Difference and Repetition: Genealogy of a Drum Break
The Winstons’s Amen Brother drum break (along with James Brown’s Funky Drummer) is one of the most sampled in contemporary musical history, almost single-handedly (now that would be amazing…) giving rise to an entire drum and
bass genre after fuelling hip hop only a short musical generation before.
The funk drum break was a crucial point in any funky track in the late 60’s /early 70’s; back in the 50’s Art Blakey had given the drums a new prominence in jazz with his fiery, noisy solos setting new precedence for the drum kit (or traps, itself a relatively recent invention partly due to the rise of radio in the early 20th C and the need for the drummer to be able to play various sound effects as well as various drums - previously there was a drummer to play the bass drum, another to play the snare or a separate percussionist to play cymbals etc).
James Brown’s mid-60’s shift in R&B from the 1 & 3 to the 2 and 4 beat gave birth to a new rhythm - funk - that was a
sexy shuffle (on the good foot) between the straight rock and R&B/soul rhythms of the day. Simultaneously propulsive yet cycling internally, with the added syncopation of ghost/off snare and kick beats between the main counts it seemed to summon up a pre-orgasmic vertigo of endless repetition and relentless forward movement, more in common with Chinese/Taoist sexual practice than the Occidental obsession with climax, the end of desire (an abstract sex machine, as Deleuze and Guattari might have termed it if they had seen James Brown play in Paris in 1971 - between Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus - where a woman from the audience climbed on stage and stripped mid-performance).
Funky Drummer was a culmination of this rhythm, and of the breakbeat. The song seems to be improvised on the spot to fill space on a record or use up studio time, little more than that beat, when James counts down the band to sit out that break, and drummer Clyde Stubblefield just keeps on doing his thang, only more so, little knowing that future generations of samplists were waiting in the wings of history.
The essence of African-American art in the 20th C it has been claimed by Alice Walker, is that it seem relaxed, casual, and sweat-free in order to bely its complexity and distance it from work and the history of slavery; in a word - cool. Tap dance and jazz improvisation epitomised this sensibility which persists right up to Micheal Jackson and Prince, who seemed to glide on a super-human plane while they performed, and a strain of rap’s “I don’t even need to try to be cooler than you and get paid milions of dollars”.
But like Fred Astaire’s skeletal elegance Vs. Gene Kelly’s muscular athleticism (film-musical dancing a mutation of jazz/tap and Irish traditional dance, whose frantic leg-work with a stiff waist and upper torso implied a sublimation of Catholicism-repressed sexuality; frigid rather than cool), the sweaty, thrusting, hard-working side of funk was the flip-side of cool, and James Brown was “The Hardest-Working Man In Showbusiness”, the grunting, sweating sexual alternative to Motown’s sweet, elegant, high-pitched R&B love-pop.
The Funky Drummer break combined both of these strains - not breaking a sweat while working it - in spades, and like any great drummer, Clyde was able to make every shuffling ghost snare and off-kick subtly, almost musically, different in pitch and timbre so that within the four beats - count 'em, that’s all it is, over and over - was a dizzying sensation of rhythmic and sonic variation within a rigid structure, the syncopation fast enough to be just beyond the comprehending brain like a carrot on a stick that keeps the feet dancing and the head nodding while the brain is occupied. Ain’t it funky, now?
Amen Brother did something very similar, with just a few more variations on the shuffle-funk theme, but it was the specifics of the recording, the reverberation of the kick drum and compressed hiss of the ride cymbal, that created more low-end ambience and high-end excitation; the drum equivalent of guitar distortion or Hammond organ Leslie speaker swell.
As appropriated by NWA’s Straight Outta Compton, Mantronix’s King Of The Beats, and Jeep Beat Collective’s Mantronix/Amen-sampling Stop Ya Skemes, the break is classic-but-standard, but the high-end layer of cymbal noise generates that extra tension perfect for thug hop or dancefloor frenzy.
The other crucial difference not apparent in these traditional 4-bar sampled versions is where the original break continues with seismic pauses as the drummer stresses the occasional beat and leaves out the occasional played beat, which seem to (but don’t) leave out a count and create an unexpected temporary black hole or pressure drop on an off-beat - something it shares with Al Green’s I’m Glad You’re Mine intro breakbeat, which proved perfect for Massive Attack’s dub reggae Five Man Army workout on Blue Lines and was all over Timbaland’s earlier reggae-influenced rhythms.
And reggae seems to be the key to the Amen Brother break’s ascendancy to the throne of the drum and bass breakbeat science kingdom. Reggae and dancehall culture were writ large all over early jungle’s ‘Smokin’ Joints’, all frenzied sped-up dancehall snare-shots and manic bad bwoy chat, so fast that the dub bassline worked at half-speed or was reduced to single 808-style boom-drops.
[B] When Amen’s off-kilter beats were - crucially - sped up, then chopped up to re-emphasize that hyper-dub loping off-rhythm and added to the mix [B] , it was like the discovery of Uranium’s critical mass as dancefloors were devastated.
Never had club music been reduced to so little - entire DJ sets could be composed of cut-up Amen breaks, bass drops and the occasional vocal sample it seemed; but that hissing, ricocheting, stuttering Amen beat seemed to sound and feel best ON ITS OWN, over and over and over - bring the beat back, indeed, to infinity, always changing, always the same.
This is a essay by Alan Murphy. I think you might find it a bit interresting
) and varying than how it may appear.
