Amen Break - Early Fame

Early Fame

The song itself achieved fame within the hip hop and subsequent electronic music communities when a former Downstairs Records employee known as Breakbeat Lenny compiled it onto his 1986 Ultimate Breaks and Beats bootleg series for DJs. Lenny hired Louis Flores to edit four bars of the drum break at a much slower speed than the remainder of the song. Although it created a jarring difference in tempo in the center of the song, it allowed Hip-Hop DJs to extend the beat by switching between two copies of the record on two separate turntables at a danceable tempo while ignoring the rest of the song (this technique was created by Kool Herc in 1974 and became a trend at large in 1977 with the efforts of Grandmaster Flash). By 1987, E-mu released the SP1200 sampler, altering Hip-Hop production techniques from drum machines to sampled loops. Most producers began to mine their loops initially from Ultimate Breaks and Beats series, causing the Amen break to gain a massive amount of fame in the late 80s hip-hop community, crossing over to the U.K. and European dance music scenes shortly afterwards. Eventually, the song was reissued in its original form at a higher quality sound, and since most contemporary electronic music producers were speeding up the sample, the bootlegged slower edited version fell out of favor.