Gotchyer! Caught with their hands in the sampled cookie jar, chart mega-weights have to fess up to their clever camouflage -- and often outright thievery -- of vintage disco, soul, jazz, and blues records. Which means this quite entertaining compilation piles on all types of original recordings that have remade their way into popular consciousness via the circuitous route of record-box revisionism. Want to know where that reggae break in
Prodigy's "Out of Space" came from? It's here (
Max Romeo and the Upsetters's "Chase the Devil"). Care to have someone show you where
Fatboy Slim lifted the surf-guitar hop "Rockafeller Skank" from? Here, too (The Just Brothers' "Sliced Tomatoes"). And so it goes for 40 tracks, exposing the sampledelic smoke and mirrors with understated viciousness. Even when it sometimes highlights the superiority of the updates --
Patti Page's "Cape Cod," for instance, lacks the teary comedown luster of
Groove Armada,
Lonnie Liston Smith's "Expansions" misses its helium-funk mark that
Stetsasonic nails, and
Herbie Hancock's "Bring Down the Birds" doesn't even get within hip-shaking distance of the uninhibited glee of
Deee-Lite's "Groove Is in ihe Heart." But as you can guess, most of these exposés show the ransacking hacks for what they are; it's well-known that
MC Hammer,
Robbie Williams, and
Eminem were stretching the definition of songwriting. The latter of which does nothing new in his
Labi Siffre-induced "My Name Is" except nasal karaoke. Extremely convenient, brutally unsympathetic, and -- at the very least -- educational,
Sampled is terrific fun. The perfect compilation for transforming into the "Pish posh, my good man, you want to hear who really wrote that?" plague of any party.