musiciamfondof: Amen Brother - The Winstons ...

Monday, April 23, 2012

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Amen Brother - The Winstons

The majority of this song is a pretty ordinary funk groove, with a talented group of musicians playing a pretty standard song that, while sounding really good, doesn’t really do anything you haven’t heard before. But then, about a minute and twenty seconds in, it happens. All of the sudden, all of the instruments except the drums stop, and the drummer starts doing this crazy beat that you swear you’ve heard before. But you haven’t heard this song before, had you?

Turns out that’s the Amen Break, maybe the most-sampled recording of all time. This simple drumbeat turned to be so exploitable, so mathematically on-beat and easy to speed up and sound different, that it formed the basis for a lot of different kinds of music, from early rap to drum-and-bass to the PowerPuff Girls’ theme song. It’s become an incredibly recognizable part of cultural history, the kind of thing you’ve heard a million times but haven’t really recognized.

If you’re interested any more in the Amen Break, this video explains it a lot better than I could.