I managed to miss the first anniversary of my own blag! Well, there’s no celebration like a belated celebration, so let’s lay down some drum beats and groove to the funky sound of scholarly activism. A few of the lyrics in the songs sampled in this video are less than safe for work:
Here’s to another year of missing the important stuff.
Congratulations!
Interesting video, but the Winstons were out of D.C., where they’d say “Amen” with a long “a” sound. Every time this guy says “ahh-men”, I die a little inside.
More seriously, he’s at least oversimplifying when he talks about jungle’s use of the break. When you take it completely apart into individual hits, it loses its identity as a memetic unit. If what he says is taken at face value, every drum fill composed of bass, snare, hi-hat, and crash cymbals is just a reworking of this one break. No, there’s got to be some restriction on how the pieces are reassembled for it to count as a use of the break. I’m sure that there’s an emergent grammar to how the break is “properly” and “improperly” used.
That all said, the Amen Break needs to be mixed with the Wilhelm Scream.
Congratulations! Fortunately, this is one of those anniversaries which you won’t get in hot water for forgetting!
Thanks, everybody!
To my ear, the jungle samples used in the video incorporated the “amen break” more or less faithfully. Of course, they may represent the more pristine examples of the sample in the genre.
Congratulations!
Blake: that’s sorta my point. The narrator talks about cutting up into each individual hit, but in practice that’s not what happens. The truth is a bit subtler.
Truth often is.
Darn you, Truth!!!!1!