If you’re thinking you’ve heard this one before, all we can say is “Amen Brother.”
It’s a story older than you might imagine. It begins way back in 1969, when a Funk and Soul band named The Winstons releases a single called “Color Him Father” which becomes one of the top 100 hits of the year and wins a Grammy. But it’s the other side of the single which is destined for greatness. The song on that B-side is called “Amen Brother.” It’s nothing special, but right smack in the middle there’s a drum break of about 6 seconds by one G. C. Coleman that…well, we’ve gotten ahead of ourselves…
Jump forward to the late eighties. In the poorer neighborhoods of America’s inner cities, a new form of music is developing called Hip Hop. Hugely rhythmic, Hip Hop is defined by two new “instruments”: the turntable, which is played by scratching records backwards and forwards, and a digital recording device called a sampler, which can capture small sections of existing music so they could be rearranged and played back in new and interesting ways. Hungry for samples, Hip Hop artists comb through the Soul catalog of the 60’s, and come upon the 6-second drum break from Amen Brother. They record it, they sample it, they play it and the crowd loves it. It becomes known as the “Amen Break” and soon it’s a staple of Hip Hop culture. In 1988, the Amen Break (looped over and over) crashes into the national consciousness as the rhythm track of NWA’s classic “Straight Outta Compton.”
The thumping is heard clear to England. In London in the early 90’s, music producers take sampling and digital manipulation to extremes. They deconstruct the Amen Break into its individual drum hits (snare, hi-hat, bass and crash) and rearrange the pieces to create new rhythms and new musical styles like Techno, Ragga-Jungle and Drum-and-Bass. Totally cool, totally danceable. But the music soon becomes progressively derivative, self-involved, and just plain strange. As a result, the rave comes to an end, but not before the Amen Break has been recycled so many times it has been literally embedded into thousands of recordings.
Many of which end up in the house catalog of numerous commercial music production companies. As the new millennium dawns, bits and pieces of those recordings are used to create new soundtracks for Hollywood and Madison Avenue. The Amen Break is used to sell everything from Jeeps to Levis to Nexium.
And today, when your 4-year-old daughter turns on Cartoon Network to watch Powerpuff Girls, that sound driving the theme song is G. C. Coleman’s 6-second drum break from 1969.
You have definitely heard it before, and you can hear it again. Because, amen, there is an online database. www.amenbreakdb.com
the quick Sliver 