MUSIC To producer Danger Mouse, his CD mix is in a 'Grey' area
It's not the first time someone has used unauthorized materials on a project.
By RICHARD CROMELIN
LOS ANGELES TIMES
LOS ANGELES -- For record producer Danger Mouse, it was perfectly natural to combine the vocals from rapper Jay-Z's "The Black Album" with the music of The Beatles' "White Album." The result, naturally, was "The Grey Album," and it has become an underground sensation since it surfaced in late January.
For the giant record label EMI Music, it was equally natural to send a cease-and-desist order to the Los Angeles-based artist and to outlets that were selling the work. The action earlier this month put a lid on the record's limited "street release," but in the age of file sharing and compact disc burning, it's not likely to stop the spread of "The Grey Album."
This high-profile skirmish in the pop-music wars is an intriguing collision of the newest technology and musical styles and themes as old as artistic obsession and property rights. Among the issues it raises: Is a record-maker justified in using unauthorized materials if that's the only way to fulfill a vision? And does calling a record "an experiment" and declining to make money from it excuse the appropriation of protected material?
Ironically, the unexpected attention accorded "The Grey Album" probably contributed to its suppression. After all, mouse-wielding producers have been creating "mash-ups" -- a mix of one record's vocals with another's instrumentals -- for at least a decade on an underground level. These records are played in clubs and passed around on the Internet and as bootleg CDs. No clearances, low profile, no problem.
Danger Mouse, whose real name is Brian Burton, tried to keep things similarly unassuming with "The Grey Album," pressing only a few thousand CDs and giving most of them away. He did sell some in an unsuccessful effort to cover his costs.
But when "The Grey Album" got written up not just in record-geek chat rooms but also on CNN and MTV, the game was up.
A representative of EMI, which controls The Beatles' recordings, said that company policy prohibited comment on legal matters. But a source at the label confirmed that a cease-and-desist order was sent to Burton and to some retailers and eBay resellers.
He knew situation
But Burton knew that The Beatles never authorize samples of their music, and here he was burning up to use 45 minutes of one of their most revered albums.
"The Beatles just don't do it, they don't grant clearances for anything," Burton, 26, said last week, sitting on a couch in the living room of his Los Angeles home and studio. "That's what I was told by enough people on the inside, so I didn't chase it up.
"The whole idea of it being legal or not -- can you see how I couldn't think about that? What? Was I supposed to not do that whole thing just because I'm not supposed to?
"I took it into my own hands and I just did it. I'm not trying to do it with malice, I'm not trying to take sales away from anybody. In fact, I think it's getting a lot of people into both of these [acts] that might not normally do it."
At the center of this fuss is an audacious tour de force that ingeniously weds the biggest rock band of all time with one of today's biggest stars. At first listening, it sounds a little like a stunt, but before long the mix of Jay-Z's raps with the sounds of "The White Album" -- painstakingly deconstructed and reassembled into altered forms of the familiar strains -- becomes a merger of equals, Brooklyn boasts and Liverpool lilt forming a bond that's entirely, well, natural.