I’ve now been writing reviews about a selection of the movies I watch for six years. And during those six years there have been moments where I wasn’t as motivated to do it anymore. I’ve been experiencing that feeling during the last couple of weeks as well. It doesn’t mean I have written less, but you sense that thing that drives you isn’t as strong as it was. During those moments I always wonder why I am still doing it and what I want to accomplish with it. Reviews about big movies can be found everywhere, so why write about them? Should I continue doing this?
Luckily I came across a couple of documentaries I hadn’t read much about, including Sample This. It made me realise that it are these type of films which I should write about regularly, because they don’t get enough attention while at the same time they are about subjects I really enjoy. Based on the title you might this documentary is the same as Copyright Criminals or Everything is a Remix and is all about using existing music to make something new. Indirectly it is about that, but this film focusses on just one song which has played an important role to the rise of hip hop: Apache by The Incredible Bongo Band.
You have to only take one look at the Who Sampled site to see how many artists have used this song in their own music (currently 445 songs). It might not be as much as the “Amen” break (which has been used 2245 times and was the defining things for jungle music), but in the seventies this was one of the breaks (and instrumental piece in a song) which made the break dancers show off their best moves. Sample This dives into its history to explain how this famous song came into existence.
It all started with the murder of Robert Kennedy, resulting in one of his employees starting a different career. But there also other unexpected elements like Charles Manson and the movies The Thing with Two Heads and Thunderball, which would all play a part in the formation of The Incredible Bongo Band. It consisted of “session musicians”, who were playing music in the studio for famous artists, every day. During interviews these artists talk about how they became part of the band and how they played Apache. Various hip hop artists talk about what the song meant to them.
If you are a music lover who is into getting more about the history of specific music than that is something Sample This offers with a lot of detail. It shows how influential a single song can be in creating a whole new type of music, but also shows how big the role is of musicians you might normally not hear about.
Sample This is available through Netflix (in the Netherlands, but maybe also in other countries)
