Drumming and Language

I'm finally getting around to reading Neal Peart's Roadshow book, which I thought was going to be summer reading. The lag of the seasons.

Since I'm generally interested in the connections between music language, I was looking for a possible connection between the physical rhythmic world that a drummer inhabits, and the more 'silent' rhythms that exist in language. Obviously, for Neil Peart, they are commingled. There are sections with transcriptions of his audio notes into a micro-cassette recorder (his 'therapist'), another layer of language through the spoken word--a thought stream that could find its way to a song lyric, and sung by Geddy Lee. I've always believed that the singer owns the words, and thought that it's too bad that Neil Peart didn't sing (publicly). Lots of people fantasize about singing, but singing is in many ways like being a drummer, which is mostly mechanical. 

Drummers (and bass players) are 'engines'. Language is also an engine, but its source is much more fragile, yet has the same kind of power in how ideas get forged into tangible things. It's also interesting that he was sitting on top of a motorcycle most of the time while on tour, with daydreaming also being a kind of engine of ideas. He was essentially a 'Biker' but actually a romantic flaneur. (Bikeur)

As I've said before in posts about Rush, the rhythms in the language shaped the music. If Neil Peart wrote all the songs on an acoustic guitar and sang them as demos, Rush would have been a completely different band. I think they would have been more of a Pink Floyd, with Peart more of a Roger Waters character.

One can see the intellectual underpinnings of, "I will choose free will" in the chapter at the end of the book. This is essentially libertarian in spirit, not unlike the way that Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, was both an aesthete and libertarian, but not in the definitions as we now know them.

"It was going to take a long time for those countries in Eastern Europe to catch up to their Western neighbors, both economically and their quality of life. When I looked at the people on the streets of East Germany, the Czech Republic, or Poland, especially those around my age, I realized those men and women have been robbed of any opportunity to have a life of ambition, adventure, or achievement. That was the saddest thing of all. But they move on."