February 14, 2004
The Grey Album
DJ Danger Mouse took the instrumental track of the Beatles' White Album and the vocals from Jay Z's Black Album and created a bunch of angry folks in the record industry.
Along the way, he created The Grey Album, available here at illegal-art.com. The full album is there in mp3... at least until legal action is taken against them, as was threatened against the original site that posted it, waxy.org.
And who took the legal action?
Not the artist, but the record company. And not the artist's recording company, but the Beatles' recording company. Not Ringo or Paul, not Jay-Z, but the Beatles' recording industry.
Is it really likely that Beatles fans are going to purchase this hip-hop album with a Beatles background instead of the White Album? Doubtful. So what's the deal? Just punks, I guess.
You can read the whole account by Eric Olsen (not to be confused with Eric Owl) at blogcritics.org here.
By the way, the album is pretty good. Rap is not typically my favorite -- with the exception of Jurassic 5 -- but mixing it with the Beatles' instrumentation made Jay Z's album very attractive and, in fact, enjoyable to me. "December 4th" was my favorite track, using the Beatles' "Mother Nature's Child." for its backbeats and sample track.
And speaking of sampling... "Hey Ya, Charlie Brown!"
