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Black + white = The Grey Album (continued)




DANGER MOUSE, a/k/a Brian Burton, is an indie-hip-hop producer who’s won acclaim for his work on Jemini’s 2003 Ghetto Pop Life (Waxploitation); before becoming a DJ, he worked in a record store alongside members of the Beatles-worshipping indie-rock collective Elephant 6. He has issued a press release saying he’s "flattered" by Grey Tuesday’s efforts; in the same release, Waxploitation CEO Jeff Antebi called The Grey Album a "watershed moment" for issues of downloading and copyright. "We are seeing the rapid speed of peer-to-peer [file sharing] come head to head with a rabid, worldwide consumer demand for forbidden fruit. The Internet makes it almost impossible to hold things back from the marketplace."

The Grey Album thus joins a growing pantheon of critically acclaimed meta-albums that have proliferated in the age of file sharing, such as Soulwax’s 2 Many DJs and the Philadelphia DJ Diplodocus’s Hollertronix — both of which are based on the recombinant possibilities of dissimilar pop songs. These are discs that make prominent use of copyrighted sound recordings — more than a brief sample of another artist’s work, but something less than the entire song — without the artist’s permission. And they represent a new sort of product, one that the recording industry is singularly ill-equipped to exploit. In fact, as Antebi points out, part of the appeal of these albums lies in that they are the very definition of the kind of music it has become impossible for labels to release. As much as their artists, the major labels are slaves to copyright restrictions. EMI reminds us that it isn’t an enemy of sampling: its artists include Fatboy Slim, the Chemical Brothers, and even mash-up king Richard X. The problem in this case is the Fab Four: no one has ever succeeded in licensing a Beatles sample. Would Capitol have any more luck persuading the Beatles’ various estates and publishing companies to authorize The Grey Album? If it did, would Roc-A-Fella consent to having Capitol release a competing version of its biggest star’s final album? And if the two labels went halfsies, would Danger Mouse ever see a dime more than he’s seeing right now?

Neither are the Copy Left’s copyright reforms a foolproof answer. Sampling popular songs may be expensive, but you can argue that cost has forced hip-hop producers to become more resilient. The best producers pride themselves on rescuing stunning instrumental moments from obscure, cheaper-to-sample recordings, rehabilitating non-hits into hits. Cheaper, more abundant sampling might just as easily lead to an amusing rash of hybrid novelty songs or a string of rehashed karaoke-style pop hits, like Puff Daddy’s "I’ll Be Missing You."

While the Copy Left fights for less restrictive copyright laws and the music industry holds its ground, artists are embracing the Internet’s gray-market electronic underground in unauthorized remixes, mash-ups, and DJ mixtapes — a realm that has proved impervious to lawsuits, and that has grown up in the fertile ground between what is possible and what is legal. By releasing an a cappella version of The Black Album, Jay-Z willfully disseminated a kind of musical open-source code — an invitation to customize and improve upon the original. In this, he may have been influenced by his arch-rival. The release of the a cappella version of Nas’s God’s Son (Columbia) inspired a then-unknown producer called 9th Wonder to craft God’s Stepson, which is regarded as the first album-length remix to get a gray-market release. The disc became an underground sensation; Jay-Z was so impressed, he asked 9th Wonder to produce a track on The Black Album: "The Threat" is built on a sample of R. Kelly’s "A Woman’s Threat." After some deliberation, 9th Wonder recently joined the Black Album remix craze with his own entry, Black Is Back.

The Copy Left argues that the public wants to interact with its products instead of being passive consumers. And the trend to unsanctioned customization isn’t off in the future: it’s the way things happen now, on DJ mixes and on the Web, on suburban home computers and on street corners. One reason God’s Stepson caught on was that it replicated the sound of Illmatic (Columbia), Nas’s first and most popular album. And downhillbattle.com’s latest endeavor reflects where things might go from here: the site will soon offer The Black Album Construction Kit, a CD-ROM featuring the Jay-Z a cappella and eight of the most popular remixed versions of The Black Album, along with an open-source audio editing program enabling you, Wilson says, "to make your own Jay-Z mash-up." The disc will also offer an open-source graphics program for creating cover art and links to sites on the free-software movement, copyright law, and music activism. Legal representation sold separately.

page 2 

Issue Date: March 5 - 11, 2004
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