COACHELLA MIGHTY MOUSE

If some in the record industry had their way, he might be in jail, or at least indentured for life. But on a recent spring evening, DJ Danger Mouse is strolling the streets of Bourges, France, soaking in his own pop life made possible, in part, by his deconstruction and, some say, wholesale theft of the Beatles' "White Album." You see, "DM" is hot - magazine-cover hot, and, while the industry is none too happy about his hip-hop mash-up of the Fab Four, the major labels have been quietly calling, setting up meetings, looking to sign him, ironically or not. Meanwhile, he tours Europe with his MC partner Jemini before his scheduled return to Southern California for the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival on Sunday and a performance at the Henry Fonda Music Box Theater on Wednesday. He's also been tapped to play at the famed Bonnaroo Festival in Tennessee on May 11, and at Lollapalooza this summer.

"Slow the fuck down," yells Jemini as he follows the producer through the streets of Bourges while talking to a reporter on a mobile. "You know my back is fucked up. How am I supposed to catch up?"

Indeed, that's what the industry must be asking itself. How can its arcane laws and corporate structures catch up to the postmodernism of Mr. Mouse, a.k.a. Brian Burton, the 26-year-old Los Angeles-based music producer you never heard of until a little thing called The Grey Album didn't come to a store near you. Rather, it infiltrated the download community like an e-mail virus, becoming perhaps the first hit album in Internet history that never received an official release. It might take an act of Congress to make something like The Grey Album - with its intricate, imaginative cutting and splicing of Ringo's drum kicks and Harrison's gently weeping guitar - legally available. To music watchers, the story is already familiar: Underground producer mines Beatles for beats, integrates rhymes from Jay-Z's The Black Album over the top, presses 3,000 promotional CDs and sends them out to friends, journalists, and indie record stores. After some good press, he is told by EMI, owner of the "White Album," to stop. He stops, but the CD is uploaded to the 'net and takes on a life of its own. It's too good to bury. Online activists protest EMI's attempts to shutter the work by sponsoring a "Grey Tuesday" in February during which The Grey Album sees a million song downloads on 170 sites worldwide (helping Danger Mouse beat out Norah Jones as the most downloaded artist that day). Burton is featured in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Rolling Stone. He becomes a digital-age sensation.

"That's my life," Burton says, "before Grey, after Grey ... . Everybody is on me like I'm ballin' or something."

A funny thing happened during his 15 minutes of fame. Burton turned the tables to highlight his considerable talents, and he continues to do so on his terms. He's over The Grey Album, despite its industry-shaking effect. It did its job, which obviously was to put him on the map. ("The record was not just me taking the Beatles and putting Jay-Z over the top of it," Burton said during a music-industry panel discussion in Miami last month. "This was to show what I could do.")

He doesn't want to be the poster child for file-sharing and illicit sampling. He's ready to move on to phase two of his career - legitimate production and performance. The latest endeavor on Burton's plate is the legal full-length he did with Jemini, called Ghetto Pop Life, first released last summer. The CD has just been rereleased, ostensibly to take advantage of all the Grey publicity heat. Ghetto Pop Life - brooding symphonic loops, operatic grandiosity, urgent rhymes - stands on its own and proves that DM is more than a mash-up artist. He's a voice. Burton just released a single with Def Jux recording artist Murs, "To a Black Boy." It's a free-download ode to Marcus Dixon, the black, 18-year-old scholar/athlete serving 10 years for "aggravated child molestation" after taking his white, 15-year-old girlfriend's virginity, with consent, in Rome, Georgia.

"I want to help out with stuff and change people's perceptions," Burton says. "That's the best thing that comes out of it."

With an ear toward indie, British trip-hop, and underground hip-hop, he's the fresh influence bling-crazed rap needs right now. "As a producer, musically, he's coming into his own," says Jemini.

You could say Burton's life is something of a mash-up in itself, moving from ´´ matzo balls to mac and cheese, but that's what makes him more than a flash in the pan. Burton has that kind of bifocal American experience (Elvis's African-American adaptations, Hendrix's Anglophilia) that gives him a unique-but-resonant window to the world of music.

He was born and raised in the Jewish suburbs of New York, Westchester and Rockland County. "I lived across the street from a synagogue," he says. "I took it all in. I wouldn't change a thing."

A fan of the British cartoon character Danger Mouse, Burton aspired to be a cartoon artist, but took to music as his teenage years approached. To this day, he prefers music "as the easiest way for me to communicate." He's camera-shy, and likes to don his $500 mouse suit for photo shoots.

His father was a schoolteacher, his mother a social worker. Both parents are black, and Burton, taking more after a mixed grandmother, has the lightest skin of any of his siblings. His sister, four years his elder, was deep into hip-hop, and even though he didn't actively seek out the sound, it surrounded him, as did alt-rock.

"I was listening to hair metal and '80s pop, and I soaked in what she was playing more than I realized," Burton says. "I didn't know who Kurt Cobain was until he died. But subconsciously you've been hearing stuff all the time. I did realize when I got in college that I did know Nirvana. I knew the songs."

His '80s and '90s childhood passed when the airwaves were more diverse, and different sounds were unavoidable on the street. It wasn't the point-and-click music-your-way of today. It was just there. Then, when he was 13, his family moved to a black suburb of Atlanta called Stone Mountain. The South at the dawn of the '90s fed him Miami bass, NWA, Public Enemy, 8-Ball and MJG, EPMD, DJ Premier. He doesn't buy into the superiority of old school, however.

"The disenchantment older people have with hip-hop today is like with rock being dead in the '70s," Burton says. "Now we're saying hip-hop's dead. It's not as bad as people think it is. We're getting older. Hip-hop is getting younger."

By age 18, he was attending the fertile creative grounds of the University of Georgia and feeling the quirky, open-minded way of its host city, Athens, Georgia - home to R.E.M., the B-52's, and a serious band scene. "By the time I started producing tracks, at like 18, 19, I was finished with hip-hop," Burton says.

"My influences were progressive - from Pink Floyd to Portishead," he continues. "I was doing instrumental soundtrack-y stuff. I just got the turntables to enhance what I was doing. DJing came naturally."

Just one class shy of graduating with a telecommunications degree, he instead moved to London to study his musical heroes - and yes, that definitely includes the Beatles.

"I went there with $300 in my pocket," Burton says. "While I was in London, I started to realize what I know is hip-hop."

Working six nights a week at a pub and producing tracks on his own time, Burton met Tom Brown, from lauded experimental techno label Warp (home to Aphex Twin and Prefuse 73, among others). Warp agreed to put out a single Burton had just done, and then the label asked for more tracks to help launch its hip-hop imprint, Lex. Next thing you know, Burton had a two-album deal, and he's off to Los Angeles to record the first installment with collaborators Tha Liks, among others. In the meantime, Burton was getting work making beats for the Cartoon Network, a task he still does.

Last year, he moved to L.A. full-time, settling in a Mount Washington tract home with a '70s interior straight out of Edward Scissorhands (blue velvet couch, green walls, a portable toy record player on the wall). There, his mobile phone rings incessantly to a loop of "Strawberry Fields Forever."

About a year ago, Burton signed on to be represented by Waxploitation, a local hip-hop and electronic-music management firm. "I thought he was incredibly focused, to the point of being sort of creatively intense," says Jeff Antebi, Waxploitation's CEO. "He's anxious. He just wanted to go. He has thousands of ideas."

Burton no longer talks much about The Grey Album, fearful that the lawyers at EMI will come after him with more than a cease-and-desist letter. He does, however, still do personal mash-ups, pairing oddities such as Suzanne Vega with heavy hip-hop loops, for his own DJ performances.

Meanwhile, some supporters continue to hold up The Grey Album as the best example yet of what's wrong with the industry and the laws they say are bent to favor the major labels. To be sure, there have been dozens of mash-ups featuring Jay-Z's swan-song Black Album to date, because he released an easy-to-sample a cappella version on purpose. (Another notable work is Cheap Cologne's Double Black Album, which has Jay-Z's rhyming mixed with bits of Metallica's own "Black Album.") But if Burton's version was just a hackneyed blend of rap over old Beatles tunes, it might not have gained the notoriety it did. Rolling Stone gave it a glowing review early on, and that brought forth EMI's cease-and-desist.

Burton says he spent more than 200 hours cutting, slicing, and pasting beats and melodies, using the "White Album" as his sole source and Acid loop software as his only tool. "I used Acid, that's it," he told an astonished reporter in Miami. "I treated it like a role-playing game when I first did it."

Ringo's rattling drum kit is dissected and reconstructed to provide the kicks and snares of Burton's Neptunes-style backbeats. Most of the collection simply uses the Beatles like a scrap recycler uses metal - melted down and nearly unrecognizable. The most hookish tracks of the bunch are "99 Problems," featuring the cascading guitar riff from "Helter Skelter," and "What More Can I Say," which uses the chorus and melody of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." On that one, 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.

Damon Dash, head of Jay-Z's Roc-A-Fella label, told the Associated Press he liked The Grey Album: "I think it's hot. ... It's two great legends together."

** The politics of sampling **

Interestingly, mash-ups, the blending of two songs, have been around for years, as a cottage industry catering mainly to DJs who want unique tracks to play. Mash-ups were usually put out by DJs-turned-bedroom-producers in small quantities - 500 to a few thousand - and sold at DJ specialty shops. The recent introduction of easy-to-use cut-and-paste music software such as Acid and Reason has only accelerated the game.

"We live in a remix culture, and when you put something out, it becomes part of that shared experience," says Nicholas Reville, cofounder of downhillbattle.org, which organized the Grey Tuesday protest. "I don't think anyone worries that Campbell's Soup was ripped off by Andy Warhol. He remixed it. The art world is way ahead of music on this. As soon as you hear The Grey Album, you see it has artistic value. The album really brought together a lot of good things and made it the perfect vehicle for bringing out this message of why sampling has to change."

Similarly, bootleg - or unlicensed, and unsolicited - remixes are a part of the DJ terrain, but they involve only one artist getting the reconstruction treatment. (While a mash-up might have the Beatles vs. Jay-Z, a bootleg remix would simply be an unauthorized take on Jay-Z, using new beats laid down in some kid's bedroom.) Many artists do bootleg remixes of their favorite songs, hoping that the stars' respective labels will like them and put them out officially. (They sometimes do, as in the case of Superchumbo's version of Missy Elliott's "Get Ur Freak On" or Junkie XL's take on Elvis Presley's "A Little Less Conversation," which became a worldwide smash and ended up as the theme song to NBC's Las Vegas.)

This is, after all, the age of the remix and the year of the mash-up. David Bowie recently announced that he's encouraging fans to mash-up his classic tunes with music from his latest album, Reality, and he's offering prizes via his website for the best mixes. Mash-ups, he told The Times of London, are "a great appropriation idea waiting to happen." Sprite is adding an ever-changing flavor line called ReMix, Nike has commissioned a New York design team to rework classic kicks in limited runs, and likewise, DC Shoe Co. has unleashed a Remix Series that has musicians such as Travis Barker of Blink-182 redecorating sneakers for public consumption.

But, while the remix has become a commodity, with mash-ups there's little hope of that, as the cooperation of two, often huge, stars and their respective labels and camps can be insurmountable. EMI owns the "White Album" master recording, and thus has the biggest veto power over sampling. Sony/ATV Music Publishing and Michael Jackson have publishing stakes in the Beatles' works as well and would have just as much say in DM's liberal plundering of the "White Album."

"EMI is absolutely in favor of music sampling," says Jeanne Meyer, EMI North America's senior vice-president for corporate communications. "There's a very well established way to get sampling, and [Burton] did not participate. And we asked him to stop, and he did."

Folks like those at downhillbattle.org want to see the law changed so that anyone can take a reasonable sampling of existing work and pay only a marginal, set fee. As it stands, samples can only be used if the owner of the master recording agrees to it, and often this happens only after the sampler pays a substantial sum. Sometimes, in the case of the Beatles, it doesn't happen at all, as the parties involved have not allowed it.

When it comes to sampling, the industry's legal weapon is the 1991 case of Gilbert O'Sullivan v. Biz Markie. The rapper had asked permission to sample O'Sullivan's 1972 hit "Alone Again (Naturally)," was denied, and sampled it anyway. O'Sullivan sued, and presiding Judge Kevin Thomas Duffy was outraged, calling Markie a thief and questioning the artistic value of his own version, "Alone Again." "Thou shalt not steal has been an admonition followed since the dawn of civilization," the judge stated. The verdict forced Markie to remove any merchandise containing the song from store shelves and destroy it. The judge then referred the rapper to a U.S. District Attorney for possible criminal charges, although none were filed.

It was a solution that has given the industry judicial weight when it comes to allowing sampling. They can ask for $1 million. They can say no. They have the right to stop artists from sampling, even though an artist can "cover," or reinterpret via their own performance, the same exact song without permission and at a fraction of the cost.

This part of copyright law, called compulsory licensing, has its roots in a 1909 revision to the U.S. Copyright Act that was meant to protect songwriters and reward them through automatic payments by those who perform their works. Today, those payments stand at about 4 to 8 1/2 cents per version per CD. Some would like to see a similar system for sampling.

"I can cover every single song on the 'White Album,' and we believe there needs to be a way to make sampling legal and just as practical," says Reville of downhillbattle.org. "It has so much potential."

He argues that making sampling legal for the bedroom-producer masses would actually net the industry more money than its current case-by-case system of negotiation, rejection, and astronomical fees. (Licensing costs for samples can sometimes reach the hundreds of thousands for high-profile hip-hop artists.)

"The current system is an arms race that makes samples so expensive that it discourages any use," Reville says. "They're seeing a lot of the money for sampling being drained off. A compulsory licensing system is extremely efficient; the money goes right where it should go. If you had a system like that, the majors might see an increase in money."

Fred von Lohmann, senior intellectual property attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, takes that argument a step further. He says sampling should be free, period. It involves the kind of "fair use" exceptions that, for example, allow writers to quote the words of others and allow jazz artists to quote the notes of others, he says.

"Does anyone think that Danger Mouse's use is harming sales of the 'White Album'?" von Lohmann says. "It's not a substitute in any way. If you step back and think about the purpose of copyright law, does anyone think if you went back to '68 and told the Beatles, 'Hey, guys, you might not get money out of the mash-up artists of the future,' that they would then have packed it in and quit? It's preposterous."

The current high-stakes sampling game gives advantage to major-label pop artists, but makes it hard for underground, sample-based artists to gain a foothold in the game, von Lohmann says.

"The major-label artists who are rich can get it into a record store, but the struggling electronic and hip-hop artists can't," he says. "It pushes most independent artists into second-class citizenship. The kind of disdain the mainstream industry heaps on mash-ups reminds me of the way people treated rock in the '50s - 'that's not really music.'"

It's a little funny. Burton did what people in hip-hop have been doing since the '70s - when hip-hop wasn't really music - and rock 'n' rollers were doing in the '50s - when rock was "jungle music": just showing off with a little razzle-dazzle. He wasn't trying to jolt the industry. Then again, neither were his heroes.