Whoa, you mean he actually mimmicked someone knocking on a door with his drums? WOW! He is a genius!
Sorry... Bad mood... No love this morning.
It's not so much that he is making a realistic sound fx with his instrument. Even I stuck with the drum long enough to learn how to make the sound of gunfire...and who didn't look nervously around the first time they heard the French Horn sound like an elephant?
No, for this, its the fact that the volume and the timing of the knock-effect occurs at the point in the song where the kid inside the room needed someone to show up at the door and knock, which they did, and yet he still missed it because the music was too loud for him to detect the knock..
Had he done it in a song about raping a 23,000 year old Ice princess over a bloodstained field of self-sacrificed virgins (silly Norwegian death metal bands) then it's not interesting in the least bit. Had he done it during a "quiet" spot in the song, it becomes an obvious trick and loses a large measure of its eventual effect.
But right there, the simple song becomes something much more allegorical by not only comparing the loneliness of a suicidal teenager to the loneliness of a young band on the road but also in demonstrating how the isolation between parents and their children or between teenagers and their peers (or between a band and their audience – tre` PF) might not be as explicit as it appears.
It's possible that the isolation is the result of one player reaching out in a manner inconsistent with the expectation of the other party. The outsider felt like the unanswered knock was a sign that Adam didn’t wish to be bothered. The insider didn’t hear the knock because he has his music on 11, expecting his potential savior to break the door down rather than politely knock first and then leave when the knock went unanswered.
The eventual destruction of the distressed party, be it Adam in the song or Blink-182 on the road or Pink Floyd at, well, any moment Roger Water’s opens his mouth could have been stopped had both sides learned to communicate effectively in the first place. At that point, the tragedy of the result is markedly underscored by the fact that a missed knock on the door, or a 10-month tour, or the demands of an audience conflicting with an internal struggle with the death of your father did not need to become the proverbial “straw that broke the camels back”.
Something like that anyway….
And that is why using that technique, right there in Adam’s Song, allows the snare to transcend being a mere instrument and become an affectation of the very story it helped to create.