And here’s the full song — contains much explicit language.

The hook samples the line “Biggie Smalls is the illest” from “The What” on the same album. It’s twenty-three seconds in.

Sampling is a severely underappreciated songwriting tool. Even if you have moral or legal issues with sampling from others, sampling from yourself is still a good idea. Biggie’s line about himself being the illest is just part of a verse in “The What.” The producer on “Unbelievable,” the great DJ Premier, was smart enough to recognize that Biggie’s line could stand on its own as a hook. DJ Premier also produced “Nas Is Like,” and built its chorus through similar means.

The word “Unbelievable” itself comes from R Kelly, sped up a little and raised in pitch to sound female. Listen at 0:58.

Sampled vocals aside, the chopped-up keyboard part is the most musically sophisticated aspect of the track. Its original source is “Remind Me” by Patrice Rushen — I’m pretty sure it comes from the end of the solo section around 4:10.

Premier chopped up this little keyboard phrase and resequenced it beyond recognition. The result is a hip angularity that a normal keyboard player would probably not have arrived at organically.

The beat in “Unbelievable” is an old standby, “Impeach The President.”

The string ambiance in the background comes from the very odd Quincy Jones song “Kitty With The Bent Frame.” Listen at 1:08.

Quincy’s record is a favorite for hip-hop producers looking for an uneasy mood.

Here’s a diagram showing the sample genealogy of “Unbelievable.”

The meaning of self-sampling

Like I said above, self-sampling is so interesting to me because it’s recursive, self-referential. Most of the music we like is full of self-reference, and generally, the more self-referential it is, the more structured and meaningful it feels. Even simple-seeming nursery rhymes can be recursive and self-similar. Here’s a visualization by Lee Byron showing self-similarity in the nursery rhyme “Hickory Dickory Dock.”

Self-similarity makes for compelling visual art, too. One reason we find nature attractive is its rich fractal self-similarity. Here’s a leaf I photographed in my neighborhood; notice how the same veiny structure repeats itself at different size scales:

Even very simple recursive mathematical equations can produce stunningly complex, biological-looking forms, like the classic fractal known as the Mandelbrot set.

Recursion isn’t just attractive. It’s fundamental to computer science — self-reference is a key programming technique. Recursion may be essential to the very nature of consciousness itself. Some neuroscientists think that your entire sense of self emerges out of recursive self-referential loops as your brain represents different parts of itself to itself.

No wonder recursive music is so fascinating. Keep on sampling yourselves, musicians; let’s see what other recursive truths we can uncover.

Here’s “Amen, Brother.” The famous drum break comes at 1:27.

“Amen, Brother” is an uptempo adaptation of “Amen” by Jester Hairston, written for the movie Lilies of the Field, and made famous by The Impressions (with Curtis Mayfield, before he went solo.)

“Amen, Brother” didn’t get much attention until crate-digging hip-hop producers started sampling the drum break in the 1980s. Breakbeat Lenny included it in the first volume of Ultimate Breaks and Beats. Since then, the break has become ubiquitous not just in hip-hop, but in every style of dance music. It almost single-handedly spawned entire genres of electronica, particularly especially drum ‘n’ bass and its various offshoots. The Amen shows up in rock and pop songs ranging from Oasis to Nine Inch Nails. It’s in TV theme songs and commercials. Casual music listeners have probably heard it in dozens if not hundreds of recordings. Here’s a family tree showing the most noteworthy usages.

As is so often the case in sample history, GC Coleman never got a dime from any of these uses beyond his union scale for the original recording session. He died in 2006, so there’s not much we can do for him now, but I think he at least deserves some recognition.

Inside the break

Here’s the Amen break, looped four times:

Amen break by ethanhein

Wikipedia has handy drum notation and drum machine tablature for the break.

Here’s how the break looks in the sampling program Recycle:

Each blue spiky blob is a drum hit. The vertical lines are slices I added using Recycle. Once you’ve sliced up the loop, you can play the slices back in any order and any combination using a MIDI keyboard or drum pads. You can generate an infinite variety of new loops this way.

Two documentaries on the Amen break

The usual reference for the Amen break is this twenty-minute video by Nate Harrison.

Here’s an hour-long podcast on the break by Crissy Criss:

Noteworthy Amen break samples

I’m not attempting anything resembling completeness here; these are just tracks I like or find interesting. Starting in the eighties with the old skool, here’s “King Of The Beats” by Mantronix.

In “I Desire,” Salt N Pepa mixes the Amen with drums from Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” and the synth line from “Daisy Lady” by 7th Wonder.

Maybe the best-known hip-hop usage of the Amen is NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton” (very, very NSFW.)

The break appears in pitched-down form at the very beginning of “Informer” by Snow. What the heck is he saying in the chorus, anyway?

As I said above, the Amen is most closely associated with drum ‘n’ bass, for example “The Angels Fell” by Dillinja.

Luke Vibert did an album under the pseudonym Amen Andrews where just about every song uses a variation on the Amen break.

An artsier take on the Amen: “Girl/Boy” by Aphex Twin.

Even artsier: Amon Tobin’s “Nightlife.”

David Bowie uses the Amen for his foray into the world of drum ‘n’ bass, “Little Wonder.” It’s not one of his strongest tunes but he gets huge points for trying.

The most current hip-hop song I could find that uses the Amen is Lupe Fiasco’s “Streets On Fire.”

Many, many more examples can be found on the Amen Break Database and Whosampled.com.

The Amen break on TV

As the Nate Harrison documentary points out, the Amen pops up in quite a few TV commercials. It’s made its way into some theme songs, too, most notably the one from Futurama:

The Amen also shows up in the Powerpuff Girls theme song.

Do you still think that sampling is stealing? I don’t mean monetarily, I mean artistically. Do you think that there’s something unoriginal in all these uses of the Amen break? Do you think that the way Aphex Twin or Lupe Fiasco recontextualizes the break is somehow a lesser creative act than getting out a drum kit and playing something? You can probably guess where I stand.

Why is the Amen break so magical?

Producers talk about how funky and passionate the Amen is, how compressed and dirty the drum sounds are, how much hip syncopation it uses in its second half. But what if there’s a mathematical explanation for the break’s popularity? Michael Schneider has a theory that the Amen Break sounds so good because it’s structured around the golden ratio.

Is there anything to this theory? You be the judge.

Try it yourself

Here’s my mashup of many of the above tracks, with heavy processing of the Amen break in Recycle and Reason.

Amen Brother megamix by ethanhein

If you want to play too, the internet is full of resequenced and reshuffled variations on the Amen break available for your downloading pleasure. Here are a hundred fifty Amen loops. Here’s another forty and yet another twenty. Stick them in your favorite audio editor and have fun!

This is exactly the kind of golden age hip-hop song I love, a party-friendly beat and lyrics delivered with enough pissed off attitude to give it some bite. Dres and Mista Lawnge, I salute you.

The samples are particularly awesome. The upright bass loop comes from McCoy Tyner’s version of John Coltrane’s “Impressions” – it’s at 3:03 in the track.

It’s appropriate that Black Sheep should have wanted to sample “Impressions” because it too is based on samples, the analog kind. Coltrane borrowed his melody from a Morton Gould composition called “Pavane” and his chord progression from “So What” by Miles Davis.

The beat and accompanying guitar twang in “The Choice Is Yours” come from “Humpin’” by The Bar-Kays. The sample is right at the beginning.

“Big Sur Suite” by Johnny Hammond Smith supplies the organ lick, listen for it at the fifteen second mark.

(Tons of other people have sampled this track, including Dr Dre, Gang Starr, the Beastie Boys, DJ Krush, and, um, Insane Clown Posse.)

The most unexpected sample Black Sheep pulls out is the scratchy guitar hook. It comes from “Her Favorite Style” by Iron Butterfly, of all people. Iron Butterfly! Who knew they even had any songs aside from “In A Gadda Da Vida?” That’s some big-eared listening.

Finally, the James Brown-like grunt and “come on” is Sweet Linda Divine in her song “I’ll Say It Again” – listen at 1:52.

Talk about a track being greater than the sum of its parts. If handed all of these records, I’d enjoy some of them, be indifferent to others, and I very much doubt I’d come up with anything so devastatingly tight and seamless as “The Choice Is Yours.”

It seems like there would be a lot of songs that would sample this one, but I only turned a few from casual web searching:

• Fatman Scoop includes the “Engine engine number nine” part in his tune “Be Faithful.”
• Fatboy Slim quotes the chorus in “Weapon of Choice” ft Bootsy Collins.
• Dres does a verse over a sample of “The Choice Is Yours” on “Where Are They Now” by Nas.

There have to be others, right? Let me know in the comments. Doo-dah dipity.

At various points in my quest, I thought I had identified some truly authentic musical forms and styles. Here they are, more or less in order of my embracing them.

Sixties Motown

When I was growing up, my mom and stepfather had the Big Chill soundtrack in heavy rotation. You could equate authenticity with soul, and there’s plenty of soul here.

In the eighties, my parents’ friends liked to praise the classic Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin recordings on this soundtrack as “pure,” by contrast to the music of the then-present: hip-hop, synth-heavy pop, Michael Jackson. I dutifully accepted this formulation, even though my ears told me to like the eighties stuff as much as the sixties stuff. I can’t argue with the musical qualities of the Big Chill tracks. The singing is full of emotional truth-telling. That said, the arrangements sound cynical and commercial to my ears now. All those strings weren’t exactly sticking it sonically to the man. The slickness of Motown drove me to eventually seek out…

Delta blues

Raw, intense, minimalist, tied to a specific time and place: this is as good a definition of musical authenticity as you could ask for. The fact that it’s being made by oppressed people is even better. I embody the cliched story of the white hipster going back through the Stones and Zeppelin and hearing all the music they were inspired by/stole from.

The blues is a powerful and truth-telling musical form. But my desire to participate in it quickly became a problem. Blues might have been authentic for Howlin’ Wolf, but for me, it’s an awkward fit. It’s not for lack of trying; I play the best white blues harmonica of anyone I know. The phrasing and microtones and general attitude have shaped my approach to every other style of music I’ve attempted. But if I was going to tell my own truth in music, I needed to find something socially a little closer to home. Jerry Garcia helpfully steered me towards…

Bluegrass

As the fans like to say, bluegrass is sung from the heart through the nose. It has all the earmarks of regional authenticity, including an apparent lack of concern with finding a wide audience.

As with blues, I ran up against some immediate cultural tourism issues when I started exploring this music. It’s easy for a New Yorker like me to condescend unintentionally, treating bluegrass as “pure” because its practitioners are supposedly unsophisticated hicks, and therefore “unspoiled.” The true story is more complicated. The bluegrass guys might be rural, but they most assuredly are not dumb. Bill Monroe conceived bluegrass partially on a commercial basis, choosing repertoire and instruments that appealed to the audiences of his time and place. Also, bluegrass requires a lot of technical skill, especially for the lead instruments like banjo and fiddle. It’s not a good genre for the casual dabbler. Besides, by the time I dug into this music I was also starting to get interested in…

Monk and Coltrane

One way to define authenticity is through exclusivity. Bluegrass excludes casual dabblers with its technical demands. But bluegrass isn’t remotely as demanding as bebop. This is part of the reason why bebop is as untainted by commercial success as any snobby hipster could wish. Hard jazz is consistently the worst-selling genre in America, year in and year out.

Monk and Coltrane don’t fit into the bebop box exactly, even though they helped define its sound. They’re good avatars of purity because of the extreme individualism of their respective sounds. Any three-second sample of either of them is instantly recognizable. Monk isn’t as impenetrable as his reputation would suggest — several of his tunes have melodies a normal person could whistle. Coltrane wrote some nicely approachable tunes too, but he gets extra authenticity points for spending his last few years playing harshly avant-garde experimental music.

I’d recommend that any musician tackle bebop if they want a rigorous education in American music generally. It’s all in there: the blues, the showtunes, the highbrow and the lowbrow, all the chords and scales and rhythms and textures our culture has to offer, at least up until the advent of electronic music. But much as I love it, bebop never really felt like home to me. I’ll continue to study Monk and Trane and their cohorts, and will continue to enjoy and be inspired by them, but if I want to express my experience in the present reality, they don’t have all the answers I need.

Klezmer

Okay, so if urban black or rural white music is an awkward fit for a New York Jew, how about the music of the tribe? Klezmer is culturally close to home for me. It straddles the shtetl and the big city, the old country and the new one, ancient folk forms and American pop.

Klezmer sometimes gets called “Jewish jazz” but a better comparison is to country. There’s the oompah-derived boom-chick beat, the harmonic minimalism, the melodic improvisation, and the emphasis on rawness and feeling over technical complexity. The scales are different — you don’t get a lot of Ahava Raba scale in country. But the comparison is close otherwise. Discovering this music was a key puzzle piece for me; I use those Arabic scales any chance I get. Klezmer’s mutt-like fusion of disparate styles is a truer statement of myself than anything that could be described as pure. Unfortunately, klezmer isn’t a great way to connect with other people aside from other NYC hipsters with Jewish ancestry, so it was never going to be my ultimate destination. But I’m glad to have gotten acquainted.

The impenetrable avant-garde

You could define authenticity as an uncompromising commitment to inner truth, the desire to please others be damned. There’s something noble and admirable in this commitment. The problem is that the furthest reaches of inner space don’t usually produce music that other people can connect to. I never enjoyed extremely experimental music, but the academic world and critical establishment hold it in high regard. As an educated highbrow type, I felt like I had to dutifully subject myself to a lot of avant-garde experiments in an effort to purge myself of my weak-minded desire for music to be fun. I guess I learned a few things about the limits of human tolerance, but mostly I learned that I really do just want to have fun. Here’s a hilarious quote from “Can Machine-Made Music Sing Without a Composer?” in New York Magazine:

[O]n February 5, the Fireworks Ensemble will perform a live version of Lou Reed’s notorious 1975 album Metal Machine Music, at Miller Theatre. Listening to Reed’s original double LP is a test of endurance. In his garment-district loft, he leaned various electric guitars against their amps so that they howled at each other in crescendoing feedback loops, and welded the tracks into deafening industrial polyphony. The result was one of the most loathed records ever to hit the market. Nevertheless, the intrepid composer Ulrich Krieger decided to arrange it for traditional instruments, an undertaking that smacks of flagellant zeal.

I like the word “flagellant.” We just can’t shake our puritan roots, can we? There’s a lingering notion that painful music has the deepest purity. I’m grateful to have rid myself of this silly idea. Deliberately annoying music seems to me now to just be another form of class competition, its flamboyant uselessness a bigger statement of materialist affectation than any crassly commercial pop.

Fake is the new real

So where has the authenticity quest ultimately led me? As a kid I loved Michael Jackson and Run-DMC to pieces, but as I got a “music education,” I felt morally obligated to reject their music for their sinful use of drum machines, synthesizers and borrowing other people’s ideas. Most especially, I felt I had to reject them for their emphasis on pleasing people above all other musical concerns. Now pleasing people seems to me to be the only good reason to make music. If “fake” and accessible sounds like synths and drum machines put bodies on the dance floor, then fake is better than real.

I’ve had an instinctive attraction to electronic music dating back to loving science fiction sound effects and scores as a kid. But my peers and educators pressured me to be suspicious and hostile towards high-tech, pop-friendly musicians like Herbie Hancock. Herbie’s acoustic piano work is acceptable to the guardians of the jazz canon, but controversy continues to roil over his embrace of the synthesizer, sequencer and the sounds on the radio.

I’m glad to have withdrawn from the battle over purity. Not everything you hear in clubs or parties is terrific, but rejecting it wholesale was getting me nowhere. Giving myself permission to enjoy pop-jazz fusion, Herbie’s seventies and eighties future sounds, hip-hop and dance music has opened up huge new continents of sonic enjoyment to me. Authenticity is about truth-telling. For a high-tech city dweller, loop-based electronic sounds are more truthful to my experience than banjos and mandolins. I’ve whole-heartedly embraced the whole bag of technological tricks: Auto-Tune, lip-synching, whatever you’ve got.

Musical authenticity is in the emotional content, not the tools used to make it. Many musicians of my acquaintance fetishize vintage gear. There’s the hope that if you play the same harmonica as Little Walter Jacobs through the same mic and the same amp, maybe some of that Little Walter Jacobs magic will rub off on you. No doubt, quality gear sounds good in the right hands. But the hands are more important than the gear. Good tools can make it easier to realize an idea, and can even spark ideas. But a lame, unpracticed or anxious harmonica player will sound lame, unpracticed or anxious no matter what. And there’s nothing inherently soulful or un-soulful about any instrument. Drum machines only sound inauthentic when they emulate human drummers. Drum machines are perfectly authentic when used for their uniquely posthuman quality. It all depends on the musician. Like Herbie Hancock says, the machine doesn’t program itself.

As of this moment, my favorite song is “Empire State Of Mind” by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys.

Is it authentic? Not really. It panders to me on many levels, as a hip-hop head, an R&B fan and a patriotic New Yorker. But Jay and Alicia pander so well, the beat is so tight, the chord progression and melody are so energizing, who cares?

The concern over purity is really about exclusivity. A mutt like me is is no position to be excluding anyone. But then, no one really is in a position to be excluding anyone. The shocking truth of biological evolution is that if you go back far enough, we’re all cousins with each other, and if you go back further, we’re cousins with bats, bananas, and bacteria. I believe strongly that the rules of evolution apply to music too. Our music all descends from the same monkey calls, so who’s in a position to be disputing the musical methods of anyone else? You don’t have to like everything, but disliking something is no reason to call its basic validity into question.

There’s a cool scene in the TV Movie “The Jacksons – An American Dream” showing Michael in the studio recording “Human Nature.” It’s at around 6:58 and unfortunately the sound isn’t lined up too closely.

Here’s a cool fan video:

SWV samples “Human Nature” for their song “Right Here (Human Nature Mix.)

“Human Nature” is extensively quoted, if not actually sampled, in Tupac’s “Thug Nature.”

Miles Davis played it a lot his last few years, unfortunately not while he was at the peak of his game. Still, it’s intriguing to hear his interpretation.

A sample of “Human Nature” runs under the verses in Nas’ song “It Ain’t Hard To Tell.”

The track was produced by Large Professor. It also includes samples of “NT” by Kool and the Gang, “Why Can’t People Be Colors Too?” by the Whatnauts, “Slow Dance” by Stanley Clarke, “What Do You Want From Me Woman” by The Blue Jays, “Long Red” by Mountain and “Sorcerer Of Isis” by Power Of Zeus. Nas himself sampled “It Ain’t Hard To Tell” in his later song “Nas Is Like”. He isn’t the only one. “It Ain’t Hard To Tell” has been sampled in “Killing Fieldz” by Gravediggaz, “Invasion” by Jeru the Damaja, “Survival Of The Fittest” by Mobb Deep, “Half Man Half Amazin” by Pete Rock and others. Here’s a diagram of all the samples Nas used on Illmatic:

Where else is “Human Nature” out there in pop culture? Any other samples or covers I should be aware of? Hit me in the comments.

Here’s a mashup including many of the tracks mentioned in this post:

Human Nature Megamix by ethanhein

And here’s a mashup with Björk’s “Human Behaviour.”

Human Nature And Behaviour by ethanhein

The Gregory Brothers (including a sister-in-law) are musicians here in Brooklyn who have a series of videos called Auto-tune The News. Here are a selection of their better episodes as of this writing.

The Gregory Brothers also produce straight R&B tracks. With all possible respect, I don’t find their serious music to be anything special. It’s when they submerse themselves in TV that they shine the brightest. The internet doesn’t have a lot of info about their production techniques, all I could find was an interview where Michael Gregory says:

Logic Express was a godsend for composition–it has an enormous sample library. I use it for all my audio now. For vocal processing, auto-tune and melodyne plug-ins come in super handy. I use Final Cut Express for all the editing, but the capture feature is somehow rubbish, so iMovie gets called in for that.

So there’s a lot of very sophisticated computer software at work, though with a charming zer0-budget lameness of video compositing and audio mixing. I imagine when they wind up on Comedy Central or wherever, the production values will get a little more slick.

Musically, these videos are working for me. If they slowed the tempos down and found some heavier kick and snare sounds, they’d be ready for the radio. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. My own experiments with Auto-tune show any kind of human speech as pretty tonal to begin with. When you automatically tune someone talking to the closest piano-key pitches, it makes it easier to make out the melodies that were already present. The Gregorys do a lot of further manipulation and harmonizing, but their best moments come from unintended speech melodies, like Joe Biden shouting “God bless America”, from space.

Some languages are more tonal than others. Chinese uses pitch to differentiate words semantically, the way English uses combinations of vowels and consonants. The same string of phonemes spoken at different pitches in Mandarin might have completely different meanings as words. Even in English, we use pitch to communicate punctuation, emotional stance and other metadata. Read this out loud to see what I mean:

Okay?

Okay.

Okay…

Okay!

Speech has a lot of profound overlaps with music, to the point where it’s sometimes difficult to draw the line between them. This is I why I’m convinced by the theory that music is the evolutionary precursor of language, the bridge between monkey calls and our present communications systems.

By quantizing and digitizing information, you make it easier to memorize and replicate it. I find myself humming phrases from the Gregorys’ videos the way I hum Andrew Lloyd Webber. Digitized sound information is easier to memorize, store and copy. The subtle nuances of Katie Couric’s speech with all the pitches on a continuous spectrum are difficult to remember and imitate, but once it’s Auto-tuned, it becomes effortless. Digitizing data in any medium makes it much more robust across many generations of copies. DNA is a digital medium – the G, A, T and C of your genes can be logically expressed as ones and zeros, and ones and zeros can be replicated flawlessly and endlessly.

I find Auto-tune bottomlessly entertaining to listen to. Jay-Z and many of my friends say they’re tired of it, but I’m not. I can understand why you might be getting a little burned out on it if you listen to pop radio. However, there’s a lot of resistance out there to Auto-tune that’s too deep and intense to just come from jadedness with a music fad. The Time magazine article about the Gregorys allows that Auto-tune “isn’t always a way to cheat.” I find that funny. How can Auto-tune be cheating? How can you cheat at music? It’s not a competitive sport. I prefer to think of music as more like a game. You can play better or worse, but there aren’t really winners and losers. We’re adept at coming up with systems of rules for music, but we get carried away with that. Who cares how you make it so long as it sounds good?

If Auto-tune causes you distress because you care about authenticity in your music, I can understand that. I resisted “fake” music through most of my teens and twenties. Now I regret all the effort, but I guess I had a point. I was worried that someone was trying to put something over on me. I gave up my desire for authenticity after it became clear that it’s an impossible dream. There is no authenticity anywhere.

Ever since the sixties, we urban elites have fetishized the bluegrass of the forties as a pure folk form. But Bill Monroe wasn’t some naive backwoods hick. He designed his music deliberately for its commercial appeal to a particular audience. For instance, all that intense treble was there to cut through radio static and low-tech mics and mixing desks. This doesn’t make Bill Monroe’s music any less truthful or good. I commend him for finding a way to reach a mass audience with such idiosyncratic, regionally specific music.

I don’t think there’s anything magical or transcendent about good music. It’s like good food, if you make it with care and attention, then it makes people feel good. Sometimes you’re cooking for yourself, sometimes you’re cooking for anyone who walks in the door, sometimes you’re cooking for paying customers. It depends on the situation which recipes are going to work the best.

The half-life for “bad” inauthentic pop music to decay into “good” authentic art music seems to about one generation. The analog synths and drum machines that sounded so fake and lame in the seventies and eighties are cherished vintage gear today. Even the digital samplers of the eighties have attained authentic status because of the digital crunchiness you get from the low sampling rate. I’ll bet you anything that future hipsters are going to fetishize Auto-tune once the pop mainstream has safely abandoned it.

Potentially the most offensive but also the least ironic video by the Gregorys is this one:

Here’s the mp3 if you want to download it. It makes me a little uncomfortable, especially the greenscreened backup singer thing, which feels disrespectful. But I can’t argue with the message. I’d like to hear a producer with more chops do a version of this, maybe at a mellower tempo with less embellishment. Imagine turning on the news and seeing that speech. Either version.

The compilation is named for a breakdown section that appears in “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose.” James Brown quiets the band down to handclaps, footstomps and congas played by Johnny Griggs. After he raps a little, James Brown cues drummer Clyde Stubblefield back in, followed by bassist Bootsy Collins and the rest of the band.

James Brown wasn’t intentionally trying to create a perfect batch of hip-hop samples in the late sixties and early seventies, but he couldn’t have succeeded any better if he had been. The “Give It Up” breakdown has been sampled by everybody from Public Enemy to Doug E Fresh to NWA to Big Audio Dynamite to Miles Davis. It takes a powerful piece of music to inspire so much new work in such a variety of styles.

There’s an ugly history of racial slurs for African-Americans around jungles. James Brown made it a point to reclaim jungle imagery in a context of joyful pride. He has several songs that include a break where it’s just the congas and his chanting about being in the jungle, brother, swing on the vine, check out your mind. The history of agriculture and high tech societies is short. The stone age was long. We’ll never know exactly what music sounded like in the stone age, but I’d guess that James Brown’s jungle breakdowns give a good idea.

It’s wrong of white racists to degrade black people by comparing them to monkeys because it denies the fundamental similarities that we all share with our primate cousins. As I try to imagine how our more monkey-like ancestors first started inventing music, I think it’s reasonable to assume they started with rhythm, with clapping their hands and stomping their feet. I’m convinced by Steven Mithen’s theory in The Singing Neanderthals that dance was the precursor to walking on two feet.

Rhythm is the most fundamental component of music. Every other aspect emerges from it. Pitches are very fast rhythms. If you play a series of clicks faster and faster, eventually they appear to fuse into a whir, then a thrum, then a low-pitched tone. The faster the clicks, the higher the pitch. Combining different pitches gives you melodies and harmonies.

Clapping your hands, stomping your feet and chanting are the easiest entry points to music making, and they never get old. With all of our technology, we still aren’t tired of that stone age sound. I’m thinking about Queen and “We Will Rock You”, about Lil Mama and “Lip Gloss”, Michael Jackson and the end of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something.” Swing on the vine, check out your mind!

Here’s a mashup of “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose” with “Clapping Music” by Steve Reich.

Clap Your Hands by ethanhein

“The Funky Drummer” is a cornerstone of hip-hop and other sample-based electronic music, but for the first decade after its release it was an obscure tune. It’s a nice groove, but as a song, it’s not as catchy as James Brown’s big hits like “Sex Machine” or “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag.” It doesn’t have verses or choruses; instead, it’s just an open-ended groove, with extended solos traded back and forth between James Brown himself on organ and Maceo Parker on tenor sax.

It’s a mother

Four and a half minutes into the recording, James Brown tells the band: “Fellas, one more time I want to give the drummer some of this funky soul we got going here.” He tells drummer Clyde Stubblefield, “You don’t have to do no soloing, brother, just keep what you got… Don’t turn it loose, ’cause it’s a mother.” That last word will turn out to be prophetic.

Here’s a loop of Clyde Stubblefield’s drum solo:

Though he was only eighteen years old at the time of the “Funky Drummer” session, Clyde Stubblefield was already a master drummer. On the recording, James Brown tells him not to cut loose and solo because it might break up the groove and let all the air out of the balloon. So when his cue comes, Stubblefield continues to play the main rhythm pattern, with more emphasis but not a lot of variation. James Brown does a short rap over the beat and then counts the band back into the original vamp. While the band plays, he names the tune on the spot:

The name of this tune is the Funky Drummer, the Funky Drummer, the Funky Drummer, the Funky Drummer, the Funky Drummer, the Funky Drummer… Maceo!

In The Jungle Groove and the Bonus Beat Reprise

The Funky Drummer drum break was much-loved by the first generation of hip-hop producers. They sampled it enthusiastically and repeatedly. In 1986, Polydor capitalized on James Brown’s new-found street cred and put out In The Jungle Groove,  a compilation record of the hard-edged, open-ended funk grooves preferred by hip-hop listeners. This compilation was the first album release of “The Funky Drummer Parts One And Two.” It also included a remix called the “Funky Drummer Bonus Beat Reprise.”

The Bonus Beat Reprise is a loop of the Clyde Stubblefield drum break for three minutes with James Brown’s sampled raps coming in once in a while on top. It’s a perfect hip-hop track right out of the box. You could throw some rhymes on top and it would be ready for the radio. If you wanted to remix it further, its gridlike structure makes it effortless.

Analyzing the break

Here’s a screenshot of the Funky Drummer break in Recycle, the program I use for most of my sampling.

What you’re seeing in the image is two nearly identical audio files, the left stereo side above, the right below. Each blue blob is a drum hit. The bigger the blob, the louder the drum hit. The two biggest ones are the snare drum hits on beat three of each measure, the backbeats. The vertical lines are metadata I added with Recycle’s help. They’re slices in the audio file, defining the important rhythmic events. In the Funky Drummer break, every slice point is on an eighth note.

Here’s how you experience the loop when it’s played over and over. Read clockwise:

Clyde Stubblefield doesn’t play his eighth notes with perfect metronomic steadiness. He deliberately lays behind the beat in places, and he uses very light swing. There’s some further slight unintended deviation from his intended deviations. Your ear can detect the difference between the perfect eighth note grid implied by the loop and the asymmetry of the actual drum hits. This difference poses a puzzle to the brain, and gives the loop tension. Hearing the loop repeated is like a musical mantra, creating a relaxed intensity that gets more gratifying the more you listen.

The break gets around

The Funky Drummer break has been sampled in thousands of tracks, from hip-hop to pop to rock to every flavor of electronica. The break has also been duplicated countless times by studio drummers. This diagram shows uses of the break. It’s limited to commercial releases that I’ve heard of; otherwise it would have to be the size of a shower curtain.

James Brown even sampled the Funky Drummer break himself, on “She Looks All Types A’ Good.”

No one loves the Funky Drummer more than Public Enemy. They use it on seven different tracks. They namecheck it in the first verse of “Fight The Power.”

1989, the number, another summer
Sound of the Funky Drummer

Here’s one of my tracks using the Funky Drummer, mixing the break with samples of viola played by Nate Burke:

Nate vs The Funky Drummer by ethanhein

The Funky Drummer as a game

When you listen to the original “Funky Drummer,” you’re witnessing a performance. You’re free to dance, but there’s not much space in the musical conversation for you. The Bonus Beat Reprise, on the other hand, is an invitation to perform. All that open musical space is like a bare stage, all lit up for you.

You can think of the Bonus Beat Reprise as a game with a few simple, inflexible rules. You can add your own sounds on top, but they have to be in slightly swung 4/4 time at ninety-nine beats per minute. Your phrases have to fit in repetitive sequences of four, with phrases beginning and ending predictably every sixteen bars. The intermittent guitar stab weakly establishes the key of A, but you’re free to use whatever pitches you want otherwise, or none at all.

The Funky Drummer game is a very inclusive one. As long as your ideas are repetitive and to the beat, you can’t really do anything wrong. You can play on top of the Funky Drummer Bonus Beat Reprise out loud or in your head, in front of an audience, with a few friends or by yourself. You can rap, or sing, or improvise jazz solos, or lay down electronic squiggles and samples, or just chant, as James Brown’s sampled voice does:

Ain’t it funky now. Ain’t it funky now.
Ain’t it funky now. Ain’t it funky now.
Ain’t it funky now. Ain’t it funky now.
Ain’t it funky now. Ain’t it funky now.

The answer unquestionably is yes, yes it ain’t.

See an incredible video of Mos Def, Black Thought and Eminem freestyling over the Bonus Beat Reprise:

The Funky Drummer meme

Along with Apache and the Amen break, the Funky Drummer break is probably the most influential breakbeat in electronic music history. It’s a literal sex machine, a powerful replicator, a successful meme. As a digital audio file, the break is small, compact, lightweight, durable, modular and easily passed around. Even at CD quality, the break is a small enough file to send in an email, post on the web, and distribute on any disk or thumb drive format.

The original “Funky Drummer” is a long snaky beast that requires a very particular context to replicate itself. The drum break is more like a microbial gene cassette. It can make itself at home in the musical genomes of a seemingly limitless variety of new songs. You could find a way to set just about any piece of American popular music of the past two hundred years to the Funky Drummer break. If a traditional song or composition is like the genome of the macroscopic organism, a sample like the Funky Drummer break is like the rapidly evolving, stripped-down genome of a microbe. Like a microbe, the break spreads itself in concert with other replicators, as a guest, a parasite or even as the basis of new, more complex organisms.

Like successful genes, successful memes don’t always benefit their human hosts. Clyde Stubblefield got paid a one-time fee, musicians’ union scale, for the “Funky Drummer” session. James Brown is officially the song’s composer, and his estate receives all royalties people have been paying (those that have been paying them.) Clyde Stubblefield isn’t entitled to any of that money. He has the undying admiration of musicians, but that doesn’t pay as well as owning a copyright.

Update: see a followup post about resequencing the Funky Drummer loop using the magic of software.

Further update: see a blog post on how to program this break on a drum machine.