Chuck D and Flavor Flav of Public Enemy circa 1990. Photograph: Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis
"The music is in no way politically-based," says Gregg Gillis, aka Girl Talk, aged 25.
Night Ripper is the new album from the Pittsburgh mash-up-maker. Painstakingly assembled over 12 months - 6,500 samples whittled down to 250 excerpted indie disco grooves and gangster hollers crossfaded with Top 40 interference - Night Ripper has made Gillis an instant hipster icon.
It's not the first album made purely out of other people's music, but it is the first samples-only album to have a mainstream release and aggressive promotion. Night Ripper simply rips up records, crudely Pritt Sticks them into a cubist infinity and audaciously lists each beat and vocal donor on the CD sleeve.
It's a fun, if disposable, listen. Making no attempt to disguise its sources, Girl Talk is a highly-evolved Jive Bunny, shunting together chart hits with an ADD glee. There are even meta nods to sampling infamy - snippets of Pump Up The Volume, Bitter Sweet Symphony and Elastica's Connection - tunes whose plagiarism was once so controversial, that, in this context, just seem silly.
Two record decks and your dad's old funk collection was once the working-class black answer to punk. Hip-hop's innovation of turntablism and sampling crystallised in the bricolage of Public Enemy's production team. Firing up MOR soul samples into an apocalyptic squall, Hank Shocklee's Bomb Squad recontextualised black music as a sonic weapon. It was very political, but it now also seems very quaint.
In 1989, the Beastie Boys dropped Paul's Boutique - the White Album of sampling - but in the same year the Turtles sued De La Soul over an unauthorised sample, and the case set a legal precedent. Sampling became risky business and a rich man's game, with record labels regularly checking if their musical property had been tea-leafed.
Sample-based pop eventually tailed off, but Girl Talk hopes that he can test the defence of "fair use" against any artist pursuing legal action against him; that the juxtaposition of so many samples constitutes a new work. On top of the fact that he hasn't got any royalties to sue for, it looks unlikely anyone would bother. Sampling, which once seemed world-ending in the eyes of the music industry, is now non-threatening and a bit passé, particularly with today's availability and ease of original music-making software.
Sampling has found a new home in geeks like me and Girl Talk: white internet nerds trying to spot obscure rock or rap samples (check the paulsboutique.info site). Anoraks, bloggers and DJs who have found an outlet for their autism in the easily-pirated Ableton Live software - now de rigueur for all bedroom Bomb Squads. Hank Shocklee would weep at what his art has become.
· This article first appeared in The Guardian Guide
