(the amen break is one of the most commonly-sampled drum breaks in popular music: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen_break)
>Coleman died homeless and destitute in 2006. It was unlikely he was aware of the impact he had made on music. Neither he [band leader Spencer] nor Coleman received royalties for the break.
While I’m certain they didn’t receive royalties from all artists, I heard many 80s artists did. And Amen Brothers took others to court. So they would have know about the use of the break.
I will admit I haven’t done any independent research into this matter personally. Just echoing accounts I’ve read and taking their reports at face value.
Who is "Amen Brothers"?
I didn’t say I knew they went to court. I just said I thought I read about it.
Looking into it again now, all I can find is a 10+ year old article about a crowd fund (eg https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-34785551). So I’m likely misremembering what I read previously.
> when they don't know the name of the band.
I just got the name of the band muddled with the name of the song. I also sometimes get get the names of my friends and loved ones muddled. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know them either. I’m just shit with names.
I do however remember every useless number I learned as a child. Including phone numbers to kids TV shows. Human memory is weird :-/
Now, the connotation is different: saying "our X will be judged by.." spreads the responsibility among everyone and makes it too easy to shift the blame onto the next guy, while saying "your X will be judged by.." stresses on your personal contribution to the X, making it not that easy to shy away.
In your case, you seemed to be representing the common idea of a different culture, ie 'my society thought your society was this or that', eg 'Muslims think western societies to be greedy and unkind'.
Do you really think of yourself as one of many? If so, which type do you identify as? And then, do you think you are personally responsible for the actions of others of your type?
I personally think the general usage of a general collective pronouns to be inevitably misleading, but has the benefit of allowing one's preferred poor and unsubstantiated beliefs to be stated as indisputable fact.
We upvote comments that completely miss the point of how this algorithm works. We upvote comments that claim the algorithm does nothing at all. We downvote comments about how the creator of the original drum break died destitute.
The other famous drum sample - the "Funky Drummer" as drummed by Clyde Stubblefield for James Brown, Stubblefield didn't think the particular drum pattern he used was particularly noteworthy. In that case, James Brown's production choices were actually more key - his signature sound revolved around really crisp drums that he insisted needed to be clear on AM Radio and Jukeboxes. Which is what made it so useful for sampling.
The track you've mentioned is the prime example of the blend of those two genres. Before the term Eurodance caught on, this track would be referred to as hip-house (as in hip-hop + house). Chicago and the broader NY area did it first, but it was a Belgian track that first topped the US charts (Technotronic's Pump Up The Jam).
So any artist could sample something, do some paperwork, and send of a fraction of royalties. Rather than the current system where you need explicit permission from the recording artist and have no recourse if they say no.
So many music genres exist because of sampling, and the shit legal precedents set in recent decades ruined an amazing thing.
For example, if the sample's small enough to not be recognisable by algorithms, they often end up on Soundcloud with a free download via Hypeddit. Some even get away with charging money for their track with non-cleared samples via Bandcamp. Because those types of bedroom producers are almost always clueless about copyright, they often cite fair use in the description and choose a Creative Commons licence, which is not how anything works. Even some B-list celebrities that damn well know what they're doing still decide to do that when they fail to clear a sample. Soundcloud would be completely irrelevant if they did a good-enough job at enforcing copyright, so they do the bare minimum labels require of them to keep running, but that definitely kills their odds of ever competing with the likes of Spotify.
Then there's a whole "gray area" of online record pools where the audio preview and download links are hidden behind a $25/month or so paywall, so record labels can't scan it directly to even know about the infringement. Usually just listing the names of available tracks in HTML is enough to get them de-indexed from Google, but they rely on word-of-mouth anyway.
And, of course, even if all of that were to stop, you can never prevent a bunch of DJs and producers DMing each other tracks, hottest of which always end up getting shared too widely at some point and uploaded to Soulseek or something.
Meanwhile, streaming services are being flooded by unethically-trained, AI-generated music, which is actually incredibly easy to detect if streaming services actually gave enough of a fuck to do so. There is one that gives a fuck rather publicly (Deezer) and according to them, it's ~34% of everything uploaded as of a few months ago, may have passed 40% as of now.
I’m a big fan of the KLF (Kopyright Liberation Front) and when the artist says “no”, I’m always reminded of this funny, surreal story about the KLF physically destroying their music: http://klf.de/home/the-abba-incident/
What a wasted chance to say "Belgian techno anthem"!
It could just be its cultural weight has me hypnotized. But maybe its just that good
My take is, it was the first of its kind to widely circulate exhibiting desirable quantities for sampling, a combination of good enough and path dependency. After a certain level of saturation/entrenchment it carried an aesthetic compared to readily available samples (maybe this is what you meant).
Whenever I couldn’t find a breakbeat sample (or wanted some starting point at least) I’d default to it. When I did music production it was very easy to get your hands on a loop but obviously that’s much later.
[0] GFL finding anything in YouTube history / search these days hence no link. Wasn't from Synthet, I don't think.
Good grief, I thought it might be that video but somehow completely blanked on it when I double-checked and decided it wasn't. Thanks for actually checking usefully!
(Synthet videos are almost always worth a watch even if you can't remember them a couple of weeks later. Old age, innit.)
great deep dive into the Amen break. this video is from the yt days of yore, nice to see the yt algo still propping it up.