The Grey Album

AJ Vogt
Apr 24, 2016
2 min read

The Grey Album was quite an interesting project by Danger Mouse which was released back in 2004. The Grey Album was a seamless combination of Jay Z's The Black Album and the Beatles so called "White Album."

While this released stirred up a lot of controversy, especially over ownership and creativity, there is Danger Mouse did start somewhat a movement with his sampling abilities.

Instead of taking a project where one would sample from all different genres and cut bit and pieces from everywhere, Danger Mouse had the specific goal of using only Jay Z's and The Beatles album. While this may seem as an odd constraint, I think that this challenges him even more in a creativity sense, because he has less to pull from, but still creates a record selling album.

The tracks on the Grey Album were Jay Z's voice, mainly because the a ceppalla versions of his songs were released. Then Danger Mouse would use The Beatles instrumental parts. With this combination he created an album that no one was ready for.

The large debacle with the Grey Album is that The Beatles record owner EMI put up a huge fuss over Danger Mouse not paying to use the music. This created a movement over ownership rights in the music industry and really put artists and record labels at odds. Then in February 2004, an activist movement encouraged over 170 different music websites to put the Grey Album on their site for free download. This actually did occur on February 24th, and was coined Grey Tuesday. Although illegal, this put a huge so-called magnifying class over the music industry and their process of copyrighting lyrics and music.

Interesting, Jay Z was always supportive of the album. Stating in an interview with NPR that he supported all forms of creativity. Jay Z probably did not feel violated though, since he released the copyrights to his music before the album was released. Even Paul McCartney said in public that he thought the album was quite interesting and creative and he was not offended and did not feel like his music was stolen.

Danger Mouse did also come out to say that it was not his intention to start this controversy. He only planned on releasing about 3,000 copies of the album before it exploded. He also said that he created the album for people who were in the "sampling industry" who wanted to learn new techniques, he did not create this solely for the public of for Jay Z or The Beatles.

While there is still controversy over this album. I personally think that Danger Mouse is a creative mastermind. He was able to essentially take two artists, from opposite ends of the spectrum and blend them together into a cohesive album. While the lyrics and musicality may not be originally his, I think it is fair enough to say that he is a creative being.

Check out a couple of the tracks below.