ABSTRACT
On the opening track of Beggars Banquet, Mick Jagger famously introduces himself in the guise of the devil. By the end of the album, however, the band ventures toward spiritual transcendence, enlisting the Watts Street Gospel Choir to elevate the damaged and downtrodden who populate ‘Salt of the Earth,’ the album’s final song. Drum and percussion tracks are central to the affective power and meaning of the album’s framing moments. ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ begins with an extended, exclusively percussive, Afro-Cuban style groove. This ‘exotic,’ ‘primitive’ introduction paves the way for the archfiend’s entrance, trading on long-standing Western tropes that associate the exotic with evil, seduction, and savagery. Similarly, the primary affective event at the end of the album relies largely on the percussive register. Only when drummer Charlie Watts kicks into a double-time gospel backbeat at the end of ‘Salt of the Earth’ does the song fully gesture toward the embodied spirituality of black Pentecostal worship. In between its bookend tracks, Beggars Banquet features a variety of percussive timbres, grooves, and effects that contribute significantly to the album’s distinctiveness and impact, and this chapter offers a drummer-musicologist’s perspective on the musical content and rhetorical power of drums and percussion on one of rock music’s most celebrated albums.
