Despite the world of popular music being seemingly boundless and borderless, with the only limit to a composer’s potential being the equipment they have on hand and their own imaginations, some tools keep being utilized over the decades, allowing for both consistency as well as innovation over time. One of the tools that has become a mainstay of the music scene is sampling, where a portion of one song, whether it’s a vocal, a drum beat, or a horn riff, is repurposed into an element of another. Eurovision songs are not immune from sampling over the years, and at least two songs this year alone appear to utilize the same break in their composition.
From DJs taking physical records to loop beats into their sets to the current relative ease of splicing digital sound bites into a track, sampling has been an inescapable part of the musical landscape since the mid 1980s.
Eurovision songs have taken advantage of short, subtle samples in the past to great effect, including Eric Saade’s Popular using the beat from Boney M’s Rasputin, and Helena Paparizou using James Brown’s I Feel Good to punctuate My Number One with sporadic “hey!”s. Efendi’s Mata Hari used a short sample from Crucified by Army of Lovers, and even cheekily name-checked the group in the lyrics.
This year, Norway’s Gåte utilizes a sample in their folk-metal track Ulveham; an old recording of singer Marit Jensen Lillebuen doing a traditional cow-call, or kulning, appears as the haunting, yodel-like vocalization in the opening bars of their song. This appears to have been given the green light by both NRK and the EBU, and gives Eurovision statisticians a staggering fact to play with: as Lillebuen was born in 1879 and passed away in 1975, not only would she be the oldest person to have their voice heard in a Eurovision song, but she may also be the only posthumous voice we’ve heard, as well. While not mentioned on the official Eurovision website, Gåte have credited Lillebuen as a songwriter on their own pages.
The Amen Break: A Case Study
The king of samples is arguably the Amen break, taken from a brief drum solo from the 1969 track Amen, Brother by American funk-soul band The Winstons. Despite Gregory Coleman’s memorable work on percussion, the song was by no means a smash; it was the B-side of a minor hit, the band parted ways the following year, and the song languished in obscurity.
In 1986, however, the track was included (with a slowed-down breakbeat) in a compilation called Ultimate Breaks and Beats, providing DJs with a wealth of fodder to adapt for their own purposes. One of the first acts to adopt the Amen break were Salt-N-Pepa with their track I Desire, followed two years later by NWA’s iconic Straight Outta Compton.
The break quickly became a mainstay on American hip-hop tracks, and eventually caught the attention of DJs across the pond. As time passed, and music production became more digitized, a new audience of DJs took the sample to a whole new level: splicing, looping, compressing, and distorting the beat until it was often barely recognizable, but still the undeniable heart of the burgeoning club scene in Europe. Its popularity skyrocketed, and eventually became the backbone of what would eventually become drum and bass, jungle, and many other associated genres. Electronic dance music, in all of its myriad forms, eventually became more mainstream. For example, The Prodigy took their album The Fat of the Land, which heavily sampled the Amen break, double-platinum in the US and Australia and quintuple-platinum in the UK.
Since then, it’s been used in tracks beyond the electronica space, from David Bowie to Björk to Oasis to Amy Winehouse to Slipknot (who, granted, technically sampled a song that sampled the Amen break…) to Tyler, the Creator to the theme song from Futurama:
Sadly, the Winstons and their legal team were not aware of the break’s usage until 1996, well after the statute of limitations for copyright infringement had passed. A GoFundMe was established in 2015 to raise funds for lead singer Richard Spencer, Amen Brother’s copyright holder, which pooled together over £24,000, but it was too little too late. Drummer Gregory Coleman had died homeless and penniless in 2006, having received no credit or residuals from the song’s vibrant afterlife.
Eurovision and the Amen Break
As it is often spliced, looped, and distorted, it’s often difficult to determine whether a beat is definitively the Amen break, a similar break, or someone drumming its distinctive pattern without using the pre-existing recording, but as far as the team at ESC Insight can tell, the earliest usage of this particular riff appeared in 2014’s Hungarian entrant. During the chorus for András Kállay-Saunders’s Running, an unmistakable, yet highly sped-up, sample bubbled up during the chorus, bringing a dose of energy and urgency to the song:
Two years later, we nearly had another occurrence of the break at Eurovision, with Raiven’s EMA runner-up Črno Bel utilizing it during the song’s second chorus. Despite the song having a BPM of almost 170, it still feels dreamy and chill, showing the versatility of the sample. We might not have had her join the roster in Stockholm that year, but she will be performing for Slovenia this year in Malmö:
In past years, a number of other songs have either used similar breaks to the Amen, or use clips so modified that it’s difficult to determine whether they utilize that specific beat, or simply one that’s somewhat reminiscent of it. Listen to t.A.T.u.’s Ne Ver, Ne Boysia, Tijana Bogićević, In Too Deep, Diljá’s Power, and Your Voice by Tamar Edilashvili, Georgia’s entry to Junior Eurovision in 2018, and leave us a comment on whether you hear it or not!
This year, we seem to have two songs that weave the Amen break into their compositions. Coincidentally, the pair were unveiled officially within days of each other. Both Nemo’s The Code and Kaleen’s We Will Rave seem to include that familiar beat, which seems to indicate that the Alps are now the central hub for thumping drum and bass. Both of these songs create a sort of sonic time warp for listeners, somehow sounding both nostalgic and familiar and fresh at the same time.
Austria’s Kaleen, rehearsing “We Will Rave”. (Photo: Alma Bengtsson, EBU)
Despite Europapa being a high-energy rave that could easily fit into a party playlist next to We Will Rave and The Code, it does not actually use that particular sample. However, a seemingly ubiquitous siren effect called Pulsar City Alarm from a 1984 album of sci-fi sounds called “Digital Space Effects – Fix Your Own Mix” was heard in both Europapa and 1995’s Love City Groove, as well as non-Eurovision tracks like Locked Out of Heaven, HUMBLE., and Heartless. Joost has used the Amen break in his previous work, most notably his smash hit Friesenjung.
And for those of you who were wondering, none of the previous Eurovision songs entitled Amen appear to use this eponymous sample. Apologies to Liora, Ana Soklič, and Vincent Bueno.
What does it mean for the Contest?
Sampling is now a seemingly omnipresent technique in modern music production, but it certainly leads to a number of questions as it pertains to its place in Eurovision. As it currently stands, there is no obvious rule specifically outlawing the practice of sampling, especially considering the examples I’ve mentioned above. However, the publicly-available rules viewable on the Eurovision website state the following:
“The songs (lyrics and music compositions) submitted to represent the country of each Participating Broadcaster’s country in the ESC must be original and must not have been released and/or publicly performed in part or in full before 1 September 2023 (the “Release Date”).”
What, in this case, is considered “original”? Is a sample considered unoriginal, or is it used in the same way that any instrument would be? Is there a difference between the usage of a short drum break and a complete, immediately recognizable riff, like Vanilla Ice using Under Pressure for Ice Ice Baby? Would a sample need to be declared, and the original creator of the sound given a songwriting credit? If a drummer simply pounded out the rhythm of the Amen break, but didn’t use the Winstons’ original track, would that change things?
As Eurovision songs continue to make waves on global pop music charts, what does the future hold for this tool, as common in contemporary pop music as it was in the early days of hip-hop and drum and bass, as Eurovision continues to look towards its future? Of course, only time will tell, but for the time being, musical production nerds can enjoy the hunt for traces of drum breaks and samples scattered throughout our Contest, and appreciate how components of sounds from decades ago still contribute to the landscape of Eurovision today.
(Special thanks to https://www.whosampled.com/ for being a valuable reference for this article.)