Album A Day: Jay-Z + DJ Danger Mouse – The Grey Album

Artist: Jay-Z + DJ Danger Mouse (With A Little Help from The Beatles)
Album: The Grey Album
Released: February 2004

It takes balls to mess with the music of The Beatles. Too many people love it too much, and are willing to take up pitchforks and torches in the name of protecting it. On the other hand, Jay-Z encourages and enables people to mess with his music, releasing a capella versions of his solo albums for people to remix and mash up as they please. So when Danger Mouse combined The Beatles’ White Album with Jay-Z’s The Black Album, he was bringing two worlds together in more ways than one. Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly, depending on your willingness to buy into genre-bending projects), The Grey Album is an effective reimagining of both albums.

For the most part, The Beatles are just the backing band here, and Jay-Z takes center stage to shaken and stirred stylings of the Fab Four’s music. As opposed to lesser remix projects which are a simple sandwich job, Danger Mouse runs The White Album through the gauntlet, chopping, splicing, looping, and mashing some of the most vulnerable and telling Beatles songs. Jay-Z’s contribution is more or less on point, a straightforward delivery of arguably his most vulnerable album. As a result you get a very stripped down feeling from an album made purely out of production equipment.

There is, of course, the other story behind the album, the one that sparked a still raging battle between starving artists and the copyright-thumping record labels. I’m not going to verbally pleasure myself and rave about how the companies “just don’t get it”, because we’ve heard that a thousand times already. Both sides have a valid argument, but neither side seems to understand that the landscape for this kind of work is still being painted, and frankly, no one really gets it. In all likelihood this conversation will continue until eventually technology evolves to the next key battleground, but we all owe a debt to Danger Mouse for starting the discussion in the first place.

Jay-Z + Danger Mouse – 99 Problems (samples “Helter Skelter) (YSI)