Kick It

A Social History of the Drum Kit

By: Matt Brennan

Narrated by: Michael Butler Murray

Length: 14 hrs and 41 mins

Publisher's summary

The drum kit has provided the pulse of popular music from before the dawn of jazz up to the present day pop charts. Kick It, a provocative social history of the instrument, looks closely at key innovators in the development of the drum kit: inventors and manufacturers like the Ludwig and Zildjian dynasties, jazz icons like Gene Krupa and Max Roach, rock stars from Ringo Starr to Keith Moon, and popular artists who haven't always got their dues as drummers, such as Karen Carpenter and J Dilla. Tackling the history of race relations, global migration, and the changing tension between high and low culture, author Matt Brennan makes the case for the drum kit's role as one of the most transformative musical inventions of the modern era. Kick It shows how the drum kit and drummers helped change modern music—and society as a whole—from the bottom up.

©2020 Oxford University Press (P)2020 Tantor

How to make the drums boring.

Drums are exciting! They are sensuous, subtle, soft, loud, outrageous, crazy, driving, swinging, anything but boring. Yet, this writer made the drums as dull as dishwater. The book includes a lot of information and some of it, a little bit, is interesting. it is four times too long or maybe even more too long than that. The tone of the book is at once defensive and apologetic. The book purports not to be about drummers but about the development of the array of percussion instruments drummers have assembled about them to make their music. Yet the author constantly comes back to the perception of the drummer as superfluous, intrusive, and disposable. (And dumb, of course.) Those of us who use these instruments for our living or even for our joy and pleasure, know we we can be intrusive but we are at all times critical and important.