before I even had a real one myself. Picking up my mom’s acoustic guitar before school and plucking away on the top two or three strings, improving marginally each time. Getting more proficient and confident. Starting to write little songs of my own. The start of a very long journey.
Sunday the 11th, I was all over the place and barely knew what I was doing. But Monday the 12th, I came home from work and sat back down at the kit. Watched a few more videos. Downloaded a little app for my computer that allowed me to play along and teach me a few things. Continued the journey.
Every day since then, I have done a little more drumming. Getting a little bit better each time. Two weeks in, I’m nowhere near even a little bit good…but I’m better than I was at the start, and understanding more each and every day. Last Thursday, to test myself, I recorded an improvised bass line to a click track and then tried to record drums for it. They’re not bad. Ropey in places, but far from terrible. I’m calling the recording “Project Drumm #1” and intend to keep working on it and record different things each month to track my progress as a player.
What I’ve noticed though, since starting to try and teach myself the drums, is that I am hearing music differently now. Getting lost in the drums. Hearing things in familiar songs that I have never heard were there before.
The other day, driving to work, I missed my exit on the motorway trying to figure out what was going on in some old Wings song that came on in my car. How were they using the toms? Was that a kick-pedal or a stick making that sound? Were they playing on the beat or on the half-beat? I had to make a six mile detour to get to work on time but I was too engrossed to care. I’d heard the song a million times, but now there were all these new layers to it. Just as, in my youth, the depth to songs I had simply taken for granted revealed themselves to be intricate bass-lines played for specific effect with intent and purpose. Bass lines my ears had simply not been attuned to before.
It is one of the oldest questions in philosophy — to ask if the world we perceive is the world as it really is. If what we think we know about the world from our experiences is the truth about the world. In many ways the drums are a perfect instrument for showing us this. After all, their job in a song is to make explicit hidden time signature(s) the music is following. Reveal the ticking of an internal clock that has always been pulsing just beneath the perceptual surface.
Every time I start to learn a new musical instrument and it unlocks old music in new ways, I am reminded just how much work the brain is engaged in constructing the world we experience. How much it decides to bring to the foreground or push to the back. To bring into focus or distort or ignore. The world is out there causing all these experiences, but there is a layered and wonderful richness to it hidden beneath the more superficial rendition we become accustomed to in our daily lives.
We ought to remind ourselves every once in a while just how little of that full picture of reality we are getting most of the time. Remind ourselves of how powerful it can be to simply force ourselves to notice something new that has always been there, just below the surface of our everyday perceptions. Something we can now perceive so clearly when we give it new attention. For it makes us ask ourselves how much else we might be missing?
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here. You also should have commented on THIS POST, as the future of this website is currently undecided as I ask myself if it is worth it?
My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. Paperback or e-book. I also have a brand new short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.
My academic paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ is out in the Journal of Philosophy of Education here.
My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book.
I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.
Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here. For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com