The continuing story of the Amen break

Have you heard the story of the Amen break? This is the 5.2-second drum groove that livens up ‘Amen, Brother’, the B-side of The Winstons’ 1969 single ‘Color Him Father’.Footnote ¹ I must confess it is a piece of music I never paid attention to, nor learned about in my music education studies.Footnote ² Yet I must have heard it a number of times, for it has been the backbone of numerous hip-hop, jungle and breakbeat tracks produced in the last decades (Harrison, Reference HARRISON2004; Snoman, Reference SNOMAN2008).

It is unlikely that G. C. Coleman, the original drummer on the track, could have anticipated that his solo would spawn entire subcultures by being transformed to countless loops that drive today's digitally produced popular music. Arguably the most sampled record of all time,Footnote ³ the Amen break thus offers an interesting case of subjecting artistic authorship to cultural dynamics.

The break also reminds us of the cunningness of the history of popular culture. As for myself, having been brought up to think that the classics of popular music are coherent and more or less original songs and albums that artists compile together in the studio (or record live), I have been intrigued to see how the creative mosaic of digital musickingFootnote ⁴ transforms this ethos. All around, musical bits and pieces that were destined to the cultural dustbin find a second life in the digital domain as memes: that is, as cultural replicators that pop up in new contexts, mutating into new forms and serving new functions, out of the reach of their original authors.Footnote ⁵ I think that such a phenomenon deserves our attention as music educators, for any radical change in musical culture should awaken our interest – at least if we want to see ourselves as its critical facilitators.

Digging musical memes

How should we then react to the idea that music can be built up from such memes as the Amen break? A modernist thinker, whether she likes popular music or not, might respond to this challenge with a suggestion similar to the one that Theodore Gracyk puts forth in his Rhythm and Noise: Aesthetics of Rock (Reference GRACYK1996).Footnote ⁶ According to Gracyk (Reference GRACYK1996, pp. 96–98), recycling musical sources is inauthentic copying as long as the recyclers do not respect the authority of the original producer-artist. The aesthetic value of popular music (or rock in specific) hinges on the objectivity of its artistic products: original recordings that are distributed as legitimate copies of singles and albums. Let us call this kind of an artwork-original ‘a mix’ – for, according to Gracyk, it is produced in the mixing process of the final recording.

From this standpoint, the status of popular music as a distinct art form is dependent on the status of ‘a mix’ as the original type that determines its copies as tokens: that is, as an ontological general category that determines its concrete instances (Gracyk, Reference GRACYK1996, p. 96). Hence, popular music differs from such improvisatory arts as jazz or folk music, for the aesthetic value of the latter is primarily related to live performance (Gracyk, Reference GRACYK1996, pp. 1, 170). It is the status of ‘a mix’ as type that grants the moral copyright to the original author in popular music. Thus, to sample or otherwise appropriate a recording without permission is ethically dubious – a violation of the moral copyright. Moreover, to change ‘a mix’ without permission would violate the artist's right to have a say on how her work lives on.

Looking at the matter from today's perspective, we might question Gracyk's penchant to elevate ‘a mix’ to the status of a type. In the 1970s it might have been appropriate to think of popular music's artistry culminating in such albums as Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run (1975), authorized mixes that stand as types to their tokens, the copies made of these mixes (Gracyk, Reference GRACYK1996, p. 21). However, one may ask whether this really helps us to understand today's networked popular music culture that seems to be more and more influenced by freewheeling exchange and copying of musical parts, assembling an extensive ‘plagiarism mosaic’ based on continuous remixing (Lethem, Reference LETHEM and Miller2008, p. 25). This mosaic appears to produce ‘liquid’ songs – mixes that are as much material for new mixes as works that stand on their own (Toop, Reference TOOP1995, p. 43). Today, many pieces of popular music live as open-ended works, often resulting in situations where it is not easy to identify the original. Some production practices of contemporary popular music have even been specifically aimed at anonymity by hiding the identity of the producer-artists and refusing to label the published mixes with anything but running numbers.Footnote ⁷

At the same time, production techniques of rock, electronic dance music, hip-hop and other contemporary styles have begun to merge: acts like Nine Inch Nails (NIN) exemplify this new ethos, perhaps leading to a new participatory aesthetics of popular music which supports audience input e.g. in the form of fan-based remixing for which the artists willingly distribute raw material.Footnote ⁸ As digital technology has brought the mixing practices to everybody's reach and offered a global distribution and exchange network for new mixes, we can truly speak of musical works as emergent communal processes. In these processes what was originally ‘a mix’ becomes material for new creative ways of projecting oneself in artistic-technological space. This shifts the aesthetic focus from products to processes, from individual expression to communication.

What's in a mix?

One can also argue that the production of popular music has always been based on intellectual property that belongs to the cultural commons. In rock music as well as in the several traditions it draws from, it has been commonplace to rework pre-existing fragments and frameworks to new figurations (Lethem, Reference LETHEM and Miller2008, p. 28).Footnote ⁹ Copyright laws have only partially applied justice to this practice. As Keller (Reference KELLER and Miller2008) remarks (specifically in relation to US politics), contemporary copyright laws are in fact a relatively new development, pasted over the constitutional rights of the citizens to use the cultural commons to freely express their ideas. Certain reuse rights have never belonged solely to the authors; they have been handed to the public, and the latter may act in accordance with these rights as long as this can be considered a case of fair use.Footnote ¹⁰ It is mostly the business-based distinctions between the artist/sellers, the works/products, industry and the public/buyers that have fed the judgements of plagiarism, frequently leading to cases where the citizens’ right to draw from the cultural commons is infringed (cf. Lethem, Reference LETHEM and Miller2008).Footnote ¹¹

From the perspective of the cultural commons, the elements of musical works that are not judged to be the author's distinct, individual, and authentic expressions should be allowed to be circulated as long as they are applied in new creative uses. But how is the authentic part of the work identified, and when can creative reuse be taken as new expression? Before the digital culture, answering to these kinds of questions was relatively easy, for anyone who wrote a piece of music and based her claims of its ownership on the objective status of sheet music (or, later, ‘a mix’), was eligible for its copyright. After the post-1960 revolution in the production techniques, the musicians, engineers, producers and arrangers may have had their share of the cake, but they still ate at the same table, catered by the idea of the original artwork.

Importantly, the digitalisation and digital distribution of pre-existing music has not only confused the line between what can be counted as an original artwork and what cannot; it has also mixed up the roles of the artist-producer and the audience-consumer, influencing our ways to judge what can be counted as artistic expression. Today, anyone with loop-based music software on her computer can make music from ready-mades: entry-level software like GarageBand^® has brought loop-based musicking to the reach of almost everyone; countless new mash-ups are created from previous patterns and relayed online on a daily basis. These patterns are constantly mixed and remixed to new forms; during this process they are transformed so many times that the question of the original fades out, overwhelmed by the aesthetic challenge to keep up the listeners’ interest with endless new configurations.

From the standpoint of music education, the line between creative appropriation and plagiarising should not be the most critical issue related to digital musicking. What really should grasp our attention is the way in which the latter unveils a deeply ingrained taboo, revealing how many artworks, in every realm that interests a number of people, are compounds: mixes that at least partly (and surprisingly often wholly) draw from communal sources. In respect to the cultural commons, the primary tasks of the music educator would be to help the students to find interesting ways to employ these commons and to find new approaches to them that could amount to individual expressions. Settling legal issues about copyright may be important for the business, but as music educators, we should not let the latter govern our attitudes toward creativity when the main issue is not private ownership but musical expression. Of course, this does not indicate that we should be indifferent to copyright and legal ownership: however, it does indicate that we should subject these issues to critical consideration in relation to the practices of artistry that we set out to promote. The cultural commons perspective could offer one way to address the matter from the standpoint of artistic expression.

Another point that could make us question the modernist aesthetic convictions of authenticity and originality is that in digital appropriation, musical memes are used as ‘vehicles for improvisations’, or ‘source materials’ that can be endlessly ‘reconfigured or remixed to suit the future’ (Toop, Reference TOOP1995, p. 43). This orientation to the future seems to imply a pragmatist attitude that has both practical and philosophical outcomes. From the pragmatist standpoint, it could be a mistake to limit one's educational vision by the modernist premises, for in digital musicking we seem to have in our hands a thoroughly postmodern phenomenon, one that lives by references to other phenomena – or, put in pragmatist terms, by references to its potential future uses. To go exclusively with the modernist idea that songs should be taken as ready-made artworks could limit our grasp of these potential uses.

The Amen break case thus suggests that we think over our received ideas of ownership, authority, authenticity and artistry: this might also lead to reconsideration of our aesthetic ideas – ideas of what makes something art, and on what and whose terms. As far as we accept that music education is a realm in which these kinds of considerations are at home (that is, a critical endeavour), it cannot be but beneficial to acknowledge alternative perspectives that we can base our aesthetic ideas on. This is not only important because it gives us food for thought, but also because it might help us best to promote the kind of creative agency that is fit for the citizens of democratic society – if one accepts that a substantial part of this agency has to do with democratisation of the arts (see also Woodford, Reference WOODFORD2005; Väkevä & Westerlund, Reference VÄKEVÄ and WESTERLUND2007).

Hence, I propose that we could consider the Amen break, and many alike cases, not primarily as violations of the original author's copyright, but as examples of how today's digital musical practices can transform our conventional work-centred aesthetics by indicating to us new creative possibilities in the ‘stray technological parts intended for cultural and industrial trash heaps’ (Rose, Reference ROSE1994, p. 22; see also Keller, Reference KELLER and Miller2008, pp. 142–143). This transformation does not have to be considered as theft: it can be taken as musical recycling at its most ecological, based on every artist's right to draw from the cultural commons. Music education is one place where people can become conscious of this right and to learn to apply it in constructive ways.

Deeper into The Mix

Of course, if we do not accept that either ‘Amen Brother’, or the musical styles that circulate its drum break deserve our attention as art educators, we may neglect the whole issue as irrelevant. This would be a severe mistake, though, because of the ubiquity of the processes and practices discussed above. There is a possibility that we are going to hear more and more creative remixing of the musical commons; we should be aware of the challenges that this presents to our pedagogies. We might also consider seriously the argument that, in order to support our students' creative agency, it is these kinds of artistic processes that we could look upon as heuristic models – albeit, of course, with a critical eye.

My own interest in such cases as the Amen break is both theoretical and practical: while these kinds of cases touch a wealth of interesting philosophical issues, they also seem to present a challenge to the pedagogy of popular music. I think it is certainly time to consider this pedagogy in more extensive terms than conventional rock band practices have to offer (cf. Green, Reference GREEN2008). One direction where this might lead is the expansion of the informal pedagogy based on a ‘garage band’ model to encompass various modes of digital artistry wherever this artistry takes place: in face-to-face pedagogical situations, in other contexts of informal learning, and in such open-networked learning environments as remix sites and musical online communities (Salavuo, Reference SALAVUO2006, Reference SALAVUO2008). The rock-based practice of learning songs by ear from records and rehearsing them together to perform live or to record is just one way to practice popular music artistry today (cf. Green, Reference GREEN2002). Such practices as DJing/turntablism; assembling of various bits and pieces to remixes; remixing entire songs to mash-ups in home studios; collective songwriting online; producing of one's own music videos to YouTube; exchanging and comparing videos of live performances of Guitar Hero and Rock Band game songs – all of these indicate a musical culture that differs substantially from conventional ‘garage band’ practices. (Väkevä, Reference VÄKEVÄ2006, forthcoming.)

This has been certainly uncharted territory for myself: for years, I thought – and taught others – that popular music's artistry culminates in original songs or albums that can be discussed in such terms as genre, style and personal idiom. Moreover, I thought that production of these works is based on tedious practice of using such tangible equipment as guitars, basses, drum sets, microphones and mixing consoles to compose, arrange, perform and record one's own music, further distributed to the listeners as ready-made ‘listenables’ (Elliott, Reference ELLIOTT1995, pp. 44–45). As a music teacher trainer, it also seemed to me that the wide scope of musical and music-related skills, knowledge and attitudes that inform contemporary music education programmes should involve a thorough understanding of this artistry. Paying attention to what takes place in digital music culture today, I have begun to think that this rationale, while still applicable in many cases, may not be the most fruitful way to look at the field.

As a popular music history teacher with a background in humanities, I have also thought that it is important to relate this artistry to its cultural source traditions. It is perhaps significant that for decades popular music and jazz have been taught under the rubric of ‘Afro-American music’ in Finnish music education programmes – a fact that reveals how closely these musics are associated with Afrodiasporic cultural tradition. I would like to conclude with some thoughts of how the study of the latter could help us in building on cases like the Amen break.Footnote ¹²

(1) There seem to be certain cultural, social and political reasons why Afrodiasporic music has become so overwhelmingly popular in the last hundred years that it can be even considered as ‘the major music in the west’ (Small, Reference SMALL1987, p. 3). Small (Reference SMALL1987, p. 483) discusses the eminence of Afrodiasporic music in connection to its function in cultural survival:

While this rationale may seem to verge on essentialism,Footnote ¹³ I think it is worthwhile to consider in relation to Small's pedagogical focus, which is to criticise the ideological influence of Western consumerist culture on our self-image as musicians and music educators. According to Small (Reference SMALL1987), ‘Afro-American’ culture can offer constructive models of musicking that exemplify artistic practice as a deeply humane endeavour. Instead of limiting our notion of musicking within the modernist expert culture's ideal of professionalism and its related exclusivist idea of autonomous art, Small suggests that we take a look at how Afrodiasporic culture exemplifies the kind of communal musicking in which strict lines between the musicians, musical works, and audience often fade out in service of more societal forms of enjoying. I would suggest that today some of the most exciting forms of this communality are related to digital musical practices that base their expression on Afrodiasporic aesthetic values. Music teachers should be familiar with these practices and the communality involved.

(2) When considering the relation between contemporary digital music culture and the Afrodiasporic tradition, we can also draw from the scholars who, while acknowledging the historical rootedness of ‘the Black Atlantic’ in African-derived aesthetics (Gilroy, Reference GILROY1993), envision this tradition as a potential melting pot of various expressive ideas of different origins (or memes if you will). Thus, the specific role of Afrodiasporic music as a symbol of resistance can also be considered from the perspective of cultural mediation.

One of the major cultural challenges for any people living in diasporic conditions is how to communicate its expressive ideas. In order to overcome this challenge, Afrodiasporic culture developed its own specific rhetoric, based on what DuBois ([1903] Reference DUBOIS1994) identified as ‘Second Sight’. The latter involves African-derived communicative practices that are applied to mask the critique towards the oppressive majority with terms that are fully open only for the oppressed minority. In the scholarship of Afrodiasporic literature and music, these communicative practices have been discussed in terms of ‘Signifyin(g)’ (Gates, Reference GATES1988; Floyd, Reference FLOYD1995). The term marks a set of rhetoric devices that produce levels of embedded meaning below the surface of cultural texts. These meanings have their full impact only when interpreted against the cultural background of the language users. The result of using these devices has been a tradition of employing language (and music) figuratively, based on the artistry of implication symbolised by such mythical figures as African trickster god Esu and his diasporic heir, the Signifyin’ Monkey. Today, this implicative rhetoric has travelled everywhere as a result of the global appeal of Afrodiasporic music. It has also influenced other world cultures by being mediated through worldwide communication networks, resulting in hybrid forms of expression that can be better described as ‘glocal’ than ‘global’ (Robertson, Reference ROBERTSON, Featherstone, Lash and Robertson1995; Dyndahl, Reference DYNDAHL, Krogh and Pedersen2008).Footnote ¹⁴ No music teacher should address contemporary popular music without acknowledging the importance of this Afrodiasporic rhetoric to its expression.

(3) Several scholars have also commented on the special relation of the Afrodiasporic tradition to technology as a conveyer of expressive ideas (Rose, Reference ROSE1994; Dinerstein, Reference DINERSTEIN2003; Bartlett, Reference BARTLETT, Forman and Neal2004). It seems that the role of technology in Afrodiasporic expression has reflected the latter's specific attitude to mediation: technology is used both in terms of communicating ideas and as expressive device, opening new overtones of meaning to aesthetic purposes.

One way to approach this matter could be to relate the artistic-technological idea of ‘a mix’ to its cultural-ideological counterpart – let us call the latter ‘The Mix’. ‘The Mix’ indicates here not a musical product, but a creative blend of cultures and ideas – of the various ways in which people commit themselves to creative goals in a multicultural society. This idea seems to have been already familiar for the African-American intellectuals of the early 20th century. Thus, Shusterman (Reference SHUSTERMAN2002, p. 132) points out an analogue between the radical pluralism of pragmatist philosopher Alain Locke, a seminal Harlem Renaissance figure, and the idea of ‘productive mix’ that the latter lauded as the life force of Afrodiasporic art in The New Negro (1925) and other writings. For Locke, this art was not an exclusive cultural heritage to be kept pure of other influences. On the contrary, Afrodiasporic culture presented for him a set of hybrid aesthetic vehicles that can help a multicultural and democratic society to channel and communicate its expressive ideas more vitally than those of European high art stifled by ‘marked decadence and sterility’ and ‘conventional blindness’ (Locke, [1925] Reference LOCKE1997, pp. 258, 264). From this standpoint, the productive idea of mixing of musical patterns may be metaphorically extended to cover ‘The Mix’ of peoples and cultures living a democratic way of life, and to mark the productive ‘unity in diversity’ that, according to Locke, is best expressed through the arts in a multicultural society (Shusterman, Reference SHUSTERMAN2002, p. 126).

It is also interesting to note how Locke's ideas of free exchange of cultural goods seemed to anticipate today's needs of free expression:

There is a pragmatist ethos worked up here that clearly foreshadows the ethos of today's digital music culture. As Shusterman (Reference SHUSTERMAN2002) notes, Locke's radical pluralism can be taken as a harbinger of contemporary postmodern artistry expressed in hip-hop's creative collage (and, I take it, in other digital musicking based on Afrodiasporic expression). Moreover, Locke's philosophy reminds us how all music draws from the cultural commons feeding our creative practices with their ‘goods’. What is left up to negotiation is how we ‘can use them best’, and it is the task of music educators to take part in this negotiation.

(4) The fourth idea that I would like to propose is that the practices of Afrodiasporic music could be seen to exemplify transformative praxes. A transformative praxis, I suggest, is a communal system of co-ordinated actions that (a) realises its own inherent values in action; and (b) through these values, also contributes to more general well-being of society. The term thus elaborates on the original Aristotelian notion of praxis that realises its own values, guided by practical wisdom that can answer to its situational needs (see Aristotle, Reference ARISTOTLE1981, 1094a, cf. 1096b; see also Alperson, Reference ALPERSON1991, pp. 233–234; Elliott, Reference ELLIOTT1995, pp. 14, 42–45, 69–70, 80; Regelski, Reference REGELSKI1996, Reference REGELSKI1998; McIntyre, Reference MCINTYRE2004).

In the Aristotelian notion, the ‘goods’ that praxis serves constitute its raison d'être – for instance, musical praxis exists because it realises its own homegrown values. The morality of this kind of action must be based on the idea that somehow, a praxial agent is also able to realise values that serve the common good. In antiquity, this was thought to take place on courtesy of phronesis, or a practical wisdom on the basis of which one could judge what is good and bad for humans. This was a virtue that was taken to be characteristic of the freemen of the Greek society that alone were taken to have potential to be educated in political art, the primary field of application for phronesis (Aristotle, Reference ARISTOTLE1981, 1140b2–30).

In contemporary society, phronesis must find its justification elsewhere than from this class-based ethical discernment. One option is to connect it to the dynamic needs of a multicultural and democratic way of life; in this kind of life a moral agent is forced to consider the bases of her valuations through their potential consequences to people living in different and changing situations (see Dewey, Reference DEWEY and Hickman1996, MW 12: 174–75, LW 5: 249, Reference DEWEY2006; Bowman, Reference BOWMAN2000a: 7–21, Pappas, Reference PAPPAS2008, ch. 5). From this perspective, phronesis would be specifically wisdom of how to negotiate different viewpoints and how to act as much as possible with respect to different negotiable opinions. Whether this kind of pragmatist astuteness can suffice without more substantial moral grounding is a question outside the scope of this article: here it suffices to note that in order to consider music as transformative praxis, one has to find a rationalisation to its power to act at the same time as fulfilling its own specific purposes and as serving more extensive human goods, the value of which must be negotiated in the changing situations of moral life.

In the last decades, our field has witnessed a vivid philosophical discussion of music's power as praxis to promote good life. In this discussion, the pedagogical value of music has been associated, for example, to its special power to realise personal ‘life values’ (Elliott, Reference ELLIOTT1995), to its capacity to help people to make their life ‘worth while’ by indicating to them ways in which they can turn their cultural practices into ‘good time’ driven by praxis-specific ‘action ideals’ (Regelski, Reference REGELSKI1996, Reference REGELSKI2007), and to the multifarious layers of meanings that music opens up to interpretation, promoting creative agency by insinuating itself ‘meaningfully and influentially into all manner of experience’ (Bowman, Reference BOWMAN2000b). In addition to these perspectives (which are by no means exclusive of each other), I would suggest emphasising music's pragmatist potential as transformative praxis (see also Väkevä, Reference VÄKEVÄ2000, Reference VÄKEVÄ2003, Reference VÄKEVÄ2007; Westerlund, Reference WESTERLUND2002, Reference WESTERLUND2003). When not merely taken as a set of cultural practices informed by their own specific norms, standards and values, but as a general catalyst of cultural change that looks for new meanings in the shared cultural commons, music can be understood as a fulfiller of the hidden potentials of conjoint life. When considered as culturally transformative praxis, music can also work as a social powerhouse that helps us to energise and revitalise our aesthetic visions by promoting creative agency.

To support this potential for cultural transformation, music educators need to welcome a critical attitude towards existing musical practices. Here ‘critical attitude’ does not imply art criticism in conventional sense. Rather, it suggests that we stay alert to the multiple ways in which we can produce and interpret musical meaning. It also suggests a will to experiment on music's pragmatist potential as transformative praxis. Music educators can act as cultural critics in a more antagonistic sense when they encounter practices and ideologies that restrict this potential. Luckily, as exemplified by cases like the Amen break, music has a power to live on its own despite restricting institutional structures. To the degree that the digitally made and distributed ‘glocalised’ versions of Afrodiasporic music share the latter's ability to work as social counter-critique, and to the degree they can build on its zeal to experiment with technologies of mediation to negotiate new meanings, they can be considered as exemplifying transformative praxes. This would perhaps be the most important reason not to overlook the Amen breaks of the future.