In a time where art can be expressed in so many ways, it’s not hard to see why such a large amount of older works has been used in new ways to represent something completely different than the original.  New audio, videos, and images are created everyday, but also old audio, videos, and images are being reimagined to fit with the ever-changing landscapes of their mediums.  In music especially, there is a wealth of sampling other people’s works, but it’s not a slight on the original, but more a acknowledgement that the work is useful and fits so many roles that it was at first not intended to.  Probably none more so than the amen break.

The band The Winstons in 1969 recorded the song “Amen, Brother” as a b-side to another single of theirs, and in the song features a 6 second drum beat, or break.  Going largely unnoticed for a decade, the drum break suddenly saw a resurgence when sampling was first introduced to the music world.  Done by mainly taking an already-recorded piece of music and then being able to edit and change the music based on what you want, sampling revolutionized how music was made, and opened up thousands of possibilities to the hip-hop and techno scenes that were then just coming into being.  The amen break soon found itself appearing in hundreds of bands, from groups like N.W.A., Oasis, and Nine Inch Nails, to a multitude of underground reggae and electronic DJs, who would splice the original beat up so much that it could barely be recognized.

Now, some might call sampling lazy, or unoriginal, and others might even classify it under theft.  But I see sampling, or any form of it in music or art, as appreciation.  Those artists who used the amen break weren’t out to cheat The Winstons out of money, or to use their beat illegally, but to further their own music.  The fact that entire genres started with sampling the amen break is a testament to what kind of influential power it has.  And it’s not just the amen break, thousands of songs have been sampled and used by other artists.  Off the top of my head, Kanye West, one of the biggest artists in hip-hop, and one of my favorite artists, has used King Crimson samples in his song “Power“, and Daft Punk samples in “Stronger.”  Vanilla Ice, sampled David Bowie and Queen’s song “Under Pressure” for his song “Ice Ice Baby.”  DJ Shadow’s album Endtroducing….. is made up entire of sampled works; hundreds of cut up bits of music put together to make something just as incredible as the original music.

Sampling in itself is fine, but there is a fine line between it and blatant plagiarism.  This line is blurry, and can be easily overstepped by something as simple as using too much of another song as a sample or not crediting it in the liner notes.  Sadly in the present day it’s harder to sample music, due to increased legal problems and ownership laws; which is good for lawyers and music company CEOs, but not for the other musicians who could be making just as good music from sampling as the original artist did.  Containing and limiting the availability of music can only cause constraints to new artists and genre-specific musicians, who rely on samples to make their music.  There’s such a focus on money and what’s your’s isn’t anyone else’s today, that something like Endtroducing….. probably couldn’t even be made in the current time.  That silencing is scary, and I hope that as we move forward that the industry will realize that the stifling of creative expression will only hurt them in the long run.