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| by rocafan on 3/27/2004 09:15:00 AM |
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LOL EW Makes Some Sense
 For a record that seemed like a high-concept joke, Danger Mouse's
The Grey Album has developed into serious business. As you may have
heard, Danger Mouse -- a.k.a. underground hip-hop producer Brian
Burton -- wiped away the backing tracks from Jay-Z's ''The Black
Album'' and replaced them with beats and textures created from
snippets of The Beatles, famously known as ''The White Album''
(hence the new work's nyuck-nyuck title). In liner notes of early
copies that began circulating in stores and on the Web, Mouse dubbed
it ''an art project/experiment I did that I thought some people
might like.'' Among those who didn't like it very much were EMI, the
Beatles' corporate parent, which issued cease-and-desist orders to
anyone distributing the disc. In protest, hundreds of websites
offered free downloads of the album on ''Grey Tuesday,'' Feb. 24,
making the homemade disc the most talked-about, and probably
listened-to, underground recording of all time.
Legally, ''The Grey Album'' shouldn't have happened without sample
clearance. (Anyone who thinks EMI wouldn't have cared is naive.)
Artistically, it shouldn't have even worked, since the merging of
Jay-Z and Lennon-McCartney is essentially a mash-up -- the played-
out vogue of melding, Frankenstein-style, the vocal from one song
and the instrumental backup from another.
But concerns about authorization and logic fall by the wayside as
soon as one actually hears ''The Grey Album,'' a startlingly,
shockingly wonderful piece of pop art. Although musicians have been
fusing rap and classic rock for decades, few have approached it with
Danger Mouse's ingenuity and imagination. The producer took
familiar ''White Album'' motifs -- the strums from ''Rocky
Raccoon,'' the harpsichord from ''Piggies,'' the gentle guitar
figure from ''Julia'' -- and looped them, lending Jay-Z's music a
radiant new sparkle. Metallic shards of ''Glass Onion'' guitar slice
through a newly propulsive ''Encore,'' replacing Kanye West's old-
school-homage production; ''99 Problems'' now rattles just as
effectively to the riff from ''Helter Skelter,'' rather than the
original's Mountain and Billy Squier samples.
At the same time, ''The Grey Album'' works on more than a name-that-
hook level. The grafting of the dramatic piano from ''While My
Guitar Gently Weeps'' onto ''What More Can I Say'' gives Jay-Z's
admissions of his hustle-driven career an added tension and
grandeur. The use of ''Mother Nature's Son'' as a new raison d'etre
for ''December 4th'' isn't just appropriate -- both tunes are about
growing up -- but witty. ''Public Service Announcement,'' ''The
Black Album'''s second interlude, replaces the original's taut beats
with the floaty sounds of ''Long, Long, Long,'' resulting in a sort
of hip-hop techno-folk. In a strange way, ''The Grey Album'' hangs
together better than ''The Black Album,'' since the latter's slew of
producers and styles -- from the Neptunes' R&B slink to Eminem's
brooding symphonic hip-hop to Timbaland's familiar dots-and-dashes
approach -- made for a patchwork end result.
Danger Mouse's ''Black Album'' remixes aren't the first and maybe
not even the best -- one website lists nearly a dozen other illicit
Jay-Z DJ mix discs. But it's an exemplary example of the form, not
to mention a legal flashpoint: If Danger Mouse didn't intend to
officially release it and wasn't actually selling it, does EMI have
sufficient grounds to clamp down on its availability? But in the way
it draws a connection between two very different eras of pop
rebellion and artistry, ''The Grey Album'' raises a far more
important question: Shouldn't bad rap-rock, of the limpbizkit
variety, be illegal instead(*HECK YEAH!)?
-Taken from Entertainment Weekly
Free
Apple iPod Program
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