Gender and Drumming

What do you call a drummer without a girlfriend?

Homeless!

This is one of the oldest drummer jokes out there. What does it aim to say about drummers? Well, it suggests a couple of things: firstly, it strongly implies that us drummers aren’t much good at making ends meet, and that we can’t manage to get a roof over our heads unless we’re fortunate enough to be taken under the wing of a sympathetic female partner. It thus paints drummers as dependent creatures who need others to survive. If this is true (which it could be), I don’t think drummers are alone in that. In musical terms, plenty of instrumentalists (like trombonists, sax players, pedal steel guitarists among others.) benefit from being in a group. Drummers usually do need a band. The second thing that this joke assumes is that drummers are male. This is largely true. I’m not, of course, saying that all drummers are male (that would be ridiculous) or that all drummers should be male – to make either of these claims would be hugely sexist and self-evidently wrong. However, it cannot be denied that most drummers are guys.

I was more than a little shocked when I realized this (especially since it has been abundantly clear my entire life), and it made me wonder what other people think of the majority of drummers. Does it look as if us drummers are opposed to letting girls and women do what we do? In 2005 Modern Drummer published a cool book called The Drummer: 100 Years of Rhythmic Power and Invention, and out of interest I counted the number of drummers listed in the index. There were 529 drummers listed and of those only seven were women. In the 100 Drum Heroes book published in 2012 year by Rhythm, there were two women.

Sometimes when I teach a big class of mixed instrumentalists, I’ll ask everyone to list their favourite guitarists, bassists, drummers and singers. I then collate the lists and write them on a whiteboard at the front of the room for all to see. I’ve done this many times, and never has anyone listed a female drummer (or guitarist, actually) among their favourites, even though there is usually at least one female drummer or guitarist in the class. When I point out that there are only men on the list, some people can of course name a handful of female drummers they’ve heard of – but that’s kind of the point; it highlights one of the main problems identified by the drummer joke above – when we say the word “drummer” we generally think of a dude, a guy, a man, not usually a woman.

This situation is probably inevitable, since most drummers historically (documented, if not actual) have been men; it might be a bit weird if, when you heard the word “drummer” the first thing popped into your head was an image of a female tub-thumper. When I’ve done research about this (such as for this book about drummers), and in conversations with people more casually, it seems that no one (or certainly very few people) feel like girls shouldn’t be playing the drums. It just seems that there aren’t many girl drummers. And even that’s not quite accurate – there are loads of female drummers actually; there just aren’t many you’ve heard of. The most famous drummers in the world, the ones we all know about, are nearly all male. Drumming seems to be one of those jobs – like President of the USA, Mayor of London, racing driver, record producer or truck driver – that women seemingly rarely get to do. Perhaps one of the reasons this situation persists is that people mostly don’t consider what life might be like for drummers who are girls. The female drummers I have interviewed told me that drumming (along with the entire music industry, but that’s the subject of a whole other blog post!) is a man’s world. The exclusion that women, therefore, experience has never really been an issue for most drummers because, since we’re guys, it’s never happened to us. So it’s a perfectly self-perpetuating, accidentally sexist culture that we drum in. Damn.

Luckily, things are gradually changing. The work that Mindy Abovitz and her team do at Tom Tom magazine – the only publication dedicated to female drummers – is remarkable in all kinds of ways. Last week I was fortunate to hang out in Colorado with the smart, eloquent and rocking Mary Claxton of The Burroughs, and three of my five most commercially successful former drum kit students are women. What the above discussion does nothing to address, however, is the pressing social justice issue of violence and oppression wrought through gendering. Talking about “men” and “women” is ingrained culture, language and traditions, even though this discourse excludes or harms a majority of individuals who identify as neither. It’s essential that we address gender imbalances wherever we find them, but it’s equally important that we tackle the often dehumanizing construct of gender.

Gareth Dylan Smith, August 2, 2017.