Arrhythmia

I’m in a dark studio with nobody in it. I’m sitting behind an immaculately clean drum set with my drumsticks in my hand, holding them in a criss-cross fashion like I see the pros do before they start playing. There’s a single spotlight shining down on me, as if God parted the clouds to watch me play. But I’m in a studio. But it feels like that. And there’s a layer of dry ice on the floor up to my ankles. James Acaster once said this was the ‘one notch above nothing’ before the universe began. I’m ready.

The Big Bang. The snare explodes with my hit, there’s no build up. Now I’m in the groove. There’s a bassline supporting me, and I him. Maybe he’s in the room but he’s invisible, one of those ninja bassists. That’s why he/she doesn’t have his own spotlight, there’s no point. It could be a she, who knows? I don’t know what exactly I’m playing but I know it’s groovy, in fact it’s groove incarnate. No room for melody here, it’s just me, slappy ninja and the groove. Maybe it’s a four on the floor. The drums sound larger than life, like by its very nature it’s already been mixed and mastered with compression, EQ and all that jazz. Well, maybe not jazz.

I play my hardest, I’m sweating, and in every perfectly executed hit I lay bare my frustration. Really, drumming to me in that moment is coordinated smashing more than playing. The beat is so infectious it overrides my being and my heart is forced to beat in time with the rhythm, I’m sure the same goes for the ninja. I don’t stop, I go on forever until I run out of anger, which somewhere in the back of my head I’m aware is the fuel for my playing.

That’s the image I conjure to distract myself every time I’m faced with something that angers me lest I resort to baser instincts. There’s something carnal about smashing things repeatedly to a beat which hasn’t changed since somebody’s heart somewhere first began to play its own rhythm. In that sense there’s some truth to the statement ‘drumming is life’.

The world is angry right now. That previous sentence implies that we are especially angrier now than before. Though that seems reasonably correct­­—2020 has been a particularly difficult year for the world—I want to emphasise that the world has always been angry. When I say the world, I mean both us humans and Mother Earth herself, the latter of which I will touch on later.

We humans have committed iniquity and injustice to each other and the fact that that’s not news is also no longer news. Outrage spikes incredibly regularly like the heartbeat of human suffering. And in the predictability of an indefatigable rhythm there is resignation and perhaps despair. This isn’t vibin’ so much as it is monotonous droning. When Spike Lee released Da 5 Bloods, a reviewer I read said that the film showed that once again Mr Lee had his finger on the pulse of America. I imagine the natural continuation of that line would be that upon checking her pulse, he discovered America in cardiac arrest.

I’m glad then to see that Mr Lee is but an early recruit of an uprising pulse-checker army. People speaking up about things that matter to and on behalf of others; people educating with infinite patience; and people with compassion to spare lending it to the empathy deprived. But not all of us are docs with defibs. Let’s face it almost none of us are, we lack power.

We struggle still to find enough commonality to agree on and pleas fall sometimes on deaf ears and other times on the wrong ears. And even when we do agree, it’s hard just to keep pace when your conductor demands a double time swing. J.K. Simmons was not the first to throw a chair over the lack of a common tempo nor was he the most emphatic.

We are also not very good at making pleas, often driven more by our fervent want to make them rather than in seeking just change. I’m not saying a great drummer a mild-mannered J.K. Simmons would mould, but that flying chair could have lobbed off a fine drummer’s head and then where would his conservatory be?

All the same, we understand his rage and it sometimes is the only way, that was after all the case the entire film was trying to make. So we scream for our lives in the streets and through our devices. It is a music of the people who will not be slaves to the rhythm.

And for those who dare not hit their drums too loud for fear of a neighbour’s complaint, know that you are at liberty to only play when you’re ready. Though the people who say it are under large scrutiny in these times, I do agree that you have a right to remain silent and that it does not equate complicity in injustice. The wisdom that evil can triumph when good men stay silent does not mean one should rush or that silence is implicitly bad. But tune your drums and practice your rudiments, it is a shouting contest outside your doors, and you can’t lock it forever.

I for one am amongst those who stay inside. Most times. Partly because once bitten, twice shy what with the infamous article 3 pieces below this one. Partly, because I want my social media to remain as apolitical as possible. But mostly because I’m deathly afraid that people won’t like the tunes I play. The tomato-caked faces of those who mishit their drums to an unforgiving audience shows how dangerous a game we play when we are given flagrant access to so many people’s attention spans. We ping-pong between the screaming conductor and the crying drummer.

Gaia herself surely has not been going gentle into that good night and yet we are forcing her further into it. If 2020 has put humanity into cardiac arrest, then Earth has long been on her sickbed with a failing heart. Though the deathly slow periodic beeps of a heartrate monitor read loud and clear, it takes too much effort for most of us to realise that she’s closer to dying today than she was yesterday and that that trend will continue uncomfortably quickly into tomorrow.

She’s all alone, keeping her heart pumping while we’ve locked ourselves in the other room doing the same with our fists. We both have the wrong tempo for different reasons. She because we made it so, and us because we didn’t realise that we were doing it and now there’s a bitter drum stroke of regret, guilt and self-loathing. Funny how we can be self-deprecating on a species level.

Of course, our home planet does not have a voice of her own and the pace makers with the pacemakers are too slow so it’s only right we bang out on her behalf. But it seems too few of us understand how hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, or at least too few of us took the time to reason it out. When mother nature rises up on her final breath and the storms brew and waves churn, what will we be but a sour note at the end of the crescendo?

I am angry, just the same it seems as everyone and everything around me. Cyclically I wake up, work and go to sleep angry. A furious rhythm. I find myself conjuring my drumming zen image into my head more and more often. But my drums are getting worn and I fear my sticks are just as likely to break as my spirit to play. The song is coming to an end and I have yet to get in time. It seems equally likely the problem lies in my band around me.

In a few weeks I’m enlisting into National Service. Those around me know I’m none too jazzed about it. In fact, it’s another item on my list of things that make me angry. For a time, it felt like I was being forced to give up my loving steady groove for a brutal steady march. But maybe I had it all wrong. Drummers draw back at times to give room for the rest of the band to shine. A song with no variance is monotony so we need to breathe life into it with change. That is the push and pull of a drummer. This then isn’t my life halted abrupt, it’s a living arrhythmia, even if that just means switching one groove for another. It seems my solo is up and it’s almost the verse, so I’ll have to play a regular quarter note drive for a while, knowing I’ll get my time again. And that’s okay by me. In fact, I might go so far as to say that this is how my song should be. I know ninja bassist approves.

We are in a time of arrhythmia where our regular clockwork has ceased to function, and our unshakable monoliths are crumbling. It’s unpredictable and we shoulder the burden of living through tumultuous times. The burden being not so much living through it as having the responsibility to fix it before the next generation joins us here. Dreaming with a broken heart is hard and as John Mayer then continued, the waking up is the hardest part. But there’s a doc with a defib somewhere and when he arrives at our behest, we shall shock ourselves back to life. That, however, does not mean a regular heartbeat. It means the ability to change it as we see fit, we won’t be expecting to lie down our whole lives.

To play a beat is to survive, to freely shift our groove is to live. We are Jean Valjean more than we are Javert. We must be. So, when the beating of the drums, echoes the beating of the heart, that is when we all find our tempo. It will not keep for long, but we’ll know how to change by then. I am alone in a dark studio tuned to one notch above nothing. I have not moved my sticks but say, do you hear the distant drums?