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The mythic ‘Grey Album’: Danger Mouse’s mashup of The Beatles and Jay Z
A man in the pub once told me about a mythic record called The Grey Album, a strange masterpiece very few people knew. Danger Mouse was name-dropped as the masked wizard behind it. It was explained to me that it’s called the Grey Album because it combines the heavyweight champions of rock and rap with The Beatles and Jay-Z, blending into the same palette—a perfect mashup of The White Album and The Black Album. The result, he said, was like nothing you’ve ever heard before.
This was the sort of advertising pitch a PR company could only dream of: some fabled masterpiece with three huge names and a solid dose of mystery. It created a sense of awe, and that subsumed all other questions. This was the perfect magnet for the internet, especially in the early days back in 2004 when echoes of the album were first reported, and the information highway was a sparse and mystic land full of hopefuls arriving like pioneers of the old west. We’ll get to the truth and drop the analogies later because it is the hubbub surrounding the Grey Album where the story lies.
In time gone by, music was full of mysteries and covert names. You had artists who would appear in the studio out of nowhere and disappear, leaving a rogue masterpiece in their wake. You’d have George Harrison popping up as a session musician under a pseudonym and secret producers who remain unknown. Those days are now largely bygone. The musical mysteries we now unearth are reissues from this epic period of history. In some ways, The Grey Album had a huge hand to play in all of this.
When Danger Mouse first made the record, he intended it as an art project with a limited release of a mere 3000 copies. That was the fate it seemed to be following for a while. Then one of those elusive discs made it to the New Yorker, which set in motion a strange series of events well ahead of their time and with massive reverberations for the future. A review of the record went proto-viral then the Robin Hood mob of the internet decreed that the record was for everyone.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” Danger Mouse commented when a storm took hold of the record. “I just sent out a few tracks (and) now online stores are selling it and people are downloading it all over the place”. At this point, censors got involved—it was as though the record was playing out the rehearsal script for the future. EMI stepped in and attempted to halt the unapproved distribution of the album. The album had gone from arthouse mystery to copyright chaos in a matter of months at the beginning of 2004.
The battleground was a unique one for myriad reasons. Firstly, the fanfare was justified. This truly was a magnificent album, and like all magnificent albums, it reached this lofty perch because it was in some way pioneering. As Danger Mouse explained regarding the art behind the debacle: “A lot of people just assume I took some Beatles and, you know, threw some Jay-Z on top of it or mixed it up or looped it around, but it’s really a deconstruction. It’s not an easy thing to do”.
It was one man’s passion project, but now it was out of his control. It had been released like an invasive species in the online wilderness and was going wild. “I was obsessed with the whole project, that’s all I was trying to do, see if I could do this. Once I got into it, I didn’t think about anything but finishing it,” that was the album’s only intent. It was an exhibition of “what you could do with sample alone,” but now it was part of something bigger.
You see, the crux came with the fact that it was urban and technologically new. It fit the libertarian notion of art and technology creating new mediums. As Danger Mouse asserted: “It is an art form. It is music. You can do different things; it doesn’t have to be just what some people call stealing. It can be a lot more than that”. However, ironically, it almost did come down to people stealing it.
Everything is free now was the message of the fans who took hold of the reins once it began to drip-feed online. They may have meant free in the libertarian fashion, but it applied in an economic sense. When EMI were attempting the block this day-brightening art, they decided to make a stand. A music industry activist group called Downhill Battle, who preach file sharing as part of the participatory culture needed to tackle the oligopoly of the music industry, decided to launch Grey Tuesday.
February 24th, 2004, would mark the day a mass internet civil disobedience protest occurred. The Downhill Battle group decreed that the hunt for the mythic Grey Album was over for the masses, and the corporate giant EMI would not be allowed to stop people from listening to this pioneering new record. For 24 hours, a string of participating websites made the album free to download. One hundred seventy websites were on board, and an album that was originally pitched as a 3000 copy outing ended up being downloaded over 100,000 times in one single day.
This was a paradigm and portent of what the internet has become. You see, there was very little discourse after the event. It opened up the libertarian door. Grey Tuesday participants claimed that the sampling was fair use, and EMI had no say in the matter. Danger Mouse merely wanted to pursue an art project which he subsequently achieved and moved on. Now the mystery was over, the album was out there, and nobody did anything after that.
It is by no means a detraction of the record’s brilliance to say that this was an extension of its artistry. It had entered the modern discourse of technology and art colliding. Paul McCartney himself would later put his finger on this front when he commented: “It was really cool when hip-hop started, you would hear references in lyrics, you always felt honoured. It’s exactly what we did in the beginning – introducing black soul music to a mass white audience. It’s come full circle. It’s, well, cool. When you hear a riff similar to your own, your first feeling is ‘rip-off’. After you’ve got over it you think, ‘Look at that, someone’s noticed that riff’”.
And regarding EMI’s intervention, he commented: “I didn’t mind when something like that happened with The Grey Album. But the record company minded. They put up a fuss. But I was like, ‘Take it easy guys, it’s a tribute’”. It’s a tribute which reached the masses, but it also furthered the progression of music. It really did bring the legacy of The Beatles and hip hop full circle in many ways. However, it also became the moment that people realised the weird crux of the internet: the repercussions are simultaneously huge and non-existent.
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