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Plunderphonics is the assembly of new music from other people's records on one condition: the theft must be audible. John Oswald had been practicing it long before it had a name, cutting and splicing other people's records since the late sixties and modeling the practice on William Burroughs's literary cut-up technique — in 1974, with Burroughs's own blessing, he cut up recordings of the writer reading his texts on how to cut things up. The name and the theory came in 1985, in a talk titled "Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative," where Oswald spliced "plunderphonics" together from "plunder" and "phonics." His defense he borrowed from Milton: it is plagiarism only if the thing is not bettered by the borrower, and the talk was later reprinted under that very title, "Bettered by the Borrower." The method's single rule: the source must remain recognizable, and it must be broken. As long as the quote stays hidden, it is ordinary sampling; as long as it stays recognizable but untouched, it is what Oswald called an electro-quotation. Plunderphonics begins the moment a recognizable quote gets bent: cut, stretched, sped up or slowed down.

The album was the theory in action. Twenty-five tracks, each built from the recordings of a single artist: Michael Jackson's "Bad" is shredded into tiny fragments and reassembled, Dolly Parton is slowed down until she sings in a male voice, and further down the list come Beethoven, Webern, Glenn Gould and Metallica. Oswald mailed the run of a thousand CDs, stamped "not for sale," to radio stations, libraries, journalists and the very artists he had taken apart — without charging anyone. On the cover he put a collage: Jackson's head on a nude female body.

The reckoning came on Christmas Eve 1989: lawyers for the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA), acting for Jackson and CBS, demanded that he stop distribution and recall the entire run. Recalling what was already out was impossible; by February 1990 Oswald handed over his remaining three hundred discs along with the master tapes, and they were physically destroyed — but seven hundred copies were already living their own life, dubbed onto cassettes and hand-copied discs. In 2001 the album was reissued by Seeland, the label run by Negativland, a band that had fought its own sampling war. Oswald himself got away with a single phrase: "They insisted I quit playing Santa Claus." But the evidence was never the free distribution — it was the method's own condition. As long as the source stays hidden, nobody sues; plunderphonics begins where the theft can be heard, and so does the lawsuit.