Kick It Audiobook By Matt Brennan cover art

Kick It

A Social History of the Drum Kit

Preview
Try for $0.00
Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Kick It

By: Matt Brennan
Narrated by: Michael Butler Murray
Try for $0.00

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $21.49

Buy for $21.49

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use, License, and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel

About this listen

The drum kit has provided the pulse of popular music from before the dawn of jazz up to the present day pop charts. Kick It, a provocative social history of the instrument, looks closely at key innovators in the development of the drum kit: inventors and manufacturers like the Ludwig and Zildjian dynasties, jazz icons like Gene Krupa and Max Roach, rock stars from Ringo Starr to Keith Moon, and popular artists who haven't always got their dues as drummers, such as Karen Carpenter and J Dilla. Tackling the history of race relations, global migration, and the changing tension between high and low culture, author Matt Brennan makes the case for the drum kit's role as one of the most transformative musical inventions of the modern era. Kick It shows how the drum kit and drummers helped change modern music—and society as a whole—from the bottom up.

©2020 Oxford University Press (P)2020 Tantor
Music Invention
adbl_web_global_use_to_activate_T1_webcro805_stickypopup
All stars
Most relevant  
Technically there’s next to nothing that I dislike about this book because I’m a drummer .

Well done , insightful and inspiring

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

I really enjoyed this. I'm a drummer myself and I'd recommend this to any drummer who wants to know more about the origins of her instrument. The very early history of the precursors of what would one day become drums as we know them, was totally unknown to me.

The recent information was partially known to me, but presented with a new angle.

I found it interesting!

Heaps and heaps of information

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Just TONS of history of drums, cymbals, drummers, technology, the evolution of drumming over time. Loved it. Disclaimer: I am a drum geek.

Way more info than I imagined!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

This “History “ only runs until the early 80’s…It’s good as long as you’re over 70 and stopped listening to music in 1981

White American guy doing Jamaican and British jaccents

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Drums are exciting! They are sensuous, subtle, soft, loud, outrageous, crazy, driving, swinging, anything but boring. Yet, this writer made the drums as dull as dishwater. The book includes a lot of information and some of it, a little bit, is interesting. it is four times too long or maybe even more too long than that. The tone of the book is at once defensive and apologetic. The book purports not to be about drummers but about the development of the array of percussion instruments drummers have assembled about them to make their music. Yet the author constantly comes back to the perception of the drummer as superfluous, intrusive, and disposable. (And dumb, of course.) Those of us who use these instruments for our living or even for our joy and pleasure, know we we can be intrusive but we are at all times critical and important.

How to make the drums boring.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.