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Art: Ruslan Lytvyn (Unsplash)
Backbeats: A History of Rock and Roll in 15 Drummers (2025) by John Lingan
Genre: A history of popular music told through a perspective you never guessed would reorient the entire lens by which you see the trajectory of influence from one genre to the next.
Recommended For: First and foremost, the drummer in your life, but also anyone who just loves learning about music and who wants to appreciate the people behind making the best music so good.
Buy here or check out at your local library. (Don’t go to the Jeff Bezos website).
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As an outsider, there’s something about a person practicing drumming that cuts straight to a level of unpretentiousness. That’s not to say that practicing other instruments is pretentious (it’s necessary, of course), but I’m at least able to project that on to a guitar player or a piano player, depending on the context. But there’s something about the rhythm section, and the drummer in particular, that looks/sounds/feels like someone trying to get better at something they enjoy doing.
It’s cliched to say drums, stripped away from everything else, give a sense of messiness. It’s not even accurate. It makes sense, of course, especially if we’re talking about practice. There’s no melody or harmony to hold on to and getting better at banging something lends itself to ideas of roughness. But when a group of people make a song together, that beat is the closest thing to a rope that everyone has to hold on to, so a drummer practicing is just trying to figure out how to hold it steady and straight, in as many circumstances as they can. It’s craft.
There’s a drummer at the end of my street. I hear them practicing when I walk by, sometimes with my dog, sometimes with my baby. I imagine it’s a teenager, but it could be an adult. It always fills me with a little moment of joy, knowing they have that thing in their life that they want to keep coming back to, this person I’ve never actually seen. I think that I’d like my son to grow up and have that thing. But he is seven months old. And that’s easy for me to say now. He’s already plenty loud.
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I thought I knew how much I would like Backbeats before I cracked it open, which is to say, enough to justify reading. I like to learn about music, and a history of drummers would teach me plenty. It exceeded those expectations every time I picked it up.
Lingan wrote the type of book I’ve always wanted to write: a backdoor into a larger conversation through a much more interesting angle than the one we always get. And he nailed it. What could have been a more bland, academic look at 15 drummers takes pretty daring leaps into popular music’s history and challenges some of its understood narratives. You don’t have to care about drummers. You just have to be ready to get music history slightly rewired in a way that makes you want to listen*
*That’s one problem with this book: You want to stop reading and listen to almost every song discussed in the book.
“Rock and roll” is in the book’s title, but its strength is in its willingness to use drummers to give you a different perspective and understand the way genre melds and creates what becomes popular - and how the beat is the first thing shaping that evolution. If you care about funk or hip hop or blues, you should read this book. Lingan is one of the only sources that will so succinctly show you how metal has origins in Cuban music in ways that most of its participants are unaware of. None of the chapters can contain themselves with the drummers they are meant to cover. They all represent a movement and provide a great deal of context as to why that particular drummer could come along and have such a drastic impact on the way music would sound going forward.
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There are so many little ways to collect music trivia these days. So many ways to collect content. I don’t blame anyone for watching some YouTube video that gives you shallow facts about albums that came out before they were born. That seems to be the way of the world. Face-to-camera content that serves more of an explainer than a connector.
But all I can tell you is that books like this one do exist. And each chapter builds out your world of understanding and lineage, from Clyde Stubblefield to Bernard Purdie to Questlove. These are people you should know about, sure. But the right book will make you love the process of finding much more than checking the box of knowing. This is that book.
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3 More Things You Can Read:
-'An Old Cowhand,' Sonny Rollins, and Jazz and Country Music's Overlapping History
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RIP David Hockney
A master of works. Inspired by greats; inspired greats.
The great artist David Hockney died recently. I don’t want to try too hard to describe his work. There’s plenty to say, but he’s a safe recommendation because anyone can feel grounded looking at his stuff. I’d really suggest looking up the contemporary art museums nearest you and seeing if they own any of his paintings. That trip this weekend to experience it will be worth it. If you’re not that lucky, this book is relatively inexpensive and gives you some bit of that feeling.
‘til next time buckaroos…