Tony Allen's Seasick Sound

I’ve gotten addicted to Tony Allen’s seasick drumming; but I had to go back in time first, to Tony Allen’s Version of Time, which is outside of time; an idea about rhythm that sloshes back and forth between swing and straight, perpetually adrift and uncontainable.

It’s a rebellious feel and Tony Allen did rebellious things with it. When I say rebellious, I don’t mean he wore a controversial t-shirt on Saturday Night Live, or wouldn’t let HUMMER use one of his tracks in a commercial. I mean that the Nigerian percussion master was out of his mind with independence. First he helped let loose a whole new kind of music (a militant witchdoctor funk called Afrobeat designed to put your ass into a trance of dance and tap you into the communal ecstasy and out of the communal psychosis). And then, after sicking his groove on the Dark Continent, his band, Africa ’70, made its own compound and declared independence from the state.

I haven’t mentioned Fela Kuti yet, on purpose. Fela started Africa ’70 with Allen. Allen was musical director, but Fela wrote the tunes and gave the sound a face. Kuti’s name became the brand name forever stapled onto “Afrobeat” in the histories, while Allen’s became a footnote. But Afrobeat was nothing if not politics through rhythm and if Fela supplied the polemic, Allen’s eternal groove gave it its conduit.



Madness is a reoccurring theme in African legends and Fela’s pan-African fervor definitely blossomed into something approaching mania. When he tried to use concert proceeds to fund his presidential campaign, a lot of his band bolted, feeling he had crossed the line from muso-political to just political. Allen knew the difference, and which one he was qualified in, and left as well, moving to Europe. After all, if he wasn’t going to let the Nigerian army push him around, why should he let Kuti?

Afrobeat has been pulling me into its tractor beam for years but Tony Allen himself didn’t enter my radar until I heard Damon Albarn’s latest project, The Good, The Bad, and the Queen. Albarn started going off the deep end of low end with his band Blur’s Think Tank, and (side project) Gorillaz’s Demon Days was even dub-heavier, drowned in fathoms of sub bass black. The fact that bassist Paul Simonon from The Clash was involved in the new scheme (The Clash are the only respectable example of whites playing reggae I know of), and was going to be anchoring possibly the greatest drummer of all time (according to Brian Eno), promised untold wonders of perverted pocket. Not only did it not deliver, (it’s a beautiful record, but with very English/white rhythms, staccato pianos and folk guitar; and only half of it even has a rhythm section) at first I thought the drumming was a joke. But that’s because I didn’t understand it. I wasn’t prepared to see what is so clear now: that Tony Allen is the fulfillment of the prophecy of pocket. Accepting his sound meant surrendering to it. Because it had revolution in it, not cordiality.

To get why Allen’s feel is the end game, it has to be seen in the bigger picture of drumming itself, starting with the present. Computers have by now altered every form of expression – music in particular. But if musicianship has gotten a shot of Botox (pert, plastic), drumming has had drastic reconstructive surgery. Drums, in their most primitive form of stretched skin over wood have been around who-knows-how-long. It wasn’t even until the 1600s that they started to show up in musical scores and another 300 years after that before the concept of a drum “kit” appeared in American jazz. Jazz was like battery acid on percussion’s musical heritage. It put it through a sort of devolution, undoing centuries of practiced and rigid symmetry by making exploratory drumming foundational to jazz’s unshackling agenda. Jazz was off the grid before there was a grid. That is, before the drum machine came along and confined the place of a beat into a very narrow compartment, there were years of anal white men perfecting gross systems of musical organization-through-notation intended to wield masses of individuals (orchestras) collectively like military institutions (armies). Jazz made those traditions seem obsolete, if not wrong-headed, not only rethinking scale and harmony, but treating the measure itself – the basic unit of musical division – as a kind of colonial prison to be broken out of.

Even if nobody knew it, this started a fight. Or it became a place to take the fight. White/black, straight/swing could have meant oppressive/progressive. The matter was never really solved and the two have continued to rub up against each over the years, sometimes making some beautiful children in the process (e.g., James Brown’s air-tight, uglified pocket). And it’s not as if the black approach was anti-beat – a tribal rhythm is about achieving a state of mind through repetition – and I’m not saying the free-jazz deconstructions of Art Blakey were the promised land. Only that drumming needed to get out of the head for a second and get down to the hip, so the hip could shake up the body and loosen the mind.

Then drum machines fucked the whole thing up. It’s one thing when it’s Kraftwerk – essentially Bach in a Star Trek suit – and the stiff stuff works as a relief for the simple beauty of melody, harmony, counterpoint. It’s another when people start to think that good drumming is about precision – and I don’t mean about being precisely badass, but about turning rhythm into a math equation to be solved on paper. About gated snares, and drummers practicing to metronomes, and human beings trying to copy the cadence of a machine that was just a weak substitute for four limbs, two ears and a soul in the first place. Our musical innocence was lost from too much knowledge and there was no going back. The people got attached to that feel, and took comfort in its consistency.

Two things eventually happened which restored some sanity to the proceedings: sample culture and ?uestlove. By the time the DJs appeared drummers were already adept at mimicking the modules by playing as fluctuation-free as possible. But when the new school started to build their tracks from small fragments of other people’s music – sampling, for its energy, the pre-technology drummers, the jazz and funk guys – they were butting those different sources right up against each other, which meant that as the track passed between this sample and that one, the feel was changing all the time, sometimes in the same song, sometimes from bar to bar. The most extreme example is Amon Tobin, who began by creating massive collages of breakbeat that used absolutely no original parts, only what raw ore he could carve out of his vinyl collection with an equalizer and Cubase. And that’s an itchy sound because your brain is a computer, but that computer is a sponge soaking in juice, not a mainframe humming in a temperature-controlled room. It knows when something’s off the grid and even though it knows it’s wrong, it knows it’s right. It wants to itch and it wants to be scratched. It wants friction, imprecision, loose ends, lubrication, slop, soil and trees. So now, through cutting and pasting, we again created a drum feel that a real person could never reproduce – only now it’s flipped. It’s unattainable levels of imprecise. Jerky in a way that no real drummer could ever be (on purpose). But then somebody was, a jovial, dark-skinned pocket prophet calling himself ?uestlove.



As the drummer and producer for Philadelphia hip-hop band The Roots, he taught himself to emulate the push and pull of hip-hop’s sampled foundations and tuned his drums to replicate its metallic, over-processed clang. I don’t know how much of it was instinct, and how much philosophy, but that kind of metatextuality is po-mo to the core.

Maybe that explains why, when I first found Tony Allen, I thought it was a mistake. Because the amount of junk he was putting on his groove, of speeding up and slowing down within each measure, of losing and finding the swing, made ?uestlove sound robotic in comparison. I’ve done a small amount of producing and recording, which sometimes requires “fixing” drummers’ takes, and I guess I’ve grown hyper-sensitive to waver. I've worked with a few drummers who are so clumsy that by the time you’ve repaired their performance, which involved lining up kicks and snares on a measure-by-measure basis, you end up with a kind of slinky effect where they’re always expanding off course, only to find their way back at the top of each bar. When it’s not intentional, this is not a good thing. And first listening to Allen, I thought I was hearing this type of stitched up, band-aided performance, another sad statement on the abuse-through-overuse of recording software. It wasn’t until I went back to the original Afrobeat tracks that I realized he’s been playing this way all along, toying with the boundaries of feel, sounding out of control but always in control.

The mark of a great musician is that they have their own sound, a style of phrasing that is instantly recognizable, like Miles Davis, James Jamerson, or Mark Knopfler. But the drums, with little tonal variety or dynamic range, are difficult to trademark. Several drummers have been said to have done it – Tony Williams, Matt Chamberlain, Larry Mullen Jr., etc. – though I could never pick them out in a blind taste test. But months after catching the Allen bug, I picked up Pocket Symphony, the new record by french electronic duo Air, and instantly recognized his playing on the track “Once Upon a Time” while driving to work. As soon as I got home I looked for confirmation on allmusic.com and got it.

Allen’s sound was an acquired taste for me, and its genius is subtle, maybe too subtle for most people, who haven’t spent as many hours as I have obsessing over something like rhythmic feel. But almost anybody can appreciate its rebelliousness, which is so gentle. It’s a soft-spoken fuck-you to all forms of oppression, political, musical or otherwise. In it, I hear wisdom, power, chronic innovation and a deep intent to never be held down.

The Good, The Bad, and the Queen – Nature Springs [From The Good, the Bad, and The Queen]

Air – Once Upon a Time [From Pocket Symphony]

Tony Allen – The Same Blood [From Afrobeat... No Go Die!]

Tony Allen – No Discrimination [From No Accommodation for Lagos/No Discrimination]

Fela Kuti and Africa '70 – Mistake [From Zombie]