Really tragic, honestly, the way Coleman’s life ended without him being properly recognized and compensated for what is possibly one of the most sampled pieces of audio ever.
It is actually interesting. A comparison that’s striking is the story of the song Bittersweet Symphony where all royalties and credits went to the Rolling Stones after they sampled 7 seconds. It seems like Jagger and Richards did eventually gave those back decades later.
But with modern ML techniques we could probably supercharge intellectual property protection and people could always extract royalties from samples of theirs.
Hard disagree. The amen break, the music it is a part of, the technology and evolution in sound that it heavily influenced; is a welcome discussion focus on a weekend for many on HN.
With some very healthy 'fair use' aspects, though I also would not have picked the Wikipedia article (as others have noted in these comments).
Judicious use of flags is encouraged.
Yeah but you kinda have to have the culture, too, if this is about the the hovering up of anything humans put on the internet. Sampling breaks and making music with the same care they made theirs with is still related to the musicians that were sampled, while using them for cheap commercial one-offs or genAI is purely on the side where beauty is not.
You can use a drum machine to make music -- or you can just run a preset, or have some slop algorithm synthesise one for you which is a mix of a bunch of things humans did without being any of those things, nor a new thing of that class. Like when you mix a telephone number with a dollar amount and the result is neither, it's just a bunch of numbers, and for people to whom it's never been more that makes no difference. For anyone else, there is no similarity, no gradual transformation you can make from a telephone number to "digits of telephone number and dollar amount intermixed".
And if this sounds like vague gatekeeping then sure, that's what considering things beautiful or ugly always will be.
Ethan Hein has several good blog posts about the Amen Break:
https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2025/amen-break-listening-guide...
https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2023/building-the-amen-break/
https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2011/the-amen-break/
See also: Nate Harrison from 2004 https://youtu.be/XPoxZW8JzzM?si=ymsROOuIHx4qA9ES
Or this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L8ugmv3Qns
The Captain Pikant videos are really well done aestetically
Really tragic, honestly, the way Coleman’s life ended without him being properly recognized and compensated for what is possibly one of the most sampled pieces of audio ever.
It is actually interesting. A comparison that’s striking is the story of the song Bittersweet Symphony where all royalties and credits went to the Rolling Stones after they sampled 7 seconds. It seems like Jagger and Richards did eventually gave those back decades later.
But with modern ML techniques we could probably supercharge intellectual property protection and people could always extract royalties from samples of theirs.
"TIL music thing on Wikipedia" is not Hacker News material imo, flagged.
Hard disagree. The amen break, the music it is a part of, the technology and evolution in sound that it heavily influenced; is a welcome discussion focus on a weekend for many on HN.
It's also an intellectual property vs remix culture thing.
With some very healthy 'fair use' aspects, though I also would not have picked the Wikipedia article (as others have noted in these comments). Judicious use of flags is encouraged.
Yeah but you kinda have to have the culture, too, if this is about the the hovering up of anything humans put on the internet. Sampling breaks and making music with the same care they made theirs with is still related to the musicians that were sampled, while using them for cheap commercial one-offs or genAI is purely on the side where beauty is not.
You can use a drum machine to make music -- or you can just run a preset, or have some slop algorithm synthesise one for you which is a mix of a bunch of things humans did without being any of those things, nor a new thing of that class. Like when you mix a telephone number with a dollar amount and the result is neither, it's just a bunch of numbers, and for people to whom it's never been more that makes no difference. For anyone else, there is no similarity, no gradual transformation you can make from a telephone number to "digits of telephone number and dollar amount intermixed".
And if this sounds like vague gatekeeping then sure, that's what considering things beautiful or ugly always will be.
Announcing your flag is against the guidelines, too. Flagged.