DJ Danger Mouse‘s Grey Album is, at the very least, an audacious conceptual coup. DangerMouse combines the unchanged vocal tracks of Jay-Z’s Black Album with instrumentals derived from the Beatles’ (so-called) white album.
Musically, I’m not convinced this re-engineering really works; voice and music don’t really go together convincingly, but neither do they clash in ways that seem particularly meaningful. There’s no real “dialectical interaction” here; and, as a commentary on race, or on black and white music, nothing in the actual sounds goes beyond the initial idea.
Still, the results are weird enough to deserve a couple of listens. The Beatles material is cut up and rhythmically manhandled, in order to line up with Jay-Z’s raps.
Predictably, Danger Mouse received a cease and desist order from EMI Records for this stunt. Yet another example of the way that copyright is inimical to creativity. Sampling and recombination are what music (and culture in general) is about right now. The paradox of art today is that originality comes out of repetition: from altering, and doing violence to, what already exists. To ban sampling is not to protect original art, but to make sure that only derivative and unimaginative works ever get made.
Fortunately illegal art still has the album for download.
The Grey Album
DJ Danger Mouse‘s Grey Album is, at the very least, an audacious conceptual coup. DangerMouse combines the unchanged vocal tracks of Jay-Z’s Black Album with instrumentals derived from the Beatles’ (so-called) white album.
Musically, I’m not convinced this re-engineering really works; voice and music don’t really go together convincingly, but neither do they clash in ways that seem particularly meaningful. There’s no real “dialectical interaction” here; and, as a commentary on race, or on black and white music, nothing in the actual sounds goes beyond the initial idea.
Still, the results are weird enough to deserve a couple of listens. The Beatles material is cut up and rhythmically manhandled, in order to line up with Jay-Z’s raps.
Predictably, Danger Mouse received a cease and desist order from EMI Records for this stunt. Yet another example of the way that copyright is inimical to creativity. Sampling and recombination are what music (and culture in general) is about right now. The paradox of art today is that originality comes out of repetition: from altering, and doing violence to, what already exists. To ban sampling is not to protect original art, but to make sure that only derivative and unimaginative works ever get made.
Fortunately illegal art still has the album for download.