The Story of The Grey Album
Digital technology has majorly enhanced the way music is developed, and the ease at which fantastic, genre-bending music can be created, yet the industry that surrounds it is still plagued with the same backwards attitude that kills innovation. Sampling, despite many records and albums proving otherwise, is still considered an illegitimate practise. The fact is sampling is an art form, and should be respected as such, because without it, we would not see the renowned talents of the likes of Danger Mouse.
Before his big breakthrough, Mouse had previously worked on trip hop LPs, under the name Pelican City, as well as on underground hip-hop projects, such as his collaborative album with Jemini, released one year before his breakthrough. Steadily building his name, Danger Mouse would have an epiphany at the end of 2003. When JAY-Z released an acapella edition of his seminal, recently-released LP The Black Album, Mouse had the idea to create an entire mashup album, mixing this acapella version of the Black Album with samples from The Beatles’ White Album, thus christening the Grey Album. Mashup albums were a growing concept at the time, with artists like Soulwax and Girl Talk releasing musical collages stacked with layers of elements, however few mashup albums were concise with their sample usage, a norm that Danger Mouse would break. Though a fanatic of both The Beatles and Jay, he told The New York Times, “I stuck to those two because I thought it would be more challenging and more fun and more of a statement to what you could do with sampling alone.” And so, 2 weeks in a tiny bedroom in a small suburban house in LA were spent tirelessly working on the ambitious project.
Preparation was considerably less challenging on the JAY-Z half of the project. Since Mouse was using official acapellas, all he needed to do was measure the beats per minute (BPM) of each track, a practise that allowed DJs to blend tracks together seamlessly by setting a common tempo. He then picked apart the White Album, searching for instrumental flourishes, a spare riff, a drum strike, and would collect all these samples to construct the beats later on. Given that the Beatles material was recorded in 1968, elements needed to be edited slightly to enhance punchiness of the samples, such as doubling-up hand claps in “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” to make them more prominent and impactful in the mix. He deconstructed the sound of both artists, and recycled fragments of audio to create something new.
The result is a truly special leg of work, one so detailed that it continues to surprise with not just each track, but each further listen. JAY-Z’s razor-sharp flows are married perfectly with the wild instrumentation from what is often considered the Beatles’ most experimental album, which is even more commendable. Some of the beats Mouse conjures could even make it past the cutting floor of the Black Album sessions; they fit neatly inside its dirt-covered walls.
“What More Can I Say” is paired with the hazy slow-burner “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, and with Danger Mouse as the middle-man, Jay nestles into the crispy drums and ringing pianos backing him. The spliced guitars of the original Beatles song leak into the beat to add texture to the Frankenstein’s monster - sprinkle in George Harrison on the chorus, and one of the Black Album’s most potent cuts is given a reinvigorated impetus. On “Dirt Off Your Shoulder”, Mouse grabs the sombre guitar melodies of “Julia”, and chops them like a gourmet chef, splicing them swiftly to create a frantic amalgamation of re-arranged notes and thumping drum hits. While the original, Timbaland-crafted instrumental was laid-back, this is jerk-forward material.
Mouse sends a shockwave up the spine of the relatively low-key cut “Allure” with the swagger-loaded guitars of “Dear Prudence” burnt onto the track. The loop here has enough kinetic energy to start a Lamborghini, and it gives an excellent backdrop to Jay’s verbal circulation. The drums mirror the original Neptunes-produced track in how it creates an exalted rhythm - it’s one of the many instances where Danger Mouse improves on the Black Album’s original production. In 2006, Danger Mouse told the New York Times, “I did not make the Grey Album for music fans. I made it to impress people who were really into sampling.” And he certainly did just that. By closely examining the music, with a strong intent and a keen eye for hunting samples like many mashup artists and producers before and after him, he managed to not only surpass the novelty factor of such an idea, but transform two of the most respected bodies of work from two of the most respected names in music, in ways never thought possible - it is most certainly art.
“I stuck to those two because I thought it would be more challenging and more fun and more of a statement to what you could do with sampling alone.”
Upon its release onto the internet, the album garnered praise from both JAY-Z and the two remaining members of the Beatles, Paul and Ringo. However, not everyone was on board with the album’s release.
Mouse knew about record label EMI’s tight grasp on the copyrighted material of The Beatles, rarely allowing their material to be used in other media. While the use of JAY-Z’s work was less contested, as projects like this were exactly why Jay released an acapella version of his record, sampling the Beatles without permission would result in the project becoming an illegal piece of media, and could spell huge legal ramifications. Thus, he kept the project’s development as low-key as he could, choosing to release it through 3,000 CDs handed to fellow DJs and musicians. Yet, it made its way onto the internet and caught colossal amounts of attention, all the way up to receiving acclaim from New York Times and Rolling Stone.
Eventually, this overwhelming attention caught the ear of EMI, who sent Mouse a cease and desist letter, allowing him to halt issue of the project without legal ramification. Danger Mouse complied and stopped distributing his work, but sites like downhillbattle.org countered that the album “honors both the Beatles and JAY-Z”, but that EMI have “shown zero flexibility and not a glimmer of interest in the artistic significance of this work.” This website would go on to conduct a monumental defiance of EMI’s wishes.
On February 24th, 2004, about 170 file hosting websites had a full copy of the Grey Album available, going against EMI’s cease and desist letter that had been sent to many of these sites. This radically disobedient day became known as “Grey Tuesday”, and was arranged in protest of the attempts to censor the album based on what they thought was unfair sampling rules. Word was spread around the internet as a result, with many notable mainstream and specialised publications reporting on the story. The Streisand Effect kicked into high gear as that day saw over 100,000 copies of the album being downloaded in America alone, theoretically making it the No. 1 album in the US. It shows that there was a significant amount of people wanting to listen to the album, and had EMI just published the album themselves, they would have had a huge success on their hands. The historic day even provoked an analysis from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who supported the protest acts and called into question the legitimacy of EMI’s claim on the White Album’s copyright, since the album was published before federal copyright protection came into the frame in 1972. Since 2011, current law states that pre-’72 recordings are protected until 2067, but at the time, it sparked discussion about exactly that, another offset from the Grey Album. Grey Tuesday was one of the first examples of cyberactivism, a concept so fetal at the time that it was coined two years later by Michael Ayers, who cited the event as a primary example of cyberactivism, calling it a “day where symbolic, cultural, and political protests are conveyed in the virtual”.
While the people arguably won the battle and stuck it to EMI, the corporates ultimately won the war. The Grey Album is not yet considered to all as the masterful, fundamental piece of art it is, though it is freely available across the internet as corporate entities lost interest in holding the album from consumers. Thankfully, the biggest winner from the LP’s controversy was Danger Mouse himself.
The success of the Grey Album would lead to Mouse becoming a hot prospect in the music industry, as its eccentric outlaw, later going on to produce and work with Gorillaz, CeeLo Green, the Black Keys and Adele. All of these collaborations would earn him Grammy nominations, winning 6 of the awards as of 2018. The Grey Album will go down in history as a game changer, not just because of how much political attention it caught, how much discussion on the creativity versus legality it sparked, but also because of how it changed the perception of one of the most important weapons in a musician’s arsenal, and how sampling is an art form, and should be respected as such.