Apache

“Apache” started as a 1960 instrumental written by Jerry Lordan, inspired by a Western movie, and recorded first by the Shadows and then by Danish guitarist Jørgen Ingmann, whose version hit No. 2 on the Hot 100 in 1961. None of that history mattered much to what happened twelve years later. Producer Michael Viner assembled a loose studio collective called the Incredible Bongo Band to record music for a Canadian Olympics documentary, and almost as an afterthought the group cut a cover of “Apache” for the 1973 album Bongo Rock – a six-and-a-half-minute version built around congas, a wah-guitar line, and, two minutes in, an extended drum break that nobody involved seemed to think was the point of the record.

It never charted. It barely registered as a single release at all. What it did instead was end up in the record crates of Bronx DJs in the mid-1970s, where Kool Herc – widely credited as hip-hop’s founding DJ – started isolating that drum break at block parties, using two copies of the same record on two turntables to loop it indefinitely, a technique he called “the merry-go-round.” Dancers reacted to the break specifically, not the song around it, and Herc’s discovery that a crowd would respond to an isolated rhythmic passage, repeated and extended past its original runtime, is close to the founding technical insight of hip-hop DJing itself. “Apache” became, in the genre’s own folklore, “the break that started it all” – sampled since by Sugarhill Gang, Run-DMC, the Beastie Boys, Nas, Massive Attack, Moby, and dozens more, almost always without the broader public ever hearing the original Incredible Bongo Band recording in full.

That’s the whole story in miniature: a cover of a cover, made by session players for a documentary soundtrack, that never found an audience for the song it actually was and instead found one of the most consequential audiences in modern music for eight bars buried inside it. Nobody involved in making “Apache” built it to be sampled – the entire concept of sampling as a compositional tool didn’t really exist yet. The song just happened to contain the right eight bars, at the right tempo, with the right amount of empty space in the mix, for a DJ three thousand miles away to find a use for it that none of its own makers anticipated.

Greatest of All Time. The most sampled breakbeat in hip-hop history, lifted out of a record that never once cracked the charts under its own name.

Hero image: DJ Kool Herc at Hot 97’s VIP Lounge, New York, 2006, by Richard Alexander Caraballo, licensed under CC BY 3.0.