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Amen: the world's most famous sample and the rise of the musical copyright

234 points| mgeraci | 14 years ago |youtube.com | reply

56 comments

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[+] p_monk|14 years ago|reply
The "Amen Brother" drum break is far from the most sampled or most famous drum break in history. Check out a list of more heavily sampled breaks here: http://the-breaks.com/stats.php

The above list is far from complete, obviously. If I had to put my money on it, id say the most sampled drum break is "Impeach The President" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqbEsS5kFb8

[+] jamesbritt|14 years ago|reply
How does this site decide what to check for the use of a sample? We're at the point where sampling is so easy, so ubiquitous, that counting usage is impossible without some arbitrary selection criteria (e.g. "I've heard of it", or, "The people who compile <some chart> have heard of it").
[+] jinushaun|14 years ago|reply
That's why drum and bass all sounds the same to me.

Reggaeton also has a similar situation, where everyone uses the exact same beat for the rhythm. It's called the "Dem Bow" beat.

[+] cdavid|14 years ago|reply
Most of the interesting stuff did not use the amen break, or used it originally. It is true that a lot of DnB and Jungle was awful and repetitive, but that's the case in most electronic genres. OTOH, timeless (Goldie), Modus Operandi (Photek), New Forms (Roni Size) were going beyond the cliches while staing in the genre in the mid-nineties. And then you have the really good stuff like squarepusher (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yA8MRphI8w), the early Amon Tobin (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj_IjGVWtVY) or Spring Jeel hack (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Di6Mrr6yuF0&feature=relat...).

A lot of hip hop originally used the funky drummer beat as well, but it has ceased to define the genre a very long time ago.

[+] dave1010uk|14 years ago|reply
If you haven't seen it, Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music [1] is an interesting source of how different electronic music genres evolved and are influenced. It contains example samples of many tracks and I've found whole sub-generes of electronic music that I never knew existed.

[1] http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/ (warning: autoplaying sound)

[+] Figs|14 years ago|reply
Interesting video. I wish the narrator didn't sound so robotic though.
[+] sixtofour|14 years ago|reply
I thought that was one of the best aspects of the video.
[+] biot|14 years ago|reply
He could give the "Alex" text to speech voice from OS X a run for its money.
[+] fedd|14 years ago|reply
i found the presented samples different from the original.

it would be better if the drum lines from different songs were showed as notes, or i can't believe that they are derived.

i think it's a stretch to make a beautiful statement, that somebody invented some loop in 60-s. i even thought the author wants to tell that if i wrote a little break bit myself, i used that amen sample (just rearranged and manipulated in any number ways). but i didn't i swear. never heard of this before today.

[+] quinndupont|14 years ago|reply
Weirdly melodic and somber, but interesting video nonetheless.
[+] code_duck|14 years ago|reply
Strange, I just happened upon this for the first time 3 days ago seemingly at random.
[+] pash|14 years ago|reply
Glossed over in the video, and in the discussion here so far, is that even when a court rules a derivative work to infringe a copyright, there's no need to obtain a license so long as the derivative work is "creative enough" to qualify as fair use under US copyright law (and similarly in many other jurisdictions). So while it's true that the Sixth Circuit ruled in 2005 [1] that unlicensed samples of any duration constitute copyright infringement, what's left unsaid is that samples still may be used without bothering about licenses so long as they're used as part of a sufficiently creative new song.

But what's "creative enough"? Ah, there's the rub.

The real story here is how copyright owners are able to abuse a quirk of the law in order to strong-arm musicians into paying licensing fees, even when everybody knows full well there's probably no legal obligation to pay them. "Sample trolls" exist precisely because fair use is only a defense to litigation, which means it can only be invoked in the course of a lawsuit. So there's no sure way to know whether you need to license your use of a sample until you get sued, you claim fair use, and a judge tells you whether you should have (past tense) bought a license or not. It's much cheaper, of course, just to pay for a license up front and be done with it.

Unfortunately, its hard to imagine a way to resolve this conundrum if copyright holders are still to be granted monopolies over derivative works [2]. Consider the canonical law-school example of a derivative work, Marcel Duchamp's goteed Mona Lisa (LHOOQ) [3]. If Leonardo had been around to defend his copyright, would Marcel have been able successfully to invoke the fair-use defense? It all depends on how creative the judge thinks it is to give old Lisa a mustache. Reasonable judges may disagree.

And then consider Andy Warhol's colorful posterized Mona Lisa silkscreens, or Kazimir Malevich's collage-cum-painting Composition with Mona Lisa, which incorporates a small copy of Leonardo's painting. Even if you thought Marcel's work was a blatant rip-off, you might think Andy's or Kazimir's is fair use. (Then there's Salvador Dali's Self Portrait as Mona Lisa.) Point is, it's impossible to draw a bright line on fair use, even for a particular work.

But that's not to say there's no bright line anywhere. When it comes to recorded music, one such line is whether a work actually incorporates a copy of the recording. If it's not a sample, but a new recording that happens to sound the same, there's no issue. (A ruling that duplicating any portion of a musical composition constitutes infringement is nigh unimaginable.) So just go record your own version of the beat you want to use and there's no issue.

1: See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeport_Music,_Inc._v._Dimen... ; a good write-up on the case is at http://www.ivanhoffman.com/fairusemusic.html .

2: And maybe they shouldn't be. But then the debate would probably turn back to what constitutes a derivative work.

3: This and other riffs on the Mona Lisa are shown at http://www.aiwaz.net/gallery/mona-lisa-as-modern-lisa/gc234 .

By the way, for those of you who doubt the ubiquity and permutivity of the Amen Break in today's hip-hop, here are a few tracks I picked out in a quick once-over of two albums by The Roots. From almost-a-sample to you-gotta-be-paying-attention, these all use the Amen Break:

- "Rolling with Heat" (slowed down, but otherwise almost unchanged)

- "Thought @ Work" (syncopated by dropping a beat)

- "Duck Down!" (very slow, syncopated)

- "I Don't Care" (syncopated)

- "Web" (very syncopated)

- "Boom!" (very syncopated)

If you can hear the signature "bum bum BAH, buh-DUM buh-DUM" in those last few, you can see why people call it the most ubiquitous break. It truly is all over the place, albeit often in heavily manipulated form.

[+] J3L2404|14 years ago|reply
"Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it. Culture is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, like nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new. Culture like science and technology grows by accretion. Each new creator building on the works before. Overprotecting stifles the very forces it is supposed to nurture."
[+] jannes|14 years ago|reply
I, too, found this quote very remarkable. But it left me wondering.

Can anybody tell me where the harm in underprotecting "intellectual property" comes from? This is an honest question. I don't understand it. Maybe it's because I'm too young and don't depend on "intellectual property" protection yet. I don't understand where this idea comes from that ideas can be owned by anyone.

What if the limit of copying would become what's copyable and not what is allowed to be copied? Wouldn't that accellerate innovation? Isn't innovation more valuable to a society than anything else? Why do we put a tax on it?

[+] thepumpkin1979|14 years ago|reply
This is an interesting video, but how does this has anything to do with Startups, Technology, Development, UX or Tech Business... This is the why I think HN is becoming another Reddit. It's a shame...
[+] danilocampos|14 years ago|reply
Anyone who works in technology is going to have to deal with intellectual property, as well as the laws/attitudes around the same.

Moreover, music is an essential component of culture, which means comprehension of music, or at least its recombinant nature, may improve your chances of creating a consumer product people love.

edit: And come on, you've been around long enough to have read the FAQ:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

(my emphasis)

This passes by any measure. Being well-rounded is a good idea. I love seeing content like this way more than the insipid, obvious, naval-gazing, circlejerking blog nonsense that often passes for worthwhile reading just because the author mentions "funding" or "startups" or anything else in vogue n times before the post finishes.

[+] jmtame|14 years ago|reply
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[+] icarus_drowning|14 years ago|reply
Interesting link. Certainly related to the rise of alternative copyright models, which are certainly related to technology and startups. Obviously relevant and valid HN link.
[+] thepumpkin1979|14 years ago|reply
Starting minute 11:00 and specifically 14:30 the narrator actually starts talking about Copyright and the video becomes interesting... so yes, this is actually about Copyright and licensing.
[+] tiles|14 years ago|reply
The end of the video discusses how a "society free to build upon the past" is able to create new forms of expression from old ideas. As opposed to articles condemning software patents and IP trolls, this video explores the benefits of unencumbered reuse of earlier work.
[+] michael_dorfman|14 years ago|reply
I see that you've just passed your one-year anniversary here, so I guess you are now officially entitled to complain that HN is turning into Reddit, but I think that this video is actually an exploration of an interesting hack.