Again Brother We Share a Similar Story Amen

Fans know that when a new Beyoncé, Kanye or Diplo track drops, it will likely contain a musical sample — an instrumental or vocal nugget from a song of yesteryear. That nugget will be rearranged, looped or otherwise given new context. Drake's "Hotline Bling," for example, didn't just introduce united states to an unusual trip the light fantastic toe style; its sped-up sampling of an 1972 R&B hit reintroduced the world to Timmy Thomas and the distinctive beat of "Why Can't Nosotros Live Together."

There'south i song that'due south been sampled far more than any other, according to one mensurate. The website WhoSampled.com, whose audience obsessively tracks what'south sampled, says that a 1960s runway called "Amen, Brother" by The Winstons is the most-sampled track in history, and it'southward not particularly close. By its count, more than than 2,000 songs have sampled a item drum beat from "Amen, Brother" that's at present known as the Amen Pause. As yous play the clip below, you can hear the The Winstons' drummer, G.C. Coleman, play the kick drums, snare drums and cymbals in a funky iv-bar pattern.

Simply what is it about a 47-twelvemonth-erstwhile, half dozen-second drum solo from a relatively unknown soul band that's given information technology musical immortality? The reply involves the invention of two new musical genres, a new slice of engineering science and a power blackout.

Almost sampled tracks

	Track	Artist	YEAR	NO. OF TIMES SAMPLED
one	Amen, Brother	The Winstons	1969	ii,239
2	Change the Trounce (Female Version)	Abreast	1982	1,853
3	Think (About It)	Lyn Collins	1972	1,588
four	Funky Drummer	James Brown	1970	1,302
v	La Di Da Di	Doug East. Fresh	1985	794
6	Funky President (People It's Bad)	James Brown	1974	736
7	Bring the Noise	Public Enemy	1987	686
eight	Synthetic Substitution	Melvin Bliss	1973	658
9	Impeach the President	The Honey Drippers	1973	650
ten	Here We Go (Live at the Funhouse)	Run-DMC	1985	635

Every mean solar day, fanatical music lovers identify hundreds of samples from songs old and new and add them wiki-style to the database of WhoSampled.com. Chris Read, the head of content at that place, vets each new entry with his squad of moderators before it makes it onto the site.¹ Over the last 8 years, more than than 400,000 songs featuring more than 225,000 samples take been cleared. Until terminal year, the Amen Break was running neck and neck for the most sampled spot with a song sample from Fab 5 Freddy and Beside'southward "Modify the Beat," which features a distorted version of someone saying the phrase, "Ahhh, this stuff is really fresh." But as the WhoSampled database has expanded out of its hip-hop roots to embrace other genres over the last few years, the Amen Interruption has taken the clear lead due to its versatility. Artists who have used the interruption include early hip-hop acts such every bit N.W.A., electronic music pioneers The Prodigy, the heavy metal band Slipknot, Janet Jackson — even David Bowie.

According to early hip-hop producer Louis "BreakBeat Lou" Flores, DJ fable Afrika Bambaataa was the 1 who first broke out the "Amen Pause." It was in the late-1970s, and DJ culture had simply gotten a fingerhold in New York City. The kickoff MCs — impresarios such as Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash and Bambaataa himself — had started spinning their favorite tracks at clubs and parties, inspiring their young followers with a treasure trove of danceable beats. These MCs were already highly competitive with one another; they hoarded their favorite albums and masked the identity of their favorite tracks (much easier to do in the pre-Shazam days).

That competition was taken to another level after the NYC blackout of 1977. The ofttimes-told story goes that widespread annexation of electronic shops led to a proliferation of otherwise prohibitively expensive turntables and other audio equipment into poorer neighborhoods in the Bronx and Brooklyn; equally a upshot, the number of DJs multiplied overnight.

MCs looking for an border had to dig even deeper into the archives of stone, funk and Motown records that supplied their beats. Flores, who MC'd with Bambaataa, said that Bambaataa had establish the track "Amen, Blood brother" on the B-side of a in one case-pop 1969 soul record past The Winstons, and kept it in his surreptitious stash. (Attempts to reach Bambaataa, who has recently been accused of having committed sexual abuse in the 1980s, through his lawyer were unsuccessful.) The whole song was eminently danceable, only the political party really got going during that six-second drum break a minute and a half into the runway. Flores said Bambaataa would tiresome the intermission down — going from a 45 rpm to 33⅓ rpm — and play information technology once again and again equally B-Boys (or "break boys") tore it upwardly on the trip the light fantastic floor.

In 1981, Flores, merely 15 years old at the time, and his business partner, Lenny Roberts, decided to show off the variety of early hip-hop influences by collecting their favorite songs into one record, and in doing and then revealed Bambaataa'south surreptitious. In addition to "Do the Funky Penguin" by Rufus Thomas and "Mary, Mary" by The Monkees, their record "Ultimate Breaks & Beats" included "Amen, Brother" — with the slowed-down version of the Amen Break.

Flores said that at get-go "Ultimate Breaks & Beats" sold modestly — mainly to club DJs — simply in 1984 a new recording applied science chosen a sampler made it possible to layer music samples throughout songs. A sampler was basically a fancy record recorder that immune anyone to record a sound and play it over again and again at different pitches at the bear on of a push. All of a sudden, musicians of all stripes started hunting downward their favorite breaks, and "Ultimate Breaks and Beats" became a hot seller once again. Past 1986, in that location was enough demand to re-release the anthology, the beginning in a series of 25 volumes of "Ultimate Breaks & Beats" that Flores would produce.

Number of songs that sample 'Amen, Brother' past genre

GENRE	NO. OF SONGS SAMPLING 'AMEN, Blood brother'
Electronic/dance	1,984
Hip-hop/R&B	127
Rock/pop	57
Soundtrack	44
Other	xx

By the early 1990s, the Amen Break wasn't just being used by acts such as Rob Base of operations and Heavy D, it had get one of the foundational beats of an entirely new electronic trip the light fantastic toe music genre: jungle. Jungle artists often sped up the break, sliced information technology up into individual pulsate hits, rearranged it, and played it for minutes at a time while layering techno, reggae and a melting pot of other sounds on top of information technology. Considering the Amen Break is a curt, drums-only breakbeat, it sounds skillful at all sorts of speeds and with all sorts of alterations, making it easy to loop and quite adaptable to all sorts of genres. "Y'all can whack basically any sample, loop, synth or bassline over information technology, and it'll audio 'good,'" said Yoël Bego by email. Bego creates all sorts of electronic dance music under the DJ name Coco Bryce and used the break in his new rails "Massiv." Fifty-fifty after Jungle's popularity started to ebb before 2000, the Amen Break kept the shell.

But in that location are lots of drums-just, hands alterable breakbeats out there that could piece of work; what makes the Amen special? A lot of artists seem to think that in that location'south something special about the drumming itself; Flores calls them "big dirty drums."

"Amen has a kind of swing — a lot of grapheme," said Read, an accomplished DJ and producer himself. "At that place's a lot going on between the kicks and snares."

"There aren't many recordings that are so distorted merely still sound then good," adds Boris English, a Jungle DJ who goes by the stagename Borai and has used the Amen Break in tracks including Never As Proficient and The Seeker. "If you try and re-record the pause played exactly the same by another drummer information technology never sounds as good."

Grand.C. Coleman, The Winstons' drummer who actually played the original Amen Break, never made any coin from its popularity; he died homeless in 2006. His bandmate in The Winstons, front human being Richard Spencer, too did not benefit from the widespread utilize of his band's music. But in 2015, a couple of British DJs launch a GoFundMe drive asking people who take benefited from the Amen Break to give back. Two versions of the bulldoze have now netted Spencer almost $33,000.

Once you have the distinctive beat of the Amen Break in your head, you lot tin hear it in all sorts of places: It's cropped up in the "Futurama" theme vocal, on the championship screen of "The Powerpuff Girls," on "SimCity iv," even in Jeep ads. While some of its latent popularity is likely due to nostalgia — or perhaps even a result of an industrywide in-joke a la the Wilhelm scream — Read thinks that it's at present simply become a standard get-to in many studios. "A lot of producers use it without having known they used it," he said.

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Source: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-most-sampled-song-of-all-time/

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