The Sound of Drums

It’s Thanksgiving. That’s not a holiday that has inspired a lot of music. I guess it makes sense; it’s mostly an American holiday (although they have one in Canada, too, I guess), so that limits both the pool of artists who might write one and the audience for such a song. It’s also a holiday that’s never really meant much to me, which I used to assume was kind of a universal sentiment—that Thanksgiving is the warm-up act for Christmas, and who gets all excited for the opener?—but I’ve now met enough true turkeyheads that I recognize is not the majority opinion. So who knows? Maybe there’s an untapped market out there, songwriters.

Regardless, I do appreciate a feast day. Makes me feel like a viking. And this Thanksgiving comes in a strange liminal space, where the world is currently…. kind of normal? But abnormal is on the horizon, whatever form it may take. (Will all the people who harvest the food we plan to eat next Thanksgiving be deported? Will there be huge tariffs raising the price of produce from Mexico? And those are just a couple Thanksgiving-related questions.) Accordingly, I’ve cooked a turkey and so forth, this year, to remind me that there’s still much to be thankful for.

One thing on that list: Drums. I’ve been thinking about drums a lot lately, partly because I’m halfway through a novel to follow-up The Fight For Midnight, and one of the main characters is a drummer and I’ve been trying to think about what attracted her to pick up the sticks rather than a guitar. Also, partly, because drums help a lot in hard times. They’re propulsive, always moving the listener and the artist both forward. Their primary purpose is to keep time, which is good, because time is a good thing when things are rough. And they encourage positivity. When the drums sound good, what do you do? You nod your head to the beat, affirming in 4/4 time that someone, at least, is doing the right thing. They’re also tactile in a way that makes sense to my brain. We call it a beat because that’s what’s happening—we are listening to the vibration of something being hit, and that’s a good thing, too. You can rely on drums.

This month, the playlist is all songs that understand the power of a drum. You can listen on Apple Music here, or Spotify here.

1- “Be My Baby,” The Ronettes (1963)

Can’t really talk about drums in pop music without starting with “Be My Baby,” now can you? These are the perfect pop drums, from the very first moments of the song, full of reverb and bigger than life. But they aren’t showy—Ronnie Greenfield (she didn’t use her abusive ex-husband’s last name after they split, so we won’t either) is the star of the song, and the drums simply add grandeur and urgency to the plea of the song, which isn’t actually all that plaintive. (The fella she’s asking to “be my little baby” is the one being infantalized by the song, after all, a relative rarity in pop music, both then and now.) Anyway, perfect drums, 11/10, no notes.

2- “Main Street,” Deer Tick (2011)

Those “Be My Baby” drums really are perfect. Let’s hear them twice in a row, since “Main Street” is one of the zillion songs in pop music history to borrow them.

I found “Main Street” because when I worked for MTV, I was assigned a write-up of the song’s music video, which we were premiering. I never really cared for the band before this, but this one got me—it sounded like what I imagined Nirvana might have become on their eighth album, if things had gone differently for Kurt Cobain. It’s a nice thought.

3- “Crazy,” Afghan Whigs (1998)

I love the Afghan Whigs for a lot of reasons, but most of the time, that reason isn’t because the band’s drum sound makes me feel like I am fifteen feet tall. “Crazy,” though, sounds like Led Zeppelin if they’d gotten Godzilla to sit in for John Bonham. The song is otherwise slight, more of a half-formed sketch than a cinematic statement like the band usually makes, but you’d never know it when you’ve got those drums to make it all feel impossibly epic.

4- “Fast As You Can,” Fiona Apple (1999)

I love my drums big and mid-tempo, but sometimes I wanna feel fucked up by a rhythm track, too, you know? Fiona Apple here is on some frenetic, skittering shit here, jumping time signatures over and over again in a way that you really need a perfect drummer to pull off. She hired Matt Chamberlain, who has played on a truly staggering number of songs you almost certainly know (“Alive” by Pearl Jam, Channel Orange by Frank Ocean, “Let It Go” from Frozen!). Fiona Apple is a musical genius, and part of that genius is figuring out how to write a song that will require a drummer to be at the absolute top of their game for it to sound right, and then making that happen.

5- “Lust For Life,” Iggy Pop (1977)

Maybe the second-best rock and roll drums after “Be My Baby”? It’s funny; they’re basically the same drums as “You Can’t Hurry Love” by The Supremes, but just played on the most reverb-heavy floor toms you can imagine, to capture the spirit of a song that’s about heroin (both being addicted to it and getting over that addiction). It feels right.

6- “Black Skinhead,” Kanye West (2010)

I rarely listen to Kanye these days, but it’s hard to write about drums and not include “Black Skinhead,” which is Kanye at his most Kanye, punctuated by these vaguely martial drums that absolutely demand your intention. I miss this Kanye.

7- “Bags,” Clairo (2019)

I don’t remember when I first heard “Bags,” but it was right before it became a huge hit. Might have literally been the morning before it became a big hit and I got it on an Apple Music algorithm playlist or something, I’m not claiming to be special. Anyway, I note that only because I remember hearing this song that should feel like a sad, indie-folk type thing, very delicate, but it ends up being much more interesting than that. That’s because of the sound Danielle Haim, who plays drums here, uses on the track, so it feels like this gentle expression of heartache that’s being carefully guarded by something a little harder-edged.

8- “Fell In Love With a Girl,” The White Stripes (2002)

A nice thing about not actually knowing very much about music while caring about it deeply is that I can say something like “Meg White is one of the most important drummers in rock and roll history” and not be bothered by the lack of complexity in her work. Are there more percussionists with greater technical proficiency? Sure, probably a million of them. Has Jack White worked with them? Yep. Did they make much music that’s actually memorable? Not really! Meg’s genius is her willingness to fully disappear into a song, to give it exactly what it needs. “Fell In Love With A Girl” is just under two minutes of her playing exactly one beat the entire time and it’s one of the best pop songs ever recorded. Pop music is about simplicity, and Meg White understood that better than almost any other drummer in any other chart-topping band. (Ringo has a similar story, but I’m not sure he understood it as much as he farted backwards into it. Sorry, Ringo.)

9- “Lemonworld,” The National (2010)

I just love floor toms, okay?

10- “One Hundred Years,” The Cure (1982)

I like revisiting Thatcher-era British culture because man, everyone sure was in a bad mood. You don’t get stuff like Hellraiser or Watchmen or even Pink Floyd The Wall from a country where everybody feels like everything is going great. You can hear it in what happened to The Cure in that time, too, where they went from being a sort-of glum pop band who still wrote songs you could dance to to the full-on Harbinger Of Gloom sound you hear on “100 Years.”

Because patience is one of the key virtues of The Cure, you get more than thirty seconds of this tormented, polyrhythmic drum beat accompanied by the siren-like guitars before Robert Smith starts singing—and then he drops in with “it really doesn’t matter if we all die,” which based on my understanding of British culture in the eighties, I assume is a reaction to Thatcher. The song maintains that exact vibe, with the drums never changing, for nearly seven minutes of verse after verse, no chorus. It feels oppressive and unstoppable, like no matter what you do, that relentless stomp is going to just keep coming, and all ol’ Bob can do is narrate just how grim things are. “Over and over we die, one after the other!” Yikes. This is a great song to sing into the mirror while wearing a bath towel as a cape, held with a clothespin, trying to intone the words “a hundred yeeeeears!” until you feel like Bela Lugosi. Just a pro-tip from someone who knows.

11- “Eraser,” Nine Inch Nails (1994)

I’ve written before about the way music helped me discover who I was, and that I had things inside of me that I didn’t know were there until I heard something that woke them up. The drums in “Eraser,” which are the biggest, scariest drums I ever heard in my life, and which I found made me feel very strong instead of frightened, told me that I was evil. It was a really good thing to find out about myself at a relatively young age.

The way Trent Reznor uses drums here—huge and terrifying for the first three and a half minutes of instrumental, then just a simple click track when he finally starts singing, and then back in full nightmare mode so he can start singing the words “kill me! kill me!” until the thing abruptly ceases—is something I think about a lot. There are so many different ways to use the same basic elements everyone has to work with.

12- “Perry Mason,” Ozzy Osbourne (1995)

I once heard an interview with Ozzy Osbourne where someone asked him why he wrote a song called "Perry Mason,” and he responded with something to the effect of (I’m paraphrasing here, this was a long time ago) “I wrote a song called ‘Perry Mason’ cuz I wanted to sing about fuckin’ Perry Mason. If I wanted to sing about Angela Lansbury, I’d have written a fuckin’ song called fuckin’ ‘Murder She Wrote,’ okay?” I can find no confirmation that this interview exists on the Internet, where people are still struggling to understand why the Prince of Darkness wrote a song about daytime television, but it is a core memory and I don’t think I hallucinated it. (Also, it’s funny because Ozzy wrote very few of his own lyrics, but this one is all him.) Some people have tried to explain it by deciding that Ozzy was singing about how he was in court a lot around this time, and that’s why he connected with the character of Perry Mason, but I don’t believe that interpretation. I think he just wanted to sing about fuckin’ Perry Mason.

Anyway, “Perry Mason” is just one of those songs where everyone came together to build something greater than the sum of its parts—the bass playing on the song is unreal, it has one of the best guitar solos of the era, and the drums are just absolutely relentless, the biggest, fullest drum sound you can find on a song that isn’t actually about pummeling you with drums. Whatever inspiration Ozzy found in Perry Mason, I’m grateful for it.

13- “The Seed (2.0),” The Roots (feat. Cody ChestnuTT) (2002)

Questlove’s drumming can be restrained and subtle—listen to his work on, say, Mama’s Gun by Erykah Badu and you can see how gifted he is at deflecting attention from his instrument while also still being one of the best drummers to ever play on a pop song. But “The Seed (2.0)” is a little showier, with those heavily fuzzed-out drums, and it’s nice to hear him cut loose once in a while.

14- “Rhymin and Stealin,” The Beastie Boys (1986)

Okay, these are just the drums from “When the Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin, shamelessly thieved by Rick Rubin and the Beastie Boys, but what else do you expect from a song called “Rhymin and Stealin”? Anyway, the drums here get drenched in a truly ridiculous amount of reverb compared even to the Zeppelin original, and it’s not like that is a band known for being subtle. As the first track on the group’s debut album, this is just such an incredibly audacious way to introduce yourself to the world, and it’s why I love the way the drums sound on “Rhymin and Stealin” even more than “When the Levee Breaks.” Context really matters.

(In the spirit of “Rhymin and Stealin,” the art for this post is by Jim Mahfood, which I found by searching “Jim Mahfood drums” on Google Image Search, because I knew he’d have something good. This newsletter is not monetized so I’m borrowing it, but I’ll give it back if he asks.)