Observing popular culture with a critical eye reveals aspects of historical trends, social struggles, aesthetic signification, and other aspects of cultural practice that are superficially unapparent. American culture, in particular, when examined hermeneutically, will often reveal remnants of this society’s violently racialized past that still exist and affect social interaction at every level. Although the first half of 2004 has already seen many culturally loaded examples of culturally significant popular cultural events with respect to the racial imagination, most notably the Super Bowl fiasco involving Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake, the voting scandal on American Idol, and the trials of Michael Jackson, Kobe Bryant, and R. Kelly, I would like to explore another popular phenomenon which, despite immediately apparent signs to the contrary, is hardly seen in the light of racialized cultural practice. In this paper I will discuss this phenomenon, the success of The Grey Album, by Danger Mouse, an album which combines vocal samples from The Black Album, the supposed swan song of possibly the most popular hip-hop artist working, Jay-Z, with The Beatles, better known as The White Album, the ulti-penultimate album by possibly the most popular rock group ever, the Beatles. It is my hope that this essay will bring together such issues as race, history, technology, the media, cultural propriety, creativity, aesthetics, even paradigms, in ways which I feel are not found in discussions of popular music often enough. I will start with a brief introduction of the development of The Grey Album phenomenon, which will explain why I see it as an object of such pressing and critical attention.

Timeline

In December of 2003, twenty six year old Brian Burton, a.k.a. Danger Mouse, an up-and-coming hip-hop deejay, spent several weeks holed up in his apartment working on the album, the result of a moment of inspiration after hearing both source recordings on the same day. "I was obsessed with the whole project, that's all I was trying to do, see if I could do this," Burton told MTV recently. "Once I got into it, I didn't think about anything but finishing it."¹ He sent out a few homemade CDs of his artistic experiment to friends before the New Year; less than a month later, in response to overwhelming enthusiasm, a few thousand complimentary CDs circulated throughout the hip-hop community, and were quickly digitally dumped onto computers and circulated heavily online. The press soon caught wind of the "thermonuclear”^{2 3} and by early February nearly every popular-music-related publication had announced the album’s planned commercial release. This soon led to trouble for Burton.

Jay-Z’s record label had sent the vocal tracks that Burton used for The Grey Album to several hip-hop producers after the hip-hop emcee expressed disappointment with the finished version of The Black Album. Distributing a capella versions of albums to promote remixes (and consequently more buzz) is common practice in the hip-hop industry; these remixes are frequently the quickest path to fame for unknown deejays and producers. So while Burton had artist permission to use The Black Album, the same can not be said about the Beatles’ recordings. Since the Beastie Boys and the Funk Brothers sampled Abbey Road like mad for their 1989 album Paul’s Boutique, various lawsuits against sampling artists have situated current interpretation of the law in such a way that EMI, the record label that owns the rights to the Beatles’ body of recorded material, has the final say on who can use the material. And EMI is very strict. Covering a tune acceptable, sampling it is not. One has to wonder why one group of people can be so militant about propriety, while others are so willing to share.

By early February, responding to the hype surrounding the project, EMI had sent “cease and desist” letters to Burton and several record stores that had allegedly sold copies of The Grey Album. This only led to greater dissemination online and calls for copyright law reform. These two patterns intersected on February 24th, when over two hundred websites willfully and illegally distributed The Grey Album online to protest the actions of EMI, only to be served “cease and desist” letters by Capitol Records, which owns the songwriting rights to the Lennon/McCartney oeuvre. The day of protest, documented at greytuesday.org, achieved a so-called critical mass of publicity, and over one hundred thousand copies of the album were downloaded from affiliated sites on that day alone, enough to make the album platinum, had it been sold by conventional means.

While publicity for The Grey Album has waned over the past month, and it is yet to be determined whether EMI and Capital will actually press charges, the attention of the press and online weblogs and editorial journals do deserve some critical attention, for at least two reasons. First, the story calls into question the current state of copyright law, who it serves, and its effect on cultural creativity and artistic freedom. This aspect will no doubt be examined in depth in the following months.

White

But I would like to look at another side of the story that has been told by the media. An interesting shift took place during the two months when The Grey Album achieved critical fame. Early stories present Burton as a young hip-hop producer, influenced by the varying music scenes he has experienced while living in Queens, Westchester, Athens, Georgia, London, and Los Angeles. The Grey Album was discussed as a product of hip-hop culture.⁴ But as the story picked up momentum, and the role of online music swapping increased, hip-hop culture almost disappeared, and the album became the latest development in a genre known as the bootleg, or the mash-up.⁵

Mash-ups, as defined by in the press over the past few years, consist of two popular songs, combined with very little editing, often resulting in an ironic juxtaposition or satiric comment on the original meaning of the songs. According to the journalistic record, they are primarily made by young white men from the U.S. or Europe, with access to expensive up-to-date computer technology, and have been popular on London radio stations since 2000.⁶ Although the first mash-up is claimed to be created by a musician in Ohio, historical precedents can be found in Negativland, the Plunderphonic work of John Oswald, European house music remixes, even musique concrete. Two of the earliest and most widely renown examples of the mash-up are Freelance Hellraiser’s “A Stroke of Genie-us” (the Strokes and Christina Aguilera) and “Smells Like Teen Booty” by Soulwax (Destiny’s Child and Nirvana). My personal favorite, one of the more comical examples, by 2Many DJs, combines “Forgot About Dre” by Eminem and the Indiana Jones theme.

While it is possible to see Danger Mouse as what Deborah Haynes calls the “postmodern parodic ex-centric bricoleur,” creating a bricolage of copied sound, working outside of powerful center of the music industry (i.e. those who own the sound), this locates The Grey Album too completely in a postmodern aesthetic dominated by white “(primarily) European and American male philosophers and theorists.”⁷ Haynes also echoes Hal Foster’s critique of the postmodern aesthetic, when it is reactionary rather than resistant.⁸

The work of most mash-up artists can be perceived, even if only in the slightest bit, as reactionary, holding very little regard for the original songs which they parody, bemoaning the current state of popular music. But Burton is quick to dispel the idea that he is disrespectful of the materials he used for The Grey Album. Considering the reaction of the remaining Beatles to his project, he has admitted, “If they say that they hate it, and that I messed up their music, I think I’ll put my tail between my legs and go.” If Burton’s combination of two archetypal examples of white and black music reflects a postmodern aesthetic, it is resistant rather than reactionary, creating a utopian possibility for the desegregation of popular music and the freedom of creativity from proprietary restrictions. This commentary is rather blatantly displayed in the titles and significance of the sources he chose and the resultant title of his project, but also less immediately apparent in the musical choices that Burton has made in combining rock and hip-hop.

When we rehear The Grey Album with the memory of other mash-ups fresh in our minds, we notice that what Burton is doing is actually quite different from the conventional compositional style of the mash-up genre. Unlike many hip-hop remixes, he sticks to only two sources, and the vocal track is hardly altered, much like other mash-ups. But The Grey Album differs from most mash-ups with Burton’s alteration of the Beatles’ music, which he drastically cuts up to create new beats out of basic sonic elements, a process of deconstruction, manipulation, and reconstruction that has historical precedents in the work of DJ Shadow and Lee “Scratch” Perry, among many others. The new sounds are sequenced like a drum machine, and Burton makes beats that recall the drum programming styles of Timbaland or Daryl Simmons.

Burton also deliberately chooses the Beatles samples that accompany particular tracks from Jay-Z’s album. For example, he pairs “December 4th,” a song about Jay-Z’s childhood and relationship with his mother, with the guitar lick from Paul McCartney’s “Mother Nature’s Son.” On “99 Problems,” originally accompanied by a heavy guitar track produced by Rick Rubin, Burton uses the heaviest guitar-laden tune on The White Album, “Helter Skelter.” The Grey Album is filled with similarly subtle choices, and the connections that Burton makes in these moments are doubly significant, changing the meaning of both originals. The two disparate elements are not only juxtaposed, but interact in a continuous call and response of signification.

Black

Details of The Grey Album demonstrate several elements of a black cultural aesthetic, as identified by music scholars over the past few decades. Olly Wilson, a composer at the University of California, Berkeley, explained in “The Heterogenous Sound Ideal in African-American Music” (1992), that the black musical tradition is constantly informed by a handful of important rhythmic and textural guidelines. Music is based on metrical contrast, all sound is approached rhythmically, musical structures are often antiphonal, musical events are organized densely in a short amount of time, and physical body motions are incorporated into the music making process.⁸ We can easily identify aspects of The Grey Album that are in line with these patterns of musical organization.

The rhythmic aspects of The Grey Album are often but not always polyrhythmic, in the sense of multiple meters occurring simultaneously. The texture is certainly complex and the beats as they existed on The White Album have been considerably altered to the point of unrecognizability, becoming significantly more densely textured, syncopated, and layered into multiple hypermetric levels.¹⁰ Upon the first hearing of The Grey Album, it becomes apparent that the music is being dealt with percussively. This is common to the point of quotidity in hip-hop musical practice. While some mash-ups are more concerned with combining tracks so that they are synchronized harmonically, as is the case in “Genie-us in a Bottle,” hip-hop based mash-ups, including several that incorporate hip-hop lyrics and other music, because the rapping track is primarily a rhythmic event, deal with the combinatory tracks more rhythmically.

This is clearly the case with The Grey Album. Danger Mouse even treats non-percussive samples from The White Album percussively. At the beginning of “My 1st Song,” Danger Mouse samples the vocal line, “Can you take me back where I came from, can you take me back?”, from the song of the same name, which fades in and quickly back out in between “Cry baby cry” and “Revolution #9.” On top of this he lays a saxophone quartet sample and guitar/drums beat from “Glass Onion,” but this is then quickly taken away for an entire measure. Once the percussion reenters, it has changed, is chopped up and reassembled, but now it appears heavily syncopated, in a triple feel to accompany Jay-Z’s rapping. The original production of “My 1st Song,” produced by Aqua and Joe “3H” Weinberger, consists of a sped-up 6/8 meter soul ballad. While Jay-Z consistently raps in this meter, on the mash-up Burton consistently places the vocal track against the duple-meter feel of the “take me back” sample. The rearranged percussion, taken from The White Album, fluctuates between these two concurrent yet disparate meters.

This practice of deconstructing beats is not common in the mash-up canon, as reified by the media’s historicization of the genre. It has occurred in hip-hop production for many years, but achieved notoriety most significantly in DJ Shadow’s 1996 album, Endtroducing. Earlier deejays and producers, including Marley Marl, EPMD, and Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad, would combine multiple drum beats in order to create a unique sounding percussive hit.¹¹ Later, as technology permitted larger recordings, artists, including Kurtis Blow, Afrikaa Bambaataa, and Eric B. of Eric B. and Rakim, began using entire measures from sampled tracks, often 1970s funk and R&B samples.¹² Just as record labels caught wind of this trend and initiated lawsuits, effectively cutting off the use of sampling in hip-hop production, the practice was picked up in the late 1980s by European dance groups, including Prodigy and 2 Bad Mice. Later trends originating in Europe, including jungle and drum’n’bass, created new beats by retriggering drumloops on offbeats, layering multiple beats, and often cutting beats into smaller parts, such as half- or quarter-measures. This is the tradition with which mash-ups are usually associated, and the lack of acknowledgement of the influence of hip-hop is telling, in that it mirrored a larger pattern of cultural appropriation, most eloquently documented in George Lewis’ 1996 article, “Improvised Music after 1950,” which focuses on avant-garde post-Cagean experimental music’s debt to modernist bebop in particular and African cultural practices in general.¹³

But, returning to the details of technique, what was unique about DJ Shadow’s first album was his process of working with samples. The entire album consisted of sampled records, either programmed into a drum machine or scratched over the beat. DJ Shadow’s technique involved parsing a drum beat into each individual percussive hit, cataloging each, and then using these sonic resources to compose new, highly complex, and practically unplayable beats. A perfect example can be found in the drum break of “Building Steam with a Grain of Salt,” the second track on Endtroducing. DJ Shadow acknowledged the intentionality of this complexity in 1997: “If it sounds complex, it’s supposed to. I want people to get the impression that I spent a lot of time on every detail of the samples. I treat the sampler the way some people treat the electronic guitar or a drum kit. I want to be the best at it.” ¹⁴

Although Burton builds his technique of recomposing drum beats from The White Album from the style found on Endtroducing, he expands the notion of potentially deconstructable material by looking throughout the entire album, not only one drum break, for source sounds. Burton explained to MTV his intentions in sampling from the entire album, without resorting to other music. “"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…. 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."¹⁵

DJ Shadow’s desire to make the work that goes into his productions apparent is echoed frequently by Burton. As he told the New Yorker,

“Those were fifteen-hour days, easily…. I played ‘The White Album’ through four times, listening for anything that I thought I might be able to use, and then I started pulling tiny bits off the album. I was keeping track of the time, because I knew this was a strange kind of experiment, and at one point I saw that I had logged more than two hundred hours.”

¹⁶ Unlike most mash-up artists, therefore, Burton desires for his work to be deliberately obvious. He wants people to see the virtuosity of his production. In this way he, like DJ Shadow, exhibits stylistic elements of a black expressive aesthetic.

Another important aspect of black musical culture, noted by Wilson, as well as John Miller Chernoff and Gena Dagel Caponi, is the active engagement with the musical material, including constant change, reinterpretation, and stylization.¹⁷ In most mash-ups, the creator attempts to combine disparate musical tracks with as much transparency as possible. Any evidence of alteration on the behalf of the producer diminishes the effect of novelty created by the supposedly serendipitous synchronization of the two songs. This is clear in Soulwax’s “Smells Like Teen Booty.” The lyrics from Destiny’s Child’s “Bootylicious” are layered on top of the instrumental tracks from Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and without immediate comparison to the original tracks, or impeccable pitch, the listener would have difficulty noticing any alteration in the two original tracks. Simply by pitch-changing or speeding up tracks, Soulwax was able to create the effect of two songs that coincidentally happened to match up perfectly. This is the dominant effect of mash-ups. Freelance Hellraiser’s “Stroke of Genie-us,” although sounding just as untouched, is actually altered considerably more than the Soulwax track. A comparison of the Strokes original to Hellraiser’s production reveals that certain chords are extended for extra measures, and progressions are rearranged in a new order, in order to harmonically match the vocals of Christina Aguilera. Despite this manipulation, Hellraiser succeeds because the work required to fit the songs together is not apparent.

The Grey Album, in contrast, highlights the role of Burton as creative, virtuosic artist. The complexity of the percussive tracks is always changing, resulting in a continuous reassertion of the role of the producer. Burton is constantly altering the material, shifting syncopation, accented beats, and meter in order to change the texture of the music. And he does so in a uniquely unorthodox manner, using unconventional (for hip-hop) sounds taken from The White Album. This emphasis on the self in the production of musical materials, unlike the European desire for perfected performance and absolute musical autonomy, has been identified by Wilson as a “soul focal moment.” Caponi connects this notion to the work of Michael Eric Dyson, who finds in virtuosic athletic performances (quoting Caponi), “three necessary ingredients of the soul focal moment: the will to spontaneity, stylization of the performed self, and edifying deception.”¹⁸ Despite the predetermined composition of The Grey Album, Burton succeeds in deceiving the audience by making each track sound spontaneous, and he accomplishes this through his particular complex stylization of the beats.

The one way that The Grey Album most resembles the standard definition of the mash-up genre, namely signifyin(g), quotation, and satire, make up a third important element in African American expressive cultural practice. As Henry Louis Gates explained in The Signifying Monkey, “To signify is to engage in certain rhetorical games…. Signification luxuriates in the inclusion of the free play of… associative and semantic relations.”¹⁹ Samuel Floyd adds, “signifyin(g) is figurative, implicative speech; it is a complex rhetorical device that requires the possession and application of appropriate modes of interpretation and understanding on the part of listeners.”²⁰ What each mash-up accomplishes is a semantic juxtaposition of supposedly unrelated musical performances. The more successful, or at least popular, of these artworks combine relatively already popular music for one of two results.

On one hand successful mash-ups, such as those mentioned above by Freelance Hellraiser and Soulwax, combine popular music in such a way as to make the originals seem structurally identical, therefore weakening the supposed foundational distinction between genres on which fans so readily depend. The other form of successful mash-up, less focused on the transparency of the producer’s craft, combines two disparate tracks in order to make some satirical commentary, altering the listener’s perception of each original. This is accomplished on 2Many DJ’s mash-up of the Indiana Jones theme and the Eminem track, “Forgot about Dre.” The combination of these two tracks highlights the similar themes occurring in each work’s history. The first is a major Hollywood soundtrack to an incredibly successful (and heavily-copyright-protected) film franchise, whose main character travels around the world effectively stealing cultural artifacts under the admirable guise of Western imperialism. The second is by Eminem, arguably the most successful living white artist who, albeit self awares, profits from the appropriation of black musical culture. In the original track, Eminem points out that contemporary artists are forgetting the role of his primary mentor (and primary provider of musical resources) in the history of hip-hop. Both tracks, through juxtaposition, are seen as more complicit in the critical history of Western European and American cultural appropriation.

Burton, in selecting two highly popular and coincidentally similarly named albums from the genres of rock and rap, is highlighting the often overlooked relationship between these two musical traditions. Although Burton never actually acknowledges the racial implications of his project directly, choosing instead to highlight his personal admiration of both artists, and therefore these implications can be argued as unintentional, they are widespread, regardless, and are partially responsible for the immediate success of The Grey Album. Like other mash-ups, and products of signifyin(g) in general, The Grey Album succeeds because, as a rhetorical device, it is dependent upon “the possession and application of appropriate modes of interpretation” that are widespread in Burton’s intended audience.

Grey

Thus in The Grey Album we can see aspects of what Wilson, Caponi, Dyson, Gates, and others have identified as basic elements of an African-derived cultural aesthetic: rhythmic and metric complexity, as reflected in the drum programming; individual improvisation and stylization, or how Burton plays with the rhythms throughout the song; dialogic interaction and signifyin(g), as found in the relationship between Burton’s chosen samples. In other words, The Grey Album is influenced both by postmodernism, which by its nature is primarily European in historical development, and by a black cultural aesthetic. It is both white and black. Dare we call it… grey?

But if other mash-ups also embody several of the elements of an African-derived cultural aesthetic, which they do, then we need to either problematize the notion of a black musical culture or the history of mash-ups as invented by a kid from Ohio, located in white European/American online communities, and representing a postmodern aesthetic. Perhaps we need to do both. According to Paul Gilroy, “how are we to think critically about artistic products and aesthetic codes which, though they may be traceable back to one distinct location, have been changed either by the passage of time or by their displacement, relocation, or dissemination through networks of communication and cultural exchange?”²¹ The answer to that question is not an easy one, since the location of culture within a particular community is still a valid strategy for many, particularly in racialized societies such as the U.S.

The partial dependence of European postmodern aesthetics and electronic dance music on a myriad of black musical influences, from bebop to Jamaican dub, has been heavily documented. Yet the appropriation of black aesthetics by white communities is as prevalent today as it was with nineteenth-century minstrelsy. Greg Tate observed, in his recent book, Everything but the Burden, “what has always struck Black observers… isn’t just the irony of white America fiending for Blackness when it once debated whether Africans even had souls. It’s the way They have always tried to erase the Black presence from whatever Black thing They took a shine to: jazz, blues, rock and roll… you name it.”²² The changing historicization of The Grey Album over the past few profitable months, from a hip-hop remix (read: black) to an internet mash-up (read: white), should give pause in light of Tate’s comment, especially in the context of discussions of the digital divide and the commodification of hip-hop culture.

The line between Gilroy’s essentialism and Tate’s appropriation is a tricky one to navigate. According to Tate and Nelson George, an entire generation of Black Americans has grown up facing this question, in their lifetime a new aesthetic has formed, the post-Soul aesthetic. Post-Soul is hybrid. It is the constant negotiation between African- and European-derived cultural values. For Tate, “its signature was not its smooth Blackness, but its self-conscious hybridity of Black and white cultural signifiers.” For George, “the post-soul era hasn’t just been about style or aesthetics, but cash money too.” ²³ Brian Burton is a post-Soul brother. While actively celebrating an aesthetic hybridity, he has (perhaps) inadvertently provided an incredibly powerful tool in the fight to upend long-established and self-serving European notions of propriety. The Grey Album is both a desegregating work of art and as Greg Tate would say, “a recognition that Black discontent was as alive as white supremacy in the land of the hybridizing freakyfree.”²⁴