If you want to hear a compact history of contemporary music, look no further than The Winston's virtually un-listened-to B-side from 1971 called "Amen, Brother". It's a pretty standard funky soul song, but then something happens just after the 1:20 mark: a drum break so prescient and hip that it's been omnipresent for the last thirty years. It's known as the Amen Break, and it's pretty much the basis for sampled music as we know it. This is the birth of techno and hip hop who knows what else, all in one short drum solo.
It's crazy that this one obscure song sounds so incredibly like 1971 right until the break, which now sounds like it's been spliced in from a 1998 techno track. It's also crazy that someone in 1980 or so picked up an old vinyl record and decided, "This will be the sound of the future."
Even crazier, but somehow not surprising, is that the composer of the song never saw a penny's worth of royalties, and the drummer who performed the song (G.C. Coleman) died homeless and broke in 2006
