MASH-UP MASTERMIND
Record companies have rights, but restricting the imagination of artists like Danger Mouse shouldn'
Facing the future, the major-label music industry has become that bumbling school principal in B movies, an out-of-step square in a suit and glasses with comic timing.
For sheer physical comedy, the case of L.A.-based artist Danger Mouse illustrates the ongoing sitcom. The DJ mixes the Beatles' White Album (technically, titled The Beatles) and the a cappella version of rapper Jay-Z's The Black Album with imagination and intricate skill. He calls it The Grey Album. The transformational, sampladelic experience builds upon both source works without ripping them off. It's art in search of an audience, without a legal way to get there. But the industry suits, facing dire sales figures over the past two years, simply had to find a way to get it into listeners' hands.
Okay, no, they didn't.
Instead, EMI, the company that controls the White Album master recording, basically said, no matter where your artistic imagination might stray, don't even think about it! Following a positive brief writeup on The Grey Album in Rolling Stone, the label sent a cease-and-desist letter last month to Danger Mouse. By that time, however, his few thousand copies were long gone. Then, last week, when 170 websites around the world protested EMI's move by staging a "Grey Tuesday" featuring free Grey Album downloads, the company sent cease-and-desist letters to many of them as well.
"They weren't acting to protect their profits," argues 24-year-old Holmes Wilson, a recent college graduate who cofounded the anti-industry site downhillbattle.org, which spearheaded "Grey Tuesday." "There was no economic competition with the White Album. It wasn't to protect the art. [The Grey Album] is completely different than the White Album. They just wanted to keep this thing down."
With more than 100,000 downloads - and some reports claiming as many as one million - The Grey Album has become perhaps the Internet's first smash-hit record without a major-label release. As there's no legal door open for traditional distribution, this abstract montage of pop giants was tailor-made for file sharing. Score one for the suits.
It's ironic that the Beatles made their fame and fortune in a once-black genre while a young black man has come back to the future to sample their sublime honey for some culture-blending alchemy of his own - only to be denied. Meanwhile, an analysis by the Electronic Frontier Foundation questions EMI's legal standing, noting that federal copyright protection does not extend to works made before 1972, and that The Grey Album "is a transformative use of the White Album ... for a noncommercial purpose." In other words, "It was not meant to be anything but an artistic expression," as Danger Mouse said in a statement.
Indeed, Danger Mouse, a.k.a. Brian Burton, has described spending hundreds of hours engaged in painstaking digital dicing. Ringo's rattling drum kit is spliced into dancehall and Latin-flavored breakbeats. At times, The Grey Album sounds more like the Chemical Brothers versus the Beatles. (In fact, the Chems did the Beatles in a similar fashion on 1996's "Setting Sun" - legally so.) On "99 Problems," the cascading guitar riff of "Helter Skelter" is punctuated with crisp snare breaks. "What More Can I Say" is a direct descendant of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," with big drums and glitchy, digitized transitions. Jay-Z raps, "They don't ... paint pictures/They just trace me/You know what/Soon they forget who they plucked/They whole style from/And try to reverse the outcome."
It was Jay-Z who encouraged this fusion, by releasing The Black Album in DJ-friendly a cappella form (not unheard of in hip-hop). Damon Dash, head of the rapper's label, Roc-a-fella, told the Associated Press, "I think it's hot ... . It's two great legends together."
The music industry's dirty little underground cottage industry has come up to bite it in the ass. DJs routinely do remixes and artist-versus-artist "mash-ups" on spec, send them to labels, and pray their works get approved. Otherwise, it would be impossible to legitimately release such items. These guys don't have lawyers on their payrolls. They live in their moms' basements. To bankroll the gamble, said jocks often put out a few thousand "white label" promo pieces of 12-inch vinyl or CD-Rs, often found in DJ shops. Dance star Junkie XL's redux of Elvis Presley's "A Little Less Conversation" was done on spec and later become a legit No. 1 hit in 24 countries.
Maybe EMI doesn't see any profit potential in a work complicated by the inclusion of Jay-Z's rhymes. But that doesn't mean Danger Mouse's album shouldn't see the light of day. Labels have the right to control the commerce of their catalogs, not the artistic imaginations of bedroom DJs. Maybe some imagination on the labels' part could free the sample-based artist from this ridiculous legal detention.
Published: 03/04/2004
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