Percussion is an attempt-in the author's words-to make sense of "senseless beating," to understand how rhythm produces meaning in music and in life. Both a scholar and a former professional drummer, John Mowitt forges a striking encounter between cultural studies and new musicology, seeking to expose the "percussive field" through which beating-specifically the backbeat that defines early rock-and-roll-comes to matter for raced, urban subjects. For Mowitt, percussion is both a bodily experience-making sense of life by touching and playing with the limit of embodiment, the skin-and a vitalising agent for critical theory itself. He examines drumming and beating as musical practice (musicological meaning), as the channelling of violence or shock (sociological meaning), and as a subjective, embodied agent (psychoanalytic meaning). In the process he focuses on such topics as the separation of slaves from their drums, the migration of blacks to urban centres in the North, E.P. Thompson's work on "rough music," Althusserian interpellation and Lacanian repudiation, and psychoanalytic discourse on the "skin ego."
Percussion makes an important contribution to cultural studies, popular and critical musicology, the theorisation of the body, and the sociology of music. It will interest students of music and cultural theory as well as readers with a serious interest in the history of music, rock-and-roll, and music theory.