Drumming is often pigeonholed as solely a visceral experience. Although it is almost impossible to hide this visceral nature, it undoubtedly has cognitive components, which supports the idea of music as an embodied activity. In this essay, I analyse John Bonham’s performance on Led Zeppelin’s ‘When the Levee Breaks’ (1971) to demonstrate how cognitive scientist Mark Johnson’s five dimensions of the human body (biological, ecological, phenomenological, social, and cultural) can reveal meaning in drumming. By applying all five levels to the song one at a time, I peel back layers of meaning. In Johnson’s final level, I propose what I term a Tonic Beat Pattern Theory based on tension and release that serves as a method of drum analysis across rock music to explain how drummers contribute to affect and meaning. In any band, the drummer is the main driver of rhythm and groove. Drummers create musical trajectories in songs that not only make fans wiggle our hips, move our feet, and bang our heads, but also, create just about any affect the song calls for. This essay begins to uncover why rock drumming matters.

This chapter details two types of drumbeats used by drummers when playing irregular-meter grooves based on large repeating spans (ten or more beats or pulses). The types – punctuated and split – differ with regard to the subdivision of the repeating cycle. In punctuated irregular grooves an established meter is interrupted at regular intervals by isolated measures in another meter. In split irregular grooves, the cycle is divided into two or more subsections of approximately balanced lengths. The drums play a critical role in decoding these subdivision patterns. Many irregular-meter drumbeats can be related directly to the familiar common-time backbeat, and the ways that an irregular-meter drumbeat diverges from that regular-meter archetype provide a ready guide for metric analysis. At deeper metric levels, drumming conventions such as fills serve as structural landmarks. The theory of punctuated and split metric structures demonstrates the centrality of drum-kit syntax to the performance, perception, and analysis of metrically irregular rock music.

When rock and roll exploded onto the American cultural mainstream in the 1950s, enthusiasts and detractors alike identified the backbeat as the most distinctive and captivating feature of this controversial ‘new’ music. Although it shocked many, the backbeat soon became ubiquitous, and it remains among the most prevalent features in contemporary popular music around the globe. Long before the rock and roll revolution, backbeating had a rich history in the performance of African-American music, dance, worship, labour, and sexuality. This chapter establishes the backbeat as a pervasive and powerful manifestation of signifyin(g), as theorized by Henry Louis Gates, Jr, a strategic form of cultural production that responds to, reinterprets, and builds upon received texts or expressions to expose, challenge, and invert the hierarchies they (re)produce. The origins of the backbeat are traced to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African-American musical traditions – including worship music, prison songs, early jazz, and hokum blues – and its early history is charted through a critical survey of recordings from the 1920s to the 1950s. This history reveals that the backbeat often functioned as a means of resisting oppressive social structures and forging group solidarity, and it illuminates how and why the backbeat became a central convention of drum kit performance practice.