Girl drummer

Lara Williams on being a woman hitting things with sticks.

Drummers are not supposed to be girls. Or perhaps, girls are not supposed to be drummers, just like girls are not supposed to download movies, bleed radiators or pay for drugs. It’s no secret women in music are often fetishised, treated like a strange anomaly—but I think there’s something specific to the way female drummers are parsed. The cultural imagination renders girl drummers as cult figures, either a Moe Tucker or a Karen Carpenter, some requisite cartoonification so we can better stomach them.

The drums being seen as a particularly male and masculine instrument, Girl drummers are therefore incongruous, dissonant: hitting something with sticks, legs splayed apart. There is something base about drumming. Something idiotic.

I started drumming when I was at school, part of a lifelong project to impress boys. I wasn’t aware of any female drummers; maybe I thought I was the only one. That was, until The White Stripes played Top Of The Pops in 2002. I had a visceral reaction to seeing Meg White play drums, my heart bursting out of my chest as I pushed against the edges of an understanding of presence, performance and art. She wasn’t technically impressive—she seemed sort of bad?—but there was something ineffably mesmeric about her, clearly the best thing about the band. 

I’ve been sort of obsessed with Meg White ever since, watching her in a studied, hawkish way. She elegantly carries the contradictions embodied by the girl drummer, her playing frequently characterized as “primal”, “childlike,” “orgasmically pounding the drums”. It’s easy to feel outraged at how candidly she accesses the animalism of her craft, the pulsing sexuality of drumming; just look at how her tongue pokes childishly from the side of her mouth. I remember a magazine spread about Glastonbury, in which one of the band members she was sharing a stage with was caught sniffing her seat. There is an abjection to drumming. “How do you know the stage is level?” goes the joke. “The drummer will be drooling from both sides of their mouth.” 

For a while I played drums in a legitimate all-girl hype band. We got taken out for dinners to Turkish restaurants in London, were invited to parties in which the only other people there were label A&R guys doing cocaine on a Tuesday. We were consistently treated like a very charming commodity, or trinket; and this could be a product of my egomania, but it seemed I, as the drummer, was treated like the most unusual trinket of all. Men used to sidle up to me after shows, make vague statements like “female drummers are sexy”. Cool! At the time I thought they were sexist, but as I now approach forty, I’m happy to take the compliment.

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Whenever I told people I was in a band, which I did constantly, they would ask “Oh, are you the singer?” Being a drummer comes with less visibility—self-erasure, even. You’re sequestered away at the back of the stage, something to be heard but not seen. And it is quite shameful, just smacking things with sticks, making a racket, and getting over-developed arms. Female drummers tend to adopt one of two performance modes in response to this: dreamily languorous, or else leaning into things, pulsing and powerful.

Not all girl drummers are pointed minimalists, however. I once saw (former) Sleater-Kinney member Janet Weiss describe writing her drum parts for a certain song as like solving a math problem. Who likes math? Not girls! Weiss is one of my favorite drummers, if not my favorite, yet I can’t help but bristle when I see interviewers asking about her setup, what hardware she uses. I think these questions are beneath her and all the other girl drummers who are subject to an unusual level of scrutiny from the music press. I wish they wouldn’t play the game at all.

I like to imagine we bring something else to the table: a broader aesthetic, a texture and tone—a certain jouissance maybe? All of my favorite female drummers share an absence of ego: servicing the song first, less interested in proving their technical prowess, not so self-serious. And they still bring an artfulness alongside keeping time.

There’s a lot of nerve in Meg White’s style, like using too much white space in a poem. “Her femininity and extreme minimalism are too much to take,” Jack White once said, in an interview. “But in the end she’s laughing all the way to the Prada handbag store.” Perhaps the boys are capable of self-effacement, of having a laugh from time to time. But somehow I doubt it. 🥁

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