Across the Universe

Cheap, I know, but I woke up with that song in my head this morning. I'm sure Yoko will get to me soon enough (who was, in her defense, a very prominent and respected figure on the Downtown scene until she had to devote her life exclusively to championing the impossible-to-determine wishes of her late husband).

I had a conversation with Zach awhile ago about my distaste for beats. Well, not necessarily my distaste, but my distaste for the abuse of beats. So much of our mainstream music is derived from simplistic percussion patterns that are, in my mind, equivalent to finger painting in Mrs. Oliver's AM Kindergarten class down in E hall. Don't let me downplay the basic rock beat, or finger painting for that matter. In the hands of seasoned professionals, people who understand the nuance of their craft, finger painting can be a welcome distraction in the hands of a pop-retro New Yorker trying to lively up the scene a bit. In that sense a solid and simple rock beat is sometimes tasty and the only thing that satisfies. All too often, however, the greater nuance of the craft is abandoned for the time-tested formulaic feeder-bar pellets that satiate the numbed mentality of the majority of the music-digesting public.

This led me to a series of conversations with Zach, percussion instructors, any anyone else who could put up with my rant for long enough. We've covered frequency spectra, social implications, and the simple unknowns, such as why you shake your ass when you feel the beat (my 2-year old is a perfect case study, being that he is as of yet not spoiled by mainstream media but has managed since he was able to shake a limb at any form of groove-based music I've thrown at him). Since those days... 4 months ago, I have since re-evaluated my stance.

A lot of the trouble in deciphering drums is context. Our most common context is the use of drums in relation to other sound producing objects. Popular music often pairs the drums with guitars, vocalists, keyboards, and most often the drums share a symbiotic relationship with the bass. We are all familiar with this role of drumming. If you stretch this paradigm into the realm of techno music it takes on a whole new identity, often becoming the carrier instrument itself. In the hands of artists such as Aphex Twin or Squarepusher the drums become the primary voice where everything else, all other musical conventions we have inherited and love, is accompaniment. If you examine the orchestral tradition of percussion it is largely effect based. Bass drums signified cannon blasts, snare drums were in sync with military tradition, sheets of metal were used to insinuate thunder, etc. These ideas aside, all are completely separate from the traditions of cultures in Africa and Indonesia, where you often see percussion as non-accompanimental, and rather the only class of sound producer present. The polyrhythmic and interlocking nature of the musics of these people lend a different perspective into the role of percussion in human life. Among the Ewe of Ghana the use of interlocking percussion represents the structure of their social life. In various gamelan genres of Indonesia the cyclical structure of the gongan depict balance in nature and the universe. In that sense I have found a sort of home for what I see as a powerful means of expression through drums and percussion.

A necessary aside at this point. I cannot go further without first identifying a few traits of our society. First, we, after all these years, have still failed to abandon the antiquated dichotomy of good versus evil. That, my friends, is a bunch of medieval schlock that really has no place in the universe. The universe does not operate on terms of good and evil, only in cause and effect. For example, consider the 1994 collision of the Shoemaker-Levy9 comet into Jupiter. I use this as a common example, as it is a recent occurrence of a catastrophic event that people would likely remember. That event caused an unquantifiable amount of damage on Jupiter, that even if we could comprehend it could not be construed as evil, although the destructive magnitude of a comet hitting Earth would likely result in may cries of impending Armageddon. No, rather, at some point in the existence of the comet it was acted upon or reacted to a series of physical phenomenon that destined its trajectory to collide with, or rather its attempt to occupy the same physical space as Jupiter at the same time as Jupiter, in which case an event occurred. That is the nature of our universe. Nothing of peaceful coexistence, rather an infinite number of energy collections reacting to each other in a set of physical bounds. Sometimes certain states of energy collide, sometimes they coincide, and sometimes they exist hypothetically independent of other collections of energy. Occasionally the introduction of two collections of energy interact in violent means. I do not mean that by our social connotations (again, the good and evil paradigm), rather violence as a measure of magnitude.

In that sense you can see a clear path for the workings of a modern drummer. Sometimes you explain the interactions of sounds, sometimes you collide them, and sometimes you implicate an event of intense magnitude (putting a crash cymbal on beat 1). If you think about it our existence is nothing more than a series of relationships. The relationship between friends, the relationship between atoms, the relationship between time streams, or the relationship between the Earth and the Sun which it circles. The drums are a musical way of depicting the existence of, maintenance of, and evolution of such relationships throughout music. At least in the hands of a skilled performer they are.

This can all segue into a similar conversation I had with a friend last night about music being man's only viable attempt to play God. That comparison considered, David King is a deity.