the.com/breakbeat
the drum solo that escaped its song and started a revolution
means A style of rhythm, and the music built on it, that uses a syncopated, looped drum pattern (the "break") instead of a steady four-on-the-floor beat — the backbone of hip-hop, jungle, and drum-and-bass.
from From "break" plus "beat," and the break is the heart of the story: on funk and soul records, the "break" was the stripped-down section where the band dropped out and left just the drums. In the 1970s, DJs noticed dancers went wild for those few seconds, so they took two copies of the same record and looped the break back-to-back, stretching that fleeting drum moment into a whole groove. "Breakbeat" names exactly that — the beat made from the break.
- origin
- DJs looped funk drum breaks at block parties
- holy grail
- the Amen Break, six seconds, millions of songs
- bpm range
- jungle and drum-and-bass push past 160
- sampling lawsuit
- the Amen drummer never earned a dime
- genetics
- hip-hop, jungle, and rave all descend from it
the amen break — 4-bar drum solo from the winstons' 1969 'amen, brother' sampled in thousands of breakbeat tracks
goldie timeless — 1995 drum and bass album that defined the breakbeat sound with intricate chopped breaks over liquid strings
squarepusher hello world — 1997 idm breakbeat album that fragmented and reconstructed breaks into glitchy, complex patterns