Ever wondered where those tireless urban tunes you blagged from Napster and Kazaa where stolen from in the first place? No? Well I suppose it is a little like following the trail of that ‘hooky’ car radio you picked up in the local along with those 200 Benson & Hedges and that pirate of the new Bond movie. Sometimes it’s best not to ask too many questions. But if you did want to ask, and you did want to recover some degree of self-respect before the trail went completely cold you could do worse than have someone run off a copy of ‘Gold Digging – As Sampled by 2Pac‘ featuring all the swag before it got breaked-up, slowed down, pitch-stretched and layered on 2Pac’s workstation. This is source-swag, moonshine. The original pasty. Which pretty much explains why there’s so many weird and wonderful things on it; I mean, where else would you get Funkadelic’s ‘Get Your Ass & Jam’ rubbing shoulder-pads with that piss-awful track by Mister Mister? Or Bruce Hornsby’s ‘The Way It Is’ sharing a toke with Sly and the Family Stone?
The third volume in the Gold Digging Series, which previously covered Kanye West and Jay Z, ‘Sampled BY 2Pac’ does pretty much what it says on the tin; it shows you where he got his samples from. ‘I Ain’t Mad At Ya’ sampled DeBarge’s ‘A Dream’, Joe Cocker’s ‘Woman To Woman’ got fleeced for ‘Califronia Love’ and Elton John’s ‘Indian Sunset’ got lifted for ‘Ghetto Gospel’. And so it goes on, occasionally unexpected, occasionally predictable but always smooth, funky and soulful, a complete contrast, you might say, to that sap who sold you the car-radio.
What goes around, comes around. And records are really no different.