I l0 Kenneth Gloag Service, Tom. Liner Notes to Adès, Piano Quintet. EMl5 516642,2005. Tarnopolsky, Mattas. Programme Note to Adès, Asyla. London: Faber Music, 1997. Venn, Edward. "Asylum Gained? Aspects of Meaning in Thomas Adès's Asyla." Music Analysis 25/l - 2 (2006): 89 - 120. Vr'hittall, Arnold. "Thomas Adès." Ifre New Gro\e Dictionary of Music and Musicians Vol. 1. Eds Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrèll. London: Macmillan,200l. 1 s6. ANonswVy'Hsr-A.N The "Amen" Breakbeat as Fratriarchal Totem It is generally accepted that music signifies'. "that it can sound happy, sad, sexy, funky, silly, 'American,' religious, or whatever" (McClary 20- 21). Notably, music is engendered; it is read as signifying specific em- bodied subjectivities, and also hails an audience it constitutes as so positioned: it "inscribes subject positions" (Irving 107). Thus rock music in the West is invariably considered a "male culture comprising male activities and styles" (Cohen l7). Musical genres and gestures, however, a.re not inherently "male" or "female"; they are produced as such, or more precisely, coproduced (Lohan and Faulkner 322). Music is a key re- source in the constitutive performance ofgender, and vice versa. Like other sorts of cultural texts, then, music works for us, as fans, as performers, as listeners and producers, and it is crucial to ask what kind of work it does and how this work is achieved (Badley xiii). The inten- tion in this chapter is to demonstrate how a particular sample, the amen break, can be productively understood as afratriarchal totem: in its work as an element in cultural politics, as a mode of social practice, and as an element in a significatory system. This statement requires some un- packing and contextualisation, over the course of which I will draw on a number of resources, including totemism as we find it in classical sociology. Totemism played a key role in the theories of Durkheim and Freud, the "founding fathers" of sociology and psychoanalysis respectively (Friedland 239). Indeed, among some academics, the Elementary Forms and Totem and Taboo themselves possess a value bordering on the to- temic. This is despite the empirical and theoretical difficulties around totemism as presented in these classic accounts (Jones). Totemism has recently been compellingly deployed, for instance, to account for and critique such facets of contemporary life as war and nationalism (Marvin and Ingle) and advertising and consumer culture (Sheffield). However, I will draw on theories of totemism, in the memorable phrase of Lévi-