THE GREY ALBUM

Praise for the series:

It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in

the Rye or Middlemarch … The series … is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration — The New York Times Book Review

Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes

just aren’t enough — Rolling Stone

One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet — Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these.

We are huge nerds — Vice

A brilliant series … each one a work of real love — NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart — Nylon

Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful — Boldtype

[A] consistently excellent series — Uncut (UK)

We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only

source for reading about music (but if we had our way …

watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check

out Bloomsbury’s “33 1/3” series of books — Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com and our website at http://www.bloomsbury.com/

musicandsoundstudies

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Where you’ll find:

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The Grey Album

Charles Fairchild

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Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc.

1385 Broadway

50 Bedford Square

New York

London

NY 10018

WC1B 3DP

USA

UK

www.bloomsbury.com

Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury

Publishing Plc

First published 2014

© Charles Fairchild, 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fairchild, Charles, 1967- author.

The grey album / Charles Fairchild.

pages cm. -- (33 1/3 ; 98)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-62356-660-9 (paperback)

1. Danger Mouse (Musician). Grey album. 2. Danger Mouse

(Musician)--Criticism and interpretation. 3. Rock music--History and criticism. I. Title.

ML420.D1436F35 2014

781.64--dc23

2014013574

ISBN: ePDF: 978-1-6235-6123-9

Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham,

Norfolk, NR21 8NN

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Track Listing

1. “Public Service Announcement” (2:45)

Beatles song: “Long, Long, Long”

2. “What More Can I Say” (4:25)

Beatles song: “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”

3. “Encore” (2:40)

Beatles song: “Savoy Truffle”

4. “December 4th” (3:35)

Beatles song: “Mother Nature’s Son”

5. “99 Problems” (4:07)

Beatles song: “Helter Skelter”

6. “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” (3:59)

Beatles song: “Julia”

7. “Moment of Clarity” (4:00)

Beatles song: “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”

8. “Change Clothes” (4:04)

Beatles songs: “Piggies” and “Dear Prudence”

9. “Allure” (4:05)

Beatles song: “Dear Prudence”

10. “Justify My Thug” (4:13)

Beatles song: “Rocky Raccoon”

11. “Lucifer 9 (Interlude)” (2:04)

Beatles songs: “Revolution 9” and “I’m So Tired”

12. “My 1st Song” (4:45)

Beatles songs: “Cry Baby Cry,” “Savoy Truffle” and

“Helter Skelter”

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: The Grey Album in a Post-Album World 1

1 Music, Incorporated

16

New world, old industry

18

Selling the album, destroying the single

25

Crowds, clouds and idols

33

2 Danger Mouse v. Capitol, Capitol v. Music

43

The aesthetic practices of the powerful

44

From fair use to safe harbors

50

Ownership rights, authorship rights and

natural rights to music

53

3 The Aesthetics of The Grey Album 57

The aesthetic legitimacy of The Grey Album 59

The musical traditions that shaped

The Grey Album 63

Musical fidelity and sample-based music

77

4 The Music of The Grey Album 82

The legacies of The Beatles and The Black Album 84

• vii •

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T H E G R E Y A L B U M

The making of The Grey Album 89

The flow of The Grey Album 93

Conclusion 111

Notes 119

Bibliography 131

• viii •

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Acknowledgments

I would like to offer my thanks to a number of people

whose enthusiasm, insight and feedback made this a

better book. The editorial staff at Bloomsbury continually responded to my ideas with care and professionalism.

From the proposal through to the final draft, their

understanding of who might read this book and why

helped me shape my writing beyond my usual (perhaps

slightly too academic) assumptions about why we write

about music. I would like to thank my peers, colleagues

and friends who have offered their honest assessments

of my ideas in all manner of fora, formal and informal,

social and professional. I would like to particularly thank Chris Coady, David Larkin, Alon Ilsar and the inimi-table Richard Toop. I would also like to thank above

all, Rachel Campbell for the constancy of her intellect

and boundless willingness to dig into ideas about music

simply because they matter. You have made all of this

possible.

• ix •

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Introduction

The Grey Album in a Post-Album World

The proprietor may, if he chooses, allow his crops to

rot under foot; sow his field with salt; milk his cows on the sand; change his vineyard into a desert, and use his

vegetable-garden as a park: do these things constitute

abuse, or not? In the matter of property, use and abuse

are necessarily indistinguishable.1

The Grey Album has received no shortage of praise since it was released. It has been lauded for its originality, its daring, even its revolutionary potential. We have been

told it was a marker of a new era in music-making,

building on the old to make the new. Sounds like a

template for a “Great Album,” doesn’t it? Rolling Stone and Spin certainly thought so, the former rating it number 58

of the “Top 100 Albums of the 2000s,” the latter raising

the ante ever so slightly by naming it number 113 of the

“125 Best Albums of the Last 25 Years.” Spin’ s equation was pretty much a Hall of Fame candidature slogan:

“Best rapper ever + best rock band ever = best mash-up

ever.”2 In fact, one of the more remarkable things about

• 1 •

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T H E G R E Y A L B U M

the reception of this album, beyond the aborted legal

case against it and the online protests in support of it, was how easily The Grey Album was slotted into a position in the canon. If the mainstream wasn’t thought “ready” for

mash-ups before The Grey Album, there was little doubt they were afterwards.

There has been a continuing ebb and flow of

commentary about The Grey Album over the last ten years.

It still stands, like most “Classic Albums,” as a marker of a time in the history of music when so many things seemed

possible. The immediate acceptance and recognition of

The Grey Album as a valued cultural form suggests it wasn’t nearly as revolutionary in its shape and content so much as in its timing and circumstances. That is hardly a bad thing. It wouldn’t be the first time a “Great Album”

was propelled upwards through a propitious turn of

events. Not coincidentally, the most surprised-sounding

party to all of the events of 2004 seemed to be Danger

Mouse himself. What he called his “art project”3 was

supposed to be a limited edition of 3,000, but as the thing spread far and wide, it got beyond his control. A passage from the “cease and desist” letter from Cowan, Liebowitz

and Latman, the lawyers for Capitol Records, reads:

Reuters has also quoted Mr. Burton as saying, “[t]his

wasn’t supposed to happen. … I just sent out a few tracks (and) now online stores are selling it and people are

downloading it all over the place.”4

Capitol’s legal handservants weren’t about to let this

slim rhetorical advantage go to waste. They told the

recipients of their pallid little missive:

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C H A R L E S F A I R C H I L D

By further distributing The Grey Album, you will not

only be violating the rights of those who own the

recordings and compositions at issue. You will also be

interfering with the intention of the very artist whose

rights you purport to vindicate.5

And that does put a fine point on it. Not even Danger

Mouse wants you to be a pirate. But no one was really

listening to Capitol very closely, except Danger Mouse.

He faced an unenviable situation. Remove the item from

circulation, or face prosecution. He readily complied.

The problem for Capitol was that The Grey Album wasn’t, strictly speaking, “his” anymore.

The problem is, Danger Mouse was never going

to be able to claim The Grey Album as his own. This is where the controversy over the album pointed out

quite sharply the inevitable contradictions between the

ownership rights, authorship rights and natural rights we claim to have over music. As famed nineteenth-century

philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon suggests at the

top of this chapter, the right to property is not neces-

sarily contingent on what you do with it. The music

industry has learned to stockpile intellectual property

in vast quantities for decades and do nothing with it, no re-issues, no special download packages, nothing, until

they decide we want whatever it is they are hoarding.

They will allow their crops to rot under foot and

sow their fields with salt if the market says so, just to keep us property-less peasants from getting our grubby

hands on their stuff without recompense. For better

or worse, Proudhon’s most famous dictum, “property

is theft,” is not a widely accepted sentiment.6 In the

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music industry, however, property is often theft. And

over the last ten years or so a lot of other uses of music have also become theft, and in an increasing array of

circumstances. Borrowing is theft. Appropriation is theft.

Homage is theft. Allusion is theft. Derivation is theft.

Quotation is theft. Even sharing is theft. Sharing. All of these forms of traditionally recognized musical practice

are illegal unless you pay the right people whatever they ask and they graciously grant you permission to make the art you want to make or play the music you want

to hear. Regardless of your perspective or ideology, the

simple fact is this: it is the whims of property owners

that determine when art is legal or not. Even authors

don’t have the bucket full of rights that owners do. The

rest of us, mere listeners that we are, don’t even rate. As far as our natural rights to music go, they don’t exist in any enforceable way. The music industry looks at us as a

bunch of renters or squatters.

A fair number of clever people have gone on at

length about the sometimes violent collisions of art and

technology in recent years.7 Scholars such as Lawrence

Lessig and Matthew Rimmer certainly don’t need my

help to tell you what is important or interesting about

the legal context into which The Grey Album entered.

Instead, the main subject of this book is the music of The Grey Album. I want to look at what makes The Grey Album an important album specifically because its importance

is not limited to the battles over its paternity. What did Danger Mouse actually do to the Beatles and Jay-Z?

Despite all of the hullabaloo over it, not much of the talk has been about The Grey Album as an album or about The Grey Album as music.

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C H A R L E S F A I R C H I L D

The Grey Album is more than just a clever amalgam of two seemingly disparate collections of source materials.

It is an important and compelling case study about what

counts about the album as a cultural form in an era

when the album appears to many to be obsolete. The

Grey Album is, above everything else, a coherent whole governed by a logic of practice and progression of ideas

that pervades every track; in other words, there is little question that it is an album in the traditional sense. One could probably even mount a pretty good argument that

it is an example of that most album-y of albums, the

concept album. What I want to suggest is that The Grey Album shows us that what makes an album important is not merely the assembly of a collection of uncannily

well-organized music. An important album changes how

we think about the traditions of practice of which it is a part.

In these terms, The Grey Album is not all that easy to place. It is not hip hop although it is clearly derived from hip hop. Nor can this album be easily contained by

the loose terms “mash-up” or “bastard pop.” The level

of dismantling and reassembly stretches well beyond

most mash-ups, most of which depend either on a

one-off demonstration of a clever juxtaposition or on

a rapid-fire system of song referencing and that simply

overwhelms the listener’s ability to keep up. On The Grey Album, Danger Mouse doesn’t move improvisationally from source to source like Madlib or flit promiscu-ously from joke to joke like Girl Talk. He engages

in an extended, long-form meditation on his source

materials and obsessive exploration of the compositional

techniques and logic he used to create his “art project.”

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T H E G R E Y A L B U M

The Grey Album is an important album because it had the potential to change how we thought about a whole range

of music that is in some way related to it. Not only did

The Grey Album change the way many viewed mash-ups and bastard pop, it also transformed what the “White

Album” and The Black Album might mean, especially in relation to each other.

Finally, The Grey Album is an important album because, within its very form and content, it came to represent

the struggles over tectonic shifts in the production,

distribution, and consumption of music. Danger Mouse

created a broad, inventive commentary on forms of

musical creativity that have defined all kinds of music for centuries: borrowing, appropriation, homage, derivation,

allusion, recomposition, collage, pastiche and quotation.

Without necessarily meaning to, he brought into focus a

new paradigm in the constant, scuffling contests between

those trying to exploit new sound manipulation technol-

ogies and those trying to corral them. He unwittingly

drew a sharp line between those exploring the capabil-

ities of new tools for making music and those trying to

contain them. Most importantly, nothing in The Grey

Album was so new that it couldn’t have been comfortably imagined well before 2004. This is because Danger

Mouse was working from within a long-thriving musical

tradition to which he added his skill and insight. For the last four decades, you would have had no trouble finding

a DJ who was willing to line up a few unexpected sounds

next to each other and rub them together to create a little aural spark and friction.

While a vivid rhetoric of novelty attached itself to

this album, it was a rhetoric that made claims far beyond

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C H A R L E S F A I R C H I L D

anything that appeared on the album itself. The decla-

rations made on Danger Mouse’s behalf were part of a

larger culture that was dreaming up new ways to connect

with the world. The really early twenty-first century was a heady time, briefly. The rhetoric of “newness,” a new

art, a new commerce, a new media, was believed by a lot

of people. Some of them were highly-placed executives

in the entertainment industry and some of these folks

got a little freaked out. The radical imaginings of various theorists positing a series of dead industries littering

the roadsides of what we used to call the “information

highway” had very serious consequences. This rhetoric

reinvigorated, and then ran arm in arm with, the increas-

ingly draconian extension, reinvention and enforcement

of copyright and intellectual property law. The hyper-

bolic imaginings of what these new media might bring us

gave some starkly repressive forces in many parts of the

entertainment industry the excuse they needed to pursue

their long-standing agenda of locking up content with

new force and new success. Ten years after this album

was released, we stand at an awkward intersection of the

law, technology and aesthetics. What was once touted as

a giant collaborative imagination machine, the internet,

is morphing into a ubiquitous, commercial and political

surveillance system with happy-clappy Web designs and

cartoon-flavored apps concealing an unimaginably huge

data-mining and monitoring operation.8

This book is framed by events from the ten years

following The Grey Album’s release, that is, between 2004 and 2014. In that reasonably short space of time,

it seems pretty obvious that an extraordinary number

of things have changed in the ways in which a lot of

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T H E G R E Y A L B U M

people find and listen to music. The iTunes Store went

from the drawing board to selling 25 billion tracks of

music before turning ten. YouTube went from some

innovative code to a primary means by which all manner

of musical expression is brought to social prevalence.

Facebook went from being a joke made by a small

collection of adolescent holdovers at Harvard to a central social experience in the everyday lives of hundreds

of millions of people. And the word cloud went from

describing puffy, wispy things in the sky to describing

a way of storing the digital denotations of large chunks

of one’s personal, professional and intimate lives on

remote machines to which unknown numbers of people

may or may not have access for murky purposes enacted

through undefined designs all of which one agrees to

simply by clicking on a virtual box containing hundreds

of thousands of words of text most people can not be

reasonably expected to understand. In short, over the

last ten years the transmigration of souls from Web 1.0

to Web 2.0 began in earnest.

More important than any of this, however, was the

fact that several very decisive trajectories of change

continued along roughly in the same direction as they

had before. There are two of particular consequence

here. Corporate influence over how we think, feel, eat,

vote, and spend our time and money has continued its

relentless expansion. This form of influence has not

exactly been hindered by the wonders emanating from

our various-sized glowing screens. Also, the ability of

states variously described as authoritarian, autocratic,

or democratic, to find, monitor and punish citizens and

adversaries alike has been dramatically enhanced by new

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C H A R L E S F A I R C H I L D

tools for collecting, storing and sifting through more

information than had been imagined to be possible only

ten years ago.9

The importance of what has changed and what has not

depends largely on how you see the potential of digital

culture playing out in the future. Many cyber-utopians

conjure a world of free goods and limitless collaboration made possible simply by reading the leavings in people’s

digital entrails and transforming these into apparently

endless strings of anecdote and aphorism.10 They rarely

talk about the power-hungry political and material

infrastructure needed to make their enchanting visions

possible.11 Many cyber-realists are of a slightly different cast of mind. The only free they can imagine is the free

market without which their Ayn Randian-fantasies of

autonomous individualism can’t exist. The two camps

only seem to overlap in the boundless certainty of

their presumptive claims to revolutionary change. We

are frequently told with absolute confidence that the

internet ‘democratizes’ just about everything, especially music. We are told, over and over again, in a multitude

of forums that it does so because it is new, different,

and subversive. The internet will, by its very nature,

upend all dominant paradigms. If you accept this, you

are an optimist; if you don’t, you are a pessimist. You are either with us or you are against us. Luckily for me, this book is not about the internet or the future. It is about music, so I only have to make these ideas relevant to the extent that they defined public debate about this album

and this music. Despite the rhetorical centrality of the

music industry to nearly every tale of woe about indus-

tries that are supposed to be in decline, not too many

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T H E G R E Y A L B U M

cyber-utopians or cyber-realists appear to have spent too much time worrying about actual music.

I’d like to provide some small corrective to this. There

are five ideas that frame everything that follows. First, the events of the last ten years show us very clearly that what we have experienced has not been the revolutionary

overturning of the existing social order in the music

industry. The music industry has not been subverted,

even as it has become something very different from

what it once was. The purported revolution so many

have been straining to will into existence or to grimly

hold off has simply not eventuated, at least not yet. This is not to say it won’t or can’t. The menacing or euphoric portents of something not quite apparent are very much

with us. But a revolution is made up of more than omens.

A revolution is the overturning of a social, political and economic order. This great overturning simply has not

happened.

Second, it has not happened for a few key reasons.

Over the last 30 or so years, the wider playing field of

the music industry, like the wider corporate landscape

more generally, has run on an operational logic that

values ever-increasing profitability and productivity over everything else. While this may seem hit-you-over-the-head obvious, it is what this logic both implies and

necessitates for the music industry that is important to

understand. More than anything, this logic demands

that these industries retain tight control over their intellectual property. They have done this mostly through

the rewriting of copyright and intellectual property law.

Further, they must rigidly maintain the ways in which

they acquire and keep that property by making sure the

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C H A R L E S F A I R C H I L D

contracts artists sign with them give the industry what

amounts to perpetual and unlimited use of the content

their artists create.12 Also, they must aggressively prevent or “effectively frustrate” any uses of that property that do not conform to their perceived needs by making sure

they have some kind of influence over the infrastructure

through which their property moves through the world.13

Given that a central, defining feature of popular culture generally has been the wholesale and continual reuse and

repurposing of the stuff of our collective experience into as many media formats as possible, corporate storehouses

of intellectual property have only grown in value. This

is one of the main reasons why the music industry has

survived this particularly gruesome upheaval in their

market.

Third, it is crucial to understand that the music

industry’s main goal is to do everything it possibly can

to continually make its property more useful, valuable

and profitable. As legal scholar Joel Bakan has shown us, in most places in the world, corporations “have a legal

duty to put shareholders’ interests above all others” as

“the law forbids any other motivation for their actions,

whether to assist workers, improve the environment,

or help consumers save money.”14 Notably, this has

demanded the comprehensive corruption of democratic

politics throughout the world. As Bakan argues:

Though often accused of corrupting democracy with

their money and influence, corporations have little choice but to seek influence when that is necessary to protecting and promoting their interests …The executive who, out

of principled concern for the integrity of the democratic

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T H E G R E Y A L B U M

process, refuses to be involved in political influence,

fails his or her shareholders, as well as the corporation’s legal mandate to promote its best interests. The job of

a corporate executive is not to protect democracy but

to manage its uncertainties and avoid the obstacles it

presents.15

The one area in which this form of corruption has been

overwhelmingly consequential, both nationally and inter-

nationally, is intellectual property law. In pursuit of their interests, the music and entertainment industries have

spent several decades participating in the construction of an international property system implemented through

trade agreements and enacted through the largest

and most effective institutions of legal, criminal and

economic management and enforcement on the planet.16

This process has been so effective as to constitute a form of “feudalism” in the eyes of two scholars who note a

striking paradox of this achievement:

The danger to basic rights posed by intellectual property regulation is not an obviously visible danger. Rather it is a danger based on the quiet accretion of restrictions—

an accretion hardly visible because it is hidden behind

technical rule-making, mystifying legal doctrine and

complex bureaucracies, all papered over by seemingly

plausible appeals to the rights of inventors and authors.17

Fourth, if we can understand the “suppression” or

“censorship” of The Grey Album, not as an isolated quick-strike against a vulnerable outsider, but instead as the predictable and obligatory response of a system of

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property rights, the origins of which predate that album

by a least 50 years, then we can see why things happened

the way they did. The legal claims against The Grey

Album are part of a much larger constellation of restraints and inhibitions on specific forms of technology and

expression that “operate to slow the rate of diffusion”18 of those forms to make sure that they can be absorbed into

the existing social fabric without being too disruptive. As communications historian Brian Winston suggests, “such

a pattern, far from atrophying in the face of supposedly

revolutionary change, persists.”19 This means that what

are widely regarded as normal day-to-day musical

activities, such as file sharing and mixtape-making for

example, have been defined as external to the “legit-

imate” music economy. This is because “they represent

an imperfection in the market, a lapse in its mechanisms

… They represent not individual market failures but an

inability of the principle of the market to account for

complex effects whose value cannot be monetarized.”20

However, these kinds of market imperfections are not

exiled from the market forever. Many can start to work

inside of it, some to such an extent that they actually

help redefine what that market is. This is the dread that has been gnawing at the music industry for a while now.

Those who already hold a good deal of power within the

music industry, whether through managing copyright or

exploiting contracts or simply accumulating a lot of plain old material wealth, have exerted a disproportionate

amount of influence over the very shape and definition

of the conceptual and practical tools of our ‘new’ digital world. This is another reason why the purported ‘digital

revolution’ hasn’t happened, yet.

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So how can this help us understand The Grey Album?

The fifth and final part of what I will argue for in this book is that The Grey Album is important specifically because it is not revolutionary nor is it in any way a radical break with the past. It is not revolutionary,

subversive or rebellious technologically, conceptually,

compositionally, sonically, musically, politically or even economically. This means that it was never dependent on

some mercurial sense of novelty to exist or survive. In its very aural make-up, it displays a tremendous amount of

continuity with a broad range of aesthetic ancestors. This is what makes it important.

To understand this, I will use two terms in fairly

particular ways in order to show how this album is

thoroughly marked by continuities with the past. Those

terms are: medium and materials. While most of us

probably understand that an artist’s “medium” is the

actual stuff that makes up their artwork, like sound, paint, marble, pixels, space, whatever, I want to use this term

in a slightly different way. The philosopher of aesthetics Theodore Gracyk gives us a more compelling way to

imagine what an artist’s medium is. Gracyk shows us that

the network of social conventions defines the limits of

how the materials an artist uses move through the world

and what aesthetic qualities and meanings are attached

to that art as it moves. As Gracyk argues, “to understand a medium is to know which qualities are relevant” to a

work of art. A medium is made out of artistic practices

used on some particular set of materials in ways recog-

nized and understood by that artwork’s audience.21 We

make meaning out of a work of art based on some

“understanding of how aesthetic qualities and meanings

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emerge from the materials” an artist uses.22 In this case, the compositional practices Danger Mouse exerted on

his materials, the very familiar conventions such as

borrowing, quotation, and collage, became meaningful

in particular ways in part because of the way he engaged

in those practices, and in part because of how he engaged with them by acting on the particular materials unknow-ingly provided by Jay-Z and the Beatles. I will argue

that the medium and materials of The Grey Album bear a striking similarity to the medium and materials of

many of its ancestors. As I will show throughout this

book, those ancestors are so numerous and varied as to

constitute a seriously complex and fascinating medium.

I should note, finally, a few of the things this book

is not about. It is not about Brian Burton the musician or the producer nor is it about his career trajectory,

wider influence, or his body of work as a whole. I

am not writing as an insider of any description and

I possess none of the skills Burton used to make this

album. Neither is it about Brian Burton the man. I don’t

spend a lot of time talking about him or his life here.

Nor is it about the links and attachments Burton has

made to various famous musicians. I have no interest

in writing about the weird vortex of attention-seeking

and celebrity-worship that consumes most of the music

industry. Instead, I will be confining myself to asking two seemingly simple questions: What is The Grey Album and where did it come from?

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1

Music, Incorporated

Music … seems of a nature too extensive, and at the same

time, comprehends too many nice particular and curious

details to be taken up at large … Since it furnishes

employment for the most exact discrimination, learning,

research and profound investigation as a science … and

requires a great length of time exclusively devoted to

the pursuit, to become a great proficient in it, as a most pleasing and graceful, yet laborious accomplishment.1

Since 2004, everyone in the know was singing from the

same songbook. The music industry was on its last legs.

It had to be.2 Many said it. Many believed it. The fattest, loudest voices in the choir were the fattest, loudest

members of the music industry itself, their moaning ably

amplified by their lobbyists in the Recording Industry

Association of America (RIAA) and the International

Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI). Making

money out of music had become far too laborious an

accomplishment for them, far harder, it would seem, than

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actually making music itself. Yet there was no shortage of the stuff. Quite the opposite. Of course, it wasn’t a lack of available music that was the problem. The problem was

the new types of relationships between musicians and

fans that many influential people had been imagining

and many others had been enacting. The emergence

of an expanding array of new kinds of connections

between fans and musicians in many forms of media had

some merrily imagining the inevitable withering of the

distended corpse of the music industry.

Yet the music industry’s own numbers told, and

continue to tell, a very different story, as do some of the music industry’s highest profile successes of the past few years. There are at least two simple measures that should tell us something about the overall state of the music

industry by the tail end of its most recent period of crisis.

By 2011, headphone sales were booming and performing

rights organizations, those bodies tasked with collecting royalty payments, are hitting all-time highs for revenues.

One royalty collector said at the time, “[m]ore music is

being consumed today than ever before.”3

So it seems something of a paradox that, despite

its obvious struggles and successes, many in the music

industry would work so hard to prevent people from

listening to the wrong music in the wrong ways. As we

will see, the music industry spent a lot of time from

the mid-1980s and the late-1990s trying to constrain

the acceptable forms of music consumption down to

pretty much just one option: the full-length album

on compact disc bought at a large retail chain store.

However, as the campaign to establish and perpetuate

the unchallenged dominance of the CD gradually wore

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on, the range of options for consumers in other areas of

consumption related to music was expanding exponen-

tially. The somewhat panicky, sometimes angry debate

over The Grey Album becomes more clear when we can see how the music industry went about trying to define

what they thought the most acceptable forms of music

consumption were. The conflict over The Grey Album

is a logical extension of this story. My point is that the conflict over this album was not only about an industry

reluctantly adjusting to new forms of consumption. It

was also about their ability to police their medium and

control their materials.

New world, old industry

The new world in which we are said to be living is

supposed to be defined by “direct” relationships between

fans and musicians. The process of creating these direct

relationships is called “disintermediation.”4 It was

supposed to mean that all that useless chaff in the middle, the A&R people, the marketing types, the lawyers, would inevitably be bypassed. This idea was by no means

limited to the music industry. It was part of a much larger and very influential set of ideas put forward by a small

collection of once-countercultural figures who argued

for the great “leveling” power of the internet. This

leveling would mean that the state would mostly vanish

and the corporation would implode. Civil society would

blossom and centralized authorities of all kinds would

atrophy.5 All of this would happen specifically because

the liberated and autonomous individual would be able

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to “negotiate” with large institutions from a position of equality because the internet would gradually wear these

institutions down to almost nothing. For musicians, it

meant that all you really needed was a small group of

devoted adherents to make a living from music as you

could leverage their support into a big stick to beat those shambling, useless wretches in the music industry into

submission.6

It might seem very easy to find some very practical,

real-world examples that appear to support this vision.

One very famous example is Radiohead’s release of In

Rainbows on their own website on a “pay-what-you-

want” basis. It was hailed as a revolutionary statement by respected artists. They had “ditched the music business”

by providing a new model of making one’s musical way

in the world.7 However, the In Rainbows “precedent”

has not necessarily proven itself to be a viable model

for others.8 Instead of hailing a new revolution, the

In Rainbows release showed how a well-thought out marketing campaign run by music industry professionals

could be used to great effect in this “new world” while

remaining at most only an uneasy distance from the old

world we were supposed to have left behind. Despite the

band’s modest claims about simply wanting to “to get the

album to people who’d been waiting patiently for four

years,” there was always more to it than that.9

Trading on Radiohead’s towering reputation, the

band’s management company released the download-

only form of the album in October 2007 on a website

that they owned and operated. Part of the goal was to

stir up interest in a band that had been on an unofficial hiatus for four years after their contract with EMI

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ended. Another part of the band’s goal was to set up a

distribution infrastructure that they had some control

over in order to steer traffic away from illegal downloads on torrent sites to the band’s own dedicated site for this album.10 While this part of the plan was only partially

successful, offering the album as a download was only

the first step. After a few months, the official download version was taken down, but a few days before this

happened, a fairly expensive and richly-supplied boxed

set for the album was offered on preorder to be delivered in time for Christmas. This part of the campaign was

concluded with a standard CD release after Christmas.

Each version of the album was attended by the requisite

fan contests, unique media events and various extras one

might expect. All of this was followed about five months

later with a world tour. In Rainbows was sold through a seamless, tightly-choreographed string of multimedia

events and related merchandise, not all that different

from similar campaigns in the days of yore. It didn’t

really matter if EMI wasn’t the choreographer; the effect was the same.

There is no doubt it worked. According to Rolling

Stone’s cover story from February 2008, one digital data measurement company estimated that despite the fact

the “only two out of five downloaders paid anything at

all” for the album, if you average out all of the downloads from the original inrainbows.com site and all of the

money collected, the band earned “about $2.26 [US]

per album, more than Radiohead would have made in a

traditional label deal.”11 In October 2008, Warner Music, the band’s publisher which oversaw the album’s release,

published some of their sales data for the album. At that

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point in time, Warner reported that the album had sold

over 3 million copies, earning the band more money

before the release of the In Rainbows CD than the band had earned from their previous album from 2003, Hail

to the Thief.12

Behind the hype, we can see that, far from ditching

the record industry, Radiohead participated in a well-

designed and successful marketing campaign for their

album and subsequent tour, underwritten in part by one

of those companies that was supposed to have wilted

on the vine by now. Their actions were a response

to a complex situation marked by dissatisfaction with

their former record company and consternation at

constant leaks of unfinished material.13 The timing

of the campaign was expert and the merchandise was

compelling enough to incite purchases beyond what was

available for free. The point here is that, as economist

Will Page noted, “torrents and legal downloads would

appear to be complements, not competitors.”14 One of

the main goals of the download version of In Rainbows was to capture people’s attention, an increasingly scarce commodity in a world now richer than ever with easily

accessible information, and then leverage that attention

into some kind of relationship with Radiohead’s music in

its many, many forms. Given that the increasing wealth

of information also means an increasing scarcity of

attention, the successful use of any number of recently

lauded forms of “direct” connection between fans and

musicians such as crowd funding, Twitter, SoundCloud

or YouTube, can still work particularly well for those that can leverage some kind of already-existing reputation

or profile into public attention.15 The competition for

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attention is nothing new, but it has radically intensified in the last ten years.

The fact that even Radiohead is still part of the music

industry should at least suggest to us that some very

important things may not have changed all that much.

Underlying all of the obvious tumult are a few sales and

revenue numbers that are the direct consequence of the

fact that the entertainment industry, of which the music

industry is a comparatively small part, has continued

its multi-decade trend towards industrial consolidation

and market expansion. This has resulted in a smaller

number of larger corporations owning and controlling

an increasing majority of the companies that make, sell

and profit from recorded music. In 1996, six big corpo-

rations controlled about 80 percent of the global music

market.16 By 2012, there were three even bigger corpo-

rations that controlled a slightly larger chunk of the

global sales of recorded music.17 Despite a remarkable

period of significant change with the genuine possibility of “disintermediation,” the same large corporations that

remain are pretty much in the same place and condition

they were before.

Despite the dire claims of the big labels, they really

weren’t doing so badly, all things considered, at least

up until about 2002 when the drop off in album sales

began to bite. Further, after a period of genuine financial distress, the music industry as a whole, began to grow

again.

After the global recession of the late-1970s, the music

industry began to recover by about mid-1982. The intro-

duction and industrially enforced dominance of the CD,

starting in 1983, as well as a significant global economic

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expansion in the 1980s and 1990s, produced a nearly

unbroken upward curve of sales value of recorded music

which lasted from 1982 until 2001. Between 1986 and

1996, the numbers were better than anyone had ever

seen. As Billboard noted in 2004, the “industry began a run of unprecedented growth in 1986.” The streak “came to a

halt in 2001 when album sales were off 2.9%.”18 Simply

put, if you actually counted what was being sold and how

much money was being made from selling it, the value of

recorded music steadily increased for a very long time.19

A lot was made of the fact that this was the first decline in album sales since the CD was introduced.20 The IFPI

claimed that piracy was to blame, somewhat hysterically

claiming that low-cost CD-R burners had allowed 640

million pirated discs to be sold worldwide. When one

added the IFPI’s estimates of illicit cassettes into the

mix, the number of pirate “sales” jumped to 1.8 billion, a number that dwarfed the worldwide sales of legal copies

of all recorded music by a measure of some 40 percent.21

Yet, despite all of this lawlessness, you can make a pretty good case that the size of “the broader music industry”

has been expanding significantly since about 2005, even

as album sales have declined dramatically.22

To the more observant, this long upward trend in

music sales might seem to contradict the apocalyptic

rhetoric that has been seeping from the music industry

for years. However, the important thing to remember

about any public accounting of “sales of recorded music”

by the IFPI is that the only numbers the IFPI makes

public come from the big three themselves. The numbers

most of us get to see are intended to serve the interests of the major record labels, the ones that routinely refer

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to themselves as the music industry, and they are very selective about what they tell us. Despite the rapid

proliferation of the ways in which we could consume

music, a lot of things were never included in the process of counting and reporting on the resulting revenue

numbers.23 Until very recently, the numbers purported

to measure the health of the music industry have

specifically excluded revenues from live performance,

merchandising, streaming, publishing royalties, public

performance royalties and any sales of ringtones or the

licensing songs in advertising, video games, television

shows, or films. The sales numbers of albums and singles

we do get to see also exclude a lot of independent

producers, distributors, retailers, and often a lot of actual nations considered too small to matter. Most measures

purporting to assess the state of the music industry do

so mostly by quantifying “sales of recorded music” and

that has only ever meant the sales of albums produced by

record labels owned by the “big three” of Sony, Warner

and Universal along with a few cautious estimates about

the kind of trade some independent record labels might

be doing. Calling these numbers approximations is a

high compliment.

This really shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. A

small number of very large corporations have controlled

a massive chunk of global music sales for decades. The

numbers they make public are central markers of that

control. As I will show in the next section, these numbers always express a fundamental distinction in the market

for music: the importance of market value over sales

numbers. It is this necessary preference that has defined the market in music since the recovery of the early

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1980s. It also gives us a big clue as to what has caused

many of the problems the music industry has been facing

for the last ten years.24 As I argued in the introduction, the music industry, like all industries, has no choice

but to pursue constantly increasing profits by any and

all means. This has meant embracing the album to the

detriment, exclusion or even wholesale destruction of

competing formats. This was especially true of the single format from about the early 1990s until the early 2000s.

Selling the album, destroying the single

Singles have been consistently and remarkably popular

for decades because they are cheap, durable, and

attractive.25 Despite this, the big record labels have

repeatedly tried to stamp them out because they are

afraid of what they call “cannibalization.”26 The theory

is simple. As Billboard helpfully explained in 2000, “many label executives believe singles sales cannibalize album

sales, and their companies don’t issue singles or, if

they do, cut them out once a song becomes a hit, with

the hope that fans will buy the album.” This practice

was designed to force album sales upwards.27 The next

step was to simply stop producing any singles at all for

most album releases. The comparatively few singles that

were released were produced to try to boost early chart

positions with labels often deliberately selling them so

cheaply that they were unprofitable.28 These convoluted

tactics appeared to have worked, briefly.

We can trace the enforced decline of the single back to

the early 1990s. In the halcyon days of 1995, things were

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looking pretty great for the major record labels. The

IFPI was claiming that “worldwide sales at retail values

were worth $39.7 billion,” a jump of nearly 10 percent

from the previous year. This growth was fueled by the

strong growth in the sales of albums on CD.29 A small

aside in this report notes the simultaneous decline of the once very popular and appealingly cheap cassette format

“in 40 of the 68 countries surveyed.” Another strange

aside noted that “singles are continuing to move forward

after a period in which several of the leading nations

regarded the format as being in terminal decline.”30 In

fact, the growth of sales for singles remained a perplex-

ingly strong “phenomenon in the five biggest music

markets in the world with sales in Japan, the U.S., the

U.K., Germany and France accounting for 90 percent of

the global market.”31 So, the apparently terminal decline of the single in “leading nations” would seem to exclude

the five most dominant music markets on the planet.

These two utterly incommensurate “facts” unwittingly

capture the heart of the problem. Albums contribute a

lot more to the market value of the big players in the

music industry than singles and this always trumped the

single’s affordability and obvious appeal to lots of people all over the world.

The long boom of the music industry between 1982

and 2001 had a lot to do with this increasingly exclusive focus on album sales in an expanding global market. We

can see this clearly in the sales numbers that came from

Nielsen-Soundscan research from the end of 1999. In

that year, in the dominant U.S. market, new hit albums

on CD were the driving force of the continuing global

expansion of the music market. Singles in all formats

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experienced a “precipitous drop” in numbers which

“industry observers” attributed to “a reluctance on the

part of the major record companies to release singles.”32

Not exactly a subtle correlation there. Not everyone

agreed with the practice. According to Billboard, “retailers argue that a low-priced music configuration is essential

if the industry wants to encourage young consumers to

buy music”33 and “since labels mostly refuse to release

hit songs on the format, that group is turning to the

internet to download pirated copies of those tunes or

asking friends to burn the more costly albums that

contain them.”34 One reporter for Billboard summed up the late-1990s music market very succinctly, if a

little simplistically: “Pushing bundled products down the throats of consumers in the form of bloated, overpriced

CDs, plus the deletion of physical singles, is what drove the revolution in song downloading.”35

By the start of 2002, the single was meant to be

a nostalgic remnant of a bygone era. The single was

pronounced dead after dramatic falls in sales numbers

saw the format languishing at the bottom of the cut-out

bin with the sales numbers the lowest they had been since the early 1950s.36 Despite efforts by some to revive the

format, such as five- and six-track “singles” sold at higher prices, or re-releases of “classic tracks” that avoided

cannibalization, the matter appeared to be closed. This

final attempt in 1999 to bury the single once and for all was telling as the music industry unwittingly picked what was probably the absolute worst moment in history to

try and finish the job: 1999, the year Napster appeared.

The intense focus on selling albums through the

promotion of one or two hit songs resulted in a hugely

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important continuity between the “old” music industry

and the “new” one, an impressively persistent type of

sales curve that remains an embedded characteristic

of the mainstream music industry. Imagine a graph

with the vertical axis measuring the number of sales

a particular album has had and the horizontal axis

measuring the total number of albums that are available

for sale. The sales curve that has come to increasingly

define the music industry since the mid-1980s exhibits

a death-defying drop from the upper left corner of

the graph, in which a small number of albums sell

a massive number of copies, all the way down close

to the bottom of the graph where a very long “tail”

begins to stretch off into the nether regions of the

lower right-hand corner of the graph. At that end, a

very large number of albums sell a very small number

of copies. Since about the mid-1990s, and possibly

earlier, Nielsen-Soundscan reported sales figures for

the largest record companies that have shown a very

small number of albums accounted for a huge chunk of

total sales. In 1995 about two-tenths of 1 percent of all albums released accounted for 40 percent of total sales.

Remember, 1995 was one of the best years in the history

of global recorded music sales. And yet, 90 percent of

all releases that year sold less than 5,000 copies.37 We

can find suspiciously similar numbers from 1997 until

2005.38 When we jump ahead to 2011, we find a similar

story: out of the more than 75,000 new releases noted

across the whole music industry, only 1,500 titles, or 2

percent of the total, accounted for over 90 percent of

total sales.39 As Billboard calmly pointed out in 2011,

“[c]ontinuing a years-long trend, the top digital sellers

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in the United States are grabbing an increased share of

sales, thanks to a surprisingly vibrant digital market.”40

Now you might be thinking, yes, yes, these boring

statistics are all well and good, but didn’t we have a

revolution around that time? Didn’t huge amounts of

music suddenly become much more easily and immedi-

ately available? Yes, they did and obviously many people

do have greater access to a ridiculous amount of music

in a bewildering variety of forms, a lot of it for free.

However, it appears that this sales curve is not limited

to music people buy. Those who have studied download

patterns on peer-to-peer networks have also found a very

similar curve. As the researchers note, when comparing

legal sales and file trading “both legal and illegal music consumption patterns are tucked up against the bottom

left axis, contrary to Long Tail-like expectations,

suggesting that much of the volume is concentrated

amongst a small proportion of the available tracks.”41

In fact, this is what is so strange and remarkable about

this sales curve. You would expect the dramatic changes

in the music market to affect it somehow. Yet, despite the massive changes we have seen since 1999, this sales curve just persists even when other very important variables

change dramatically. For example, the average annual

number of new releases has more than doubled since

2004.42 Also, one of the biggest changes over the last ten years is the sheer number of songs now available digitally.

Beyond this, it is simply logic-defying that this sort of sales curve should persist even in the face of both the

unprecedented heights of album sales in the late-1990s

as well as the plainly massive decline in album sales since 2002. What this tells us is that while some of the decline

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in album sales really should be attributed to file sharing, more relevant is the fact that the sales numbers the big

labels were posting in the late-1990s were profoundly

unsustainable historical anomalies brought about by the

legally obligatory pursuit of constantly increasing profits.

By 2011, according to some digital luminaries, we

were supposed to be seeing a very different kind of

music market, one defined by its “long tail.”43 On the

sales graph that I described above, the massive downward

curve should have become less steep as top sellers sold

less. The tail should have got “thicker” as the sales

numbers for all those many, many titles on the lower

reaches of the graph rose. While there has been some

evidence that shows the percentage of albums bought

digitally has ceded some ground to the “tail” albums,

small numbers of hit albums still dominate in roughly

the same proportions they did in 1999 and hit singles

are even more dominant than ever in all formats.44

As Billboard tersely concluded in 2009, “labels have continued to focus on finding hits for a reason: It’s

almost impossible for them to make any real money

any other way.”45 For artists, the digital panacea has

been slow to materialize because, “although niche titles

collectively account for a greater percentage of sales, no individual one accrued any meaningful income—and

few have received the attention their creators would

need to perform or sell merchandise at a time when

those revenue streams are becoming more important.”46

We can again see that the dominant market position of

the big record labels does translate into some advantage

in terms of getting people’s attention and turning that

attention into money.

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One of the main reasons for these particular forms

of continuity in the market for music is that the market

in music continues to be operated as a cartel. This is

not a metaphor. It is the literal description given to the music industry multiple times by entities such as the

European Union, the US Federal Trade Commission

and the Attorney Generals of 42 American states.47 Like

all cartels, the goal is to maintain prices by restricting competition. The sales curve I have been describing is,

in part, the result of this. There are other side effects of this in the music industry. They are numerous and point

to some of the problems that have dogged the music

industry of late beyond their automatic accusations of

piracy.

In 2007, Billboard published the results of one of its regular analytical forays into the numbers tallied

up by Nielsen-Soundscan. Their goal was to track the

potential for the development and nurturing of new

artists, a feature of the music industry many thought to

be on the wane since the late-1990s. The situation was

clear, according to industry insiders: “Record companies

no longer have the time, the staffing and the money to

provide that infrastructure around an artist early on.”48

But it was the reasons given that were striking. Piracy

didn’t get a single mention. The main cause of this

problem was the consolidation of the radio broadcasting

and music retailing industries which followed along the

same lines as the consolidation of the music and enter-

tainment industries. There were simply fewer people in

a smaller number of larger and more powerful corpora-

tions who decided what music made it to radio or which

CDs made it onto the shelves of their stores or onto the

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pages of their websites. This meant that those larger more powerful entities had disproportionate influence over the rest of the market, or what those in the music industry

call “market moving share.”49 If a new release was not

a more or less immediate success, it was less and less

likely that it would ever break through. Within the big

record companies, consolidation meant that fewer and

fewer people were available to promote, distribute and

push an increasing number of new releases. In addition

to the increasing mass of music now available, there are

also an increasing number of other things consumers

are doing with their time and money, such as spending

both on endless numbers of television channels, DVDs,

video games and websites.50 In short, the main problem

was that the music industry’s medium and materials were

getting out of control.

It is probably not too surprising that a heavily consoli-

dated, often sclerotic cartel might struggle to catch up

to many of its perpetually multi-tasking consumers. The

channels through which record companies sell music and

through which people consume it have splintered and

fragmented in unprecedented ways in recent years. The

media environment in which we consume music is now

exponentially more crowded than in the past. In the last

part of this chapter, I want to provide a brief survey of a few of the forms this struggle has taken over the past decade.

Understanding the dynamics of how the music industry

has gone about the task of continually capturing and recapturing their occasionally elusive prey over the last ten years can help us understand how the shifting dynamics of the

relationship between the music industry and consumers

can radically evolve in order to stand in place.

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Crowds, clouds and idols

The shift from one way of consuming music to another,

however gradual or abrupt, is about a lot more than the

appearance of a new format or technology. Such a shift

encompasses broader and sometimes unsettling changes

to the social rituals and relationships that give music

much of its meaning and value. Some technological

changes can even bring into question the very character

and definition of music itself. We can trace these debates at least as far back as the 1906 essay “The Menace of

Mechanical Music” written by “America’s Band Leader,”

John Philip Sousa, who presciently identified issues that remain with us to this day.51 As the media historian Lisa Gitelman has shown, for Sousa “the ‘little black spots’ of notation might be symbolic but they were not real music

at all … Real music was intuitively ‘something beyond’

dead matter, and Sousa wanted musical authorship recon-

structed accordingly under law.”52 Beneath these dry,

technical debates about new technologies, lies a motley

mix of both fear and excitement that has repeatedly

been evoked by the appearance of new machines we task

with making music, whether we are talking about the

phonograph, radio, magnetic tape, CDs, mp3s and online

streaming. The medium and materials of popular music

have never stopped changing over the last century and

the battles fought by the music industry to control them

have often been just as intense as those we have seen in

the last ten years.53

One of the main reasons the music industry hasn’t

died during any of these crises and transitions is that

they have remained somewhere between barely and

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reasonably capable of doing what they’ve always done

to survive: assembling a mass audience, giving them

convenient, satisfying ways to consume music, and

making a large number of those people feel that what

they were consuming was worthwhile enough to do

repeatedly. Despite the often radical changes to the

forms these tasks have taken in the last decade, they have still managed to persist. Most recently, it has been cloud computing and music-based reality television that have

provided the environments in which the sorts of crowds

the music industry thinks it needs to survive can be

assembled. For better or worse, these are the mediums

that are most obviously pointing us forward into what

remains a murky future.

This future was unwittingly set out some years ago

by a small number of industry observers who saw online

streaming and digital download sales as the only way

the music industry might survive. I say unwittingly

because in most cases, these reluctant seers were actually explaining why the things the music industry needed

to do to survive were probably impossible. According

to these sources, the music industry needed to do the

following things to survive:

✒✒ make friends with the computer industry through

new partnerships, alliances and mergers;

✒✒ make file-swapping just inconvenient enough to

deter most people from doing it;

✒✒ find ways to sell music online through subscription

services and per-track downloads;

✒✒ assert legal and technological control over content;

and

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✒✒ install “brand as the music navigator of the online

environment.”54

In short, they needed to find new ways to exert the

same continuing level of control over their medium and

materials, but in a new environment. When these ideas

were first floated in the mid-1990s, the hostility to them on the part of many in the music industry was palpable.

They are now common sense with one or another major

label pursuing most if not all of them. They seem to

think they have been at least moderately successful.55

In addition to their extremely well-documented anti-

piracy efforts, the music industry’s first effort at doing all of these things was to create two subscription services that were meant to sap the energy of file-sharing networks.

While the RIAA attacked file-sharing networks in court

and lobbied for specific changes to copyright law, the

big labels set about creating MusicNet, sponsored by

Warner, BMG, EMI and Real Networks, and Pressplay,

sponsored by Sony and Universal. Clearly, the music

industry was paying attention to streaming and what

would eventually be called “cloud” computing far earlier

than most of us might have suspected. However, their

focus was almost entirely on perpetuating the cartel-

like business model described above. This explains the

seemingly farsighted effort in the U.S. to develop the

legal infrastructure that would allow the kinds of digital streaming services that would eventually operate on the

scale the music industry demanded.56 These tactics were

in use by 1995, but only started to bear serious fruit

after about 2011. Behind these somewhat prosaic devel-

opments was a much longer-term and more profound

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change, the shift from an industry concerned mostly

with producing music to an industry mostly concerned

with the exploitation of intellectual property rights. This shift also began much earlier than some might have

expected. As a fairly comprehensive report from 1985

argued, in the mid-1950s “record companies bought

their way into music publishing as a means of securing

control over the various ancillary rights that surround

a recording” and by “the end of the sixties they had

become integrated to such an extent that it was impos-

sible to untangle their activities.”57 The author then

added rather presciently, “[w]hatever future emerges,

the music industry’s fate may well be determined by

how successfully it manages to lobby governments on

the matter of copyright reform.”58 As we now know, they

have done this very successfully.

However, the sort of intense, dedicated, single-

minded, long-term and wildly successful skills that

served the industry so well when remaking intellectual

property law, abandoned them when they set about

trying to create services people might actually want to

use. This explains the almost comically awful design of

MusicNet and Pressplay when they were rolled out in

2001–2 after extensive delays and lengthy negotiations

within the industry. Both charged $9.95 per month and

allowed consumers access to a set number of streams

and downloads of individual songs. But the downloads

were temporary, expiring when subscriptions lapsed, and

the limited catalogues made available by these services

proved unattractive to most potential customers.59 Both

were dismal, expensive failures. This isn’t too surprising given the obstacles faced by these music subscription

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services when they were brought out. According to one

analyst, these included

tenuous consumer demand, undefined economic models,

unknown costs, as well as a lack of compelling content

selection, clearance from all interested rights holders,

an understanding of how to market the new services,

a relationship with traditional retail, and—despite

hundreds of millions of dollars of collective development spending—sustained support from the labels and their

parent companies themselves.60

Oh, is that all?

Remarkably, the music industry’s myopia stretched

even beyond their comprehensive, but perhaps under-

standable lack of foresight. While it is hard to blame

an industry for not immediately conjuring an entirely

new economy on the fly, what was really astonishing

was the lengths the big record labels went to in order

to create the exact sort of cartel online they had set

up in the real world. Before either subscription service

was even available to the public, the U.S. Department

of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission opened

what would become a lengthy investigation into the way

MusicNet and Pressplay had established themselves.

Smaller companies had complained that the big record

labels “planned to cross-license only themselves and

other major players” while others had told authorities

they had been “refused licenses by MusicNet because

they did not pony up hundreds of thousands of dollars

for negotiations.”61 Further, major labels were accused

of colluding to “set artificially high prices for digital

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downloads” by secretly agreeing with each other not

to undercut a set price and collectively refusing to do

business with anyone who didn’t agree to their terms of

service.62 While the case was initially dismissed in 2003

and a similar class-action suit was dismissed in 2008,

the latter decision was reversed in 2010. The years of

wrangling have continued right up to the present. The

most striking feature of the accusations is that the major record labels were trying to impose an abnormally high price on digital downloads when free downloads were

arguably at their peak. When people said at the time

that the music industry ‘didn’t get it,’ this is what they meant.

These halting, possibly criminal efforts were more

important than their abject failure suggests. They were

successful in providing models through which the music

industry could establish new partnerships, alliances and

mergers with the computer industry in such a way

as to protect their content and brands. It was this

necessary cooperation that began to break down the

music industry’s grumpy resistance to letting others sell their music online. Most consequentially, the big labels

began licensing their catalogues to the iTunes Store

which opened in 2003. Despite giving up a fair amount

of technological and marketing control, the extensive

and increasingly draconian legal controls the music

industry exerted over their music still gave them some

semblance of control over how that music was used by

others. They began to exercise that control a few years

after the deal with Apple was completed. From the

start, the big record labels complained that they weren’t making enough money, despite the immediate, sustained

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success of the iTunes Store, and despite claiming 47 cents of every sale.63

Further, the big labels have continually pushed for

variable pricing in order to charge more for new releases or hits and to discount slower-selling tracks. Of course, there were familiar reasons for the music industry’s

years of nagging for variable pricing. They obviously

expected that selling some tracks for $1.29 instead of

99 cents (USD) would not depress sales enough to cost

them money. It looks like they were probably right.64 As

Billboard noted, “[i]n the six weeks after iTunes introduced variable pricing … [c]onsumer spending on the

catalog tracks dropped about 2% and net revenue to

labels rose around 6%.”65 In short, they were happy to

sell less for more to fewer. Isn’t this sort of thinking what got them into trouble in the first place? There have even been some dark mutterings about “dynamic pricing”

in which prices change in real-time based on website

usage in order to maximize “the revenue potential for [a]

specific product and its demand in the marketplace.”66

Regardless of these characteristic machinations, the

iTunes Store has been a ridiculous success, becoming the

world’s biggest music retailer, accumulating 435 million

registered users, amassing a catalogue of over 35 million songs and selling over 25 billion copies of these songs in its first decade.67

There has been one extraordinary, long-running

success story in the music industry that has done even

more to show that the music industry can both survive

and prosper in our new digital world: music-based

reality television. For reasons that are not entirely clear, few outside of the music industry have even seemed

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to have noticed that, during the darkest days of the

music industry, congested as they were with histrionic

claims of obsolescence and decay, shows like “American

Idol,” “X Factor” and “The Voice” did everything imagi-

nable to provide a new model for the music industry.

They established new alliances with the television and

computer industries, made piracy a practical irrelevance, turned extensive file sharing into a market-building

bonus, crafted multiple revenue streams that managed

to share out the extensive risks of these long-running

projects, cleverly used existing intellectual property to their benefit and most assuredly established “brand” as

the “navigator” of the many sales environments in which

they thrived.68

Not only have these programs been successful

in creating a mass audience in an era defined by

demographic niches, they fit snugly into the emerging

business model the music industry has been adopting

since the late-1980s, a model perfectly in line with

the global corporate-dominated model of economics

and politics enforced worldwide. Music-based reality

television is based on cheap, disposable, contracted

labor. Musicians enter into a long period of contracted

servitude and serve entirely at the leisure of their

employers. Musicians, like their songs and performances,

are more or less interchangeable, unless they produce

a hit. The musicians are mostly a cost to be controlled

while everything they produce is property owned and

exploited by these shows across multiple media and

revenue streams by their employers in perpetuity.69 Most

importantly, these shows also produce the necessary

illusion of “democracy” through their expertly crafted

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simulacrum of consequential audience agency. And this

is where these shows teach us the most about why they

are successful models for the future. The old model of

the music industry, in which record labels seek out and

develop musicians to help them forge long stable careers

as creative artists through fan support of recordings and live performances, has become increasingly marginal to

the main profit centers of the music industry. Over the

last two decades or so it has been largely displaced by a model that is focused on creating brands whose experi-ential content can effortlessly slip across all existing or emerging media channels and produce profit in any of

the many guises in which they might appear, whether

they appear as a tour, one-off performance, soundtrack

to a film, television show or advertisement, promotional

appearance, television or film documentary, fictional

film, television mini-series, and the seemingly endless

opportunities for merchandising. Indeed, one result of

the turmoil in the music industry since 1999 has been

that the range of tie-ins a record company might be

able to link to an album has become unfathomably wide.

As one group of economists recently argued, record

companies have long sought

product line extensions including downloadable music,

cellphone ring tones, ringback tones (snippets of music

that play to a caller while they wait for their call to

go through), cellphone wallpaper, music embedded

in video-games, DJ remixes, and numerous other

offshoots. One source estimates that more than 400

different items might be offered in connection with a

specific album.70

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You might be asking, quite reasonably at this point, what does any of this have to do with Danger Mouse or The

Grey Album. One of the most interesting things about the response to The Grey Album was how hurt, angry and surprised so many people seemed to be when Capitol

Records told him to remove it from circulation. This

hurt was the result of a profound misunderstanding of

what the music industry is for. A lot of people seem to

think that music is meant to be made and shared around

between people who want to listen to it because it is

important to them and draws them into meaningful and

possibly even profound social relationships with one

other. But the music industry can only view music as so

much grist for its ever-expanding mills of mediated social experience that have been spreading through all areas of

social life for a very long time. The logic of this model demands that music must be, not so much rationed, as

economically directed and purposefully exploited in all

of its incarnations. When something like The Grey Album turns up that does not appear to conform to this prime

directive, something must be done. That’s what I’ll tackle in the next chapter.

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2

Danger Mouse v. Capitol,

Capitol v. Music

It is a fundamental premise of any modern, open and

diverse society that the dissemination and use of infor-

mation goods ought to be encouraged. Thus, the onus

must be on the proponents of transferable, exclusive

copyrights to show that without stronger protection

desirable goods would be neither produced nor

distributed, or that grave moral inequities towards

creators would result.1

You might say that Brian Burton’s relationship with the

music industry has had its ups and downs. Before The

Grey Album launched him to prominence, he was making mixtapes and promos chock full of unauthorized use of

other people’s intellectual property. Either no one who

owned that property noticed or they didn’t care. In early 2004, this same practice saw him get his now-famous

cease-and-desist letter from Capitol Records telling him

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to cut it out. By 2014, he was the recipient of multiple

Grammy awards telling him to keep it up. In the decade

since The Grey Album, Burton has become a sought-after producer working with some of the most prominent acts

in the world, such as Gorillaz, Beck, The Black Keys,

and U2. It wasn’t that his practice had changed drasti-

cally in that period so much as it had expanded and

become richer, more accomplished, and certainly more

acceptable to the music industry. With the widespread

distribution of The Grey Album, Burton had stepped over a line. He quickly stepped back. Fortunately for him,

and for us, that wasn’t good enough for some people.

They took his album, crossed that line, and kept on

going. They are the main reason we know about this

album and can still get it. It is the nature of the line that Burton and his supporters crossed that is the subject of

this chapter.

The aesthetic practices of the powerful

I ended the last chapter by suggesting there exists a

vague and widespread misunderstanding about what the

music industry is for. Many people seem to think that

the music industry exists to make music. In fact, it exists to make money from music, mostly by moving it from

one place to another. This is not meant to be a clever

throwaway line. It is meant to be an acknowledgment of

a bland, simple fact. My point is that if we can see the

terrain on which this industry engages in its constant

struggle for survival then we can understand it better.

We can understand that the terrain it is fighting to hold

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onto is not artistic terrain, but economic terrain. We

can also understand how and why the music industry

accumulates and exercises power over that terrain in the

way that they do.

The workings of the music industry are defined by

the calculated exercise of corporate power and if there is one thing we should really know about corporate power

by now is that it is fundamentally agnostic about almost

everything. It is agnostic about aesthetics, freedom of

expression, the law, civil rights, human rights, every-

thing that is, except profits.2 As I noted at the start of this book, the corporation’s most unavoidable legal

obligation is to make money. However, consistently

making money by moving music from one place to

another has often proved to be surprisingly difficult.

To survive, the music industry has had to make itself an

integral part of the endless work of dealing with a huge

range of issues, including managing its relationships

with retailers, broadcasters, publications and websites,

lobbying for very specific changes to trade law, intel-

lectual property law, copyright, and tax law, and making

sure that the mysterious suite of codes that are alleged

to govern corporate behavior never jump up to bite it.

One of the things the music industry has always had to

do is clamp down with ever-increasing vehemence on

how the music they own moves through the world. It

should be fairly obvious from the last chapter that, by

about 2002, the tools the music industry had used to do

this for a very long time simply didn’t work anymore.

So they had to develop new ones. What is so interesting

and important about The Grey Album is that it stood perfectly balanced on the cusp of two tectonic plates

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as they shifted and crunched one another into new

formations.

I regard these perpetual industrial machinations

as aesthetic practices in so much as they shape our

experience and understanding of music at least as much

as the actual musicians do. These aesthetic practices

of the powerful are not limited to trying to make sure

people are using music properly. The world is far too

complex and unpredictable to think that simply rationing

access to the mechanisms used to distribute music will

be sufficient in controlling it. It’s a start, but beyond this, the music industry has also had to continually create new kinds of relationships with consumers suited to often

rapidly changing conditions. The goal is not simply to

sell things, but to construct, as any good sociologist of music would tell you, the ideal musical subject. They

try to produce this perfect imagined consumer by using

a continually evolving and expanding range of tools to

assess and understand what particular forms of music

might “afford” us.3 That is, we all know music acts as

a kind of socially organizing medium that helps people

make sense of social experiences. We know this because

we have experienced this. Music gives us something we

want and value. The music industry’s job is to exploit

what music gives us as thoroughly as possible by trying

to create as many social, cultural and economic relation-

ships with as many of us as possible and keep them going

as long as they can. The exploitation of these relation-

ships takes as many forms as you can think of, from the

immediately obvious, such as free downloads, music

videos, clever apps, or placing their products in films,

television shows and video games, to the less obvious,

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such as the contractually enforceable exclusionary

relationships between record labels and retailers, broad-

casters, music publications and websites that ensure the

required measure of market visibility is efficiently and

effectively manufactured. All of this work is a direct,

strategic response to the substantial risks and unpredictability involved in selling music. It requires a huge range of mechanisms in the exercise of corporate power to

tamp down those risks. The evolution of Danger Mouse’s

career over the last ten years shows us how agnostic these mechanisms can be. Far from being sued for producing

an unauthorized remix album today, it would be worth

Capitol’s while to commission him to make one.

The music industry’s struggles to control how their

property moves through the world have not only

happened before, but they have happened in remarkably

similar ways. In his magnificent book, Pop Music Piracy, Barry Kernfeld lays out a pattern which he demonstrates

has been incredibly persistent whether we are talking

about sheet music pilfering, home taping, or filesharing.

Kernfeld describes what he calls “a generic situation that occurs over and over again.” The music industry tries to

impose a monopoly over music and the ways in which

it is distributed. Others try to use that music “in ways

the monopolists did not foresee or take into account.”

Kernfeld shows that “a struggle then follows between

the two parties …This struggle takes different forms,

but in the end has the same result. The monopolists give

in.” According to Kernfeld, “the pattern plays itself out in one of two ways, assimilation or obsolescence.” Either the music industry starts doing what the bootleggers or

“pirates” were already doing in order to displace them,

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or a new technological form of musical product replaces

the old one.4

While this scenario may seem familiar and may even

suggest that the digital utopia of unlimited music sharing is upon us, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the music

industry has lost. What it suggests is that there has

been an underlying commonality of purpose within the

music industry throughout all of its struggles stretching back into the nineteenth century. For better or worse,

the music industry has shown itself very capable of

maintaining its power regardless of the content or condi-

tions of that power. While mass resistance to increasingly restrictive sets of rules governing the use of specific

technological forms may have undermined this industry,

it hasn’t destroyed it. This is largely because the music industry has been able to get on top of things in such a

way as to use its power to benefit from larger processes

of assimilation and obsolescence. The history of the

music industry since about 1980 should tell us that their survival hasn’t necessarily depended on one or the other, but on a clever, ad hoc balancing of the two.

The obsolescence part seems pretty obvious as

familiar, common and pervasive forms of consuming

music have routinely become the exception rather than

the rule, replaced by new and more enticing alterna-

tives. The assimilation part has gone under the radar

a bit, but has been just as important. Over the last ten

years, the music industry has used its leverage and

power to construct new economic, cultural, legal and

technological frameworks to move music profitably from

one place to another by adopting or benefiting from a

whole host of related developments, such as the judicial

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imposition of restrictions on internet use, improved

P2P filtering, radically more effective surveillance of

users, legal punishment of ISPs and users alike, the

development of new forms of digital distribution to

diversify revenue streams and promotional vehicles, and

the wholesale reworking of artist contracts to reflect

these changes.5

The overall strategy is to create what experts call

a “trusted system” of social, legal and technological

regulation of behavior that, according to one scholar of

digital culture, can

make access to digital content dependent on users satis-

fying any number of obligations, well beyond the simple

promise to use it within the strictures of copyright

law. These constraints … will even more dramatically

commodify culture, transforming every encounter with a

cultural work into a financial transaction, slicing up the populace into laser-precise market segments at the whim

of industry.6

The results of these efforts have been disturbing. As

another scholar shows, these systemic strategies have

imposed “scarcity into digital distribution systems where none should exist” and have converted “music fans and

consumers into music ‘users’ who lack property rights to

their recordings and even rights to ordinary consumer

protections.”7 As with so many other resources once held

in common, such as water, land, or air, our collective

musical resources are being fenced off using the same

tools, laws, ideas and modes of politics that have been

used to box up and sell most other common resources

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in the past. Copyright law is just one more notable

example and specifically, over the last ten years, there

has been a shift in copyright law away from managing

and restricting content towards managing and restricting

forms of distribution and mediation. It is the difference between a fair use and a safe harbor.

From fair use to safe harbors

One of the main motivating factors that propelled the

protests against the attempted removal of The Grey

Album from circulation was anger. This anger was

directed at the fact that what was so plainly a creative

work of art was unjustifiably classed as a criminal act by a private company for the purposes of legal intimidation.

If The Grey Album wasn’t “fair use” then what was? The problem for Danger Mouse and many others has been

the long-standing legal ambiguity of the fair use doctrine in the United States.8 This has had pernicious consequences, as one legal scholar has noted:

The failure of Congress and of the courts to provide clear guidance on the meaning of fair use permits copyright

owners to leverage the vagueness of the law and persuade

prospective users that virtually any unauthorized use

constitutes copyright infringement—and that if the use

is not paid for it will result in a lawsuit and substantial damages.9

This is exactly what happened to Danger Mouse and his

distributors. The underlying issue responsible for his

predicament was that he was caught between two broad

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ideas about the management of intellectual property. One

is typified by the possibility, however vague and contra-

dictory, that anyone can make unlicensed use of existing

work. This idea is meant to uphold the larger benefit

to the public of allowing legal space for the innovative, unforeseen use of existing work in order to create new

work.10 There is simply no way to credibly argue that this is not how our culture works.11 The other idea is charac-terized more by the explicit acknowledgment of specific

and limited exceptions to the otherwise stringent restrictions on such use. The latter has not so much replaced

the former as much as it has become increasingly more

common. It has become more common not because it

is a better idea, but because it is so costly and laborious to fight through the American legal system in order to

create a new class of exceptions. Only those with a lot of investment and potential profit behind them can afford

to do it.12 As a result, the exceptions that exist are much more likely to be the sort that serve the interests of those who have bought the ears and pens of the United States

Congress. The “safe harbor” is a good example.

The idea of a safe harbor for the use and distri-

bution of copyrighted material was planted in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1996. It was intended to

limit the liability on online service providers for the

nefarious actions of those users intent on continuing their thieving ways. If ISPs respond to the claims of copyright owners by blocking or removing infringing materials

from their websites, the ISPs don’t have to worry about

getting sued. Of course, it is this very provision that has produced an enormous volume of litigation. Some of the

largest, richest and most powerful corporations on the

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planet have been suing the hell out of each other to try

to influence the legal limits that will eventually be set on internet use through the establishment of friendly legal

precedents. The point here is that there appears to be an increasingly influential built-in bias against a small artist such as Danger Mouse making art and an increasingly

influential bias for a big company like Google selling

your attention to advertisers and your user data to just

about anybody.

The problem here is that the law tells us we are to

have one set of relationships with each other and the

experience of real life tells us to have another. The law says that the materials of our collected experience are only available to us for consumption and so-called private use.

Any other use of them without permission of the owner

is illegal. This is despite the fact that a massive apparatus exists to manufacture the desirability, value and social

relevance of these materials, an apparatus as unethical

and as uninhibited as any we know; I am referring of

course to the advertising industry. However, if we then

take our experience of those forms of desirability and

value that have been so aggressively constructed around

us and reflect these back to others who may share our

feelings and perceptions and if we do so in anything

other than the legally prescribed manner, we are on the

hook for heavy civil and criminal penalties. There is

little hope that this situation will change any time soon.

Happily, like our friend Danger Mouse, there are many,

many people of all stripes and colors all over the world

who have not let this state of affairs stop them.13

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Ownership rights, authorship rights and natural

rights to music

The fundamental issue here is that in our everyday

lives we are supposed to have access to three kinds of

rights over music: ownership rights, authorship rights

and natural rights. At present the only ones that seem

to be universally, formally and legally acknowledged

are ownership rights. Authorship rights are occasionally

accorded formal recognition in very specific and limited

circumstances. As far as I can tell, natural rights to music don’t seem to exist in any formal way whatsoever. Our

right and ability to create seems entirely subject to

the cost-benefit analysis of large corporations. Danger

Mouse’s case shows us this all too clearly.

The letter sent to those alleged to be distributing

The Grey Album was reasonably clear. The recipients were told that they were violating “Capitol’s rights in

the [distribution of] Capitol Recordings—as well as

the valuable intellectual property rights of other artists, music publishers, and/or record companies.” Any further

“unauthorized distribution, reproduction, public perfor-

mance, and/or other exploitation of The Grey Album will constitute, among other things, common law copyright

infringement/misappropriation, unfair competition, and

unjust enrichment.” They were told to “cease and desist

from the actual or intended distribution, reproduction,

public performance or other exploitation of The Grey

Album … identify the names and addresses of any third parties who have supplied you with physical or digital

copies of The Grey Album … provide Capitol with an accounting of all units of The Grey Album that have

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been distributed via your website, either physically or

digitally, and of all instances of public performance of

The Grey Album … [and] make payment to Capitol in an amount to be discussed.”14 The letter was a professional

service provided by a law firm paid to look after the

interests of property owners, nothing more; it was very

little different than similar services carried out by bailiffs or the sheriff’s department on the behalf of landlords

evicting unruly tenants. The authors of the works in

question were not represented in this case at all. While

one might suggest their interests are indirectly looked

after here, their desires were not sought, identified or

recorded in any way. They were barely even alluded

to. The rights of the authors were at best, a potentially troublesome irrelevance that were carefully deployed for

rhetorical effect.

Our natural rights to music, to listen to it, to make

meaning from it, to reproduce it and to make it a conse-

quential part of our lives, have no recognizable place in these struggles. No one should have the right to take

these rights from us no matter what kind of letter we

might receive.15 Danger Mouse invested a good deal of

his knowledge, ability, labor and creativity into The Grey Album. Yet none of that had any formal, acknowledged value according to Capitol Records. Further, the many

enthusiastic and often insightful responses to his work,

which took the form of reviews, critical reflections,

and new remixes of similar materials, would also be

rendered mute or nonexistent by Capitol through simple

economic and legal intimidation.

The ideology behind the letter sent to Danger Mouse

and his distributors seems unambiguous. It seems to

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value originality and artistry above derivation and

copying. It also appears to value the sanctity of property over the unlicensed use of that property by others. But

this is only a mirage. The artistry and originality of The Grey Album cannot be formally or legally recognized, by definition, specifically because of its chief distinguishing characteristic as a work of art: its relationship to its

source materials. This fact is not changed by the failure of Capitol’s attempt at intimidation. It is not changed

by the success of the campaign of civil disobedience

brought to bear to forestall the consequences of Danger

Mouse’s actions. It is not changed by Capitol’s claims

to represent the interests of the artists whose labor and imagination are captured by the sound recordings over

which Capitol now claims to have exclusive tenure. In

point of fact, those who claim to be “the exclusive U.S.

licensee and/or owner and distributor of musical sound

recordings featuring performances by the Beatles” have

only one value, money. They did not write the music they

now own, they did not invest any time or money in its

production, and they did not believe in its content in any manner significant enough to claim any responsibility

for its continuing existence. They bought the rights to

exploit the Beatles’ music at an auction and set about

doing just that, very effectively; just ask Nike, Allstate, Budweiser, Target or Proctor and Gamble. You might

dismiss these claims merely as a flailing anti-corporate

rant, but I am trying to point out the defining fact of this case and suggest its wider relevance. All of the claims

towards supporting artists, investing in creativity, or

facilitating genius the music industry makes are empty

rhetoric because their primary interests force them to

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attack those forms of artistry and creativity that conflict with their interests.

What may have seemed like a fairly simple and

clear-cut case of infringement, at least to the lawyers,

ended up highlighting a very public and fairly significant disjuncture between the monopolists and a group of

enthusiastic music producers, distributors, and fans. The realities of the law were on one side, the contemporary

experience of music was on the other. There were two

versions of legitimacy competing for dominance and for

once it wasn’t the music industry’s version that won. The best defense of The Grey Album is not how much work went into it or the extent to which Danger Mouse was

successful in achieving his artistic goals. More than any of this, The Grey Album is part of a lengthy, complex, and influential aesthetic tradition. This, more than anything else, has been its best defense. It is crucial that we understand what this tradition is because it makes a difference to how we assess the legitimacy and value of this music.

The Grey Album is not important or legitimate because a court or a legislature or a corporation says so. It is

important and legitimate because it is recognized as such by people who know what it means and why it matters.

No lawyer can prevent that from happening.

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3

The Aesthetics of

The Grey Album

It would appear under those conditions that the music

pirate had a philanthropic mission. This mysterious and

mercenary Messiah, noticing the dire distress of the

tune-starved masses—whoever they may be—said, “I

will save them. I will fill their melodic ‘little Marys’ with music at 2d. a meal.”1

We can call The Grey Album a lot of things: a mash-up, a remix album, a concept album, a tribute album. These

would all be accurate to some extent. We can also call

the techniques Danger Mouse used to make it a lot of

things: borrowing, appropriation, versioning, sampling,

collage, pastiche, bricolage, homage, allusion, derivation, quotation, recomposition, or quodlibet (whew!). You

can make a pretty good case that all these techniques

are in some way present on this album. However, while

these are all certainly relevant and important ideas, they

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are not all that useful by themselves in answering the

two questions about this album that I want to answer

in this book: What is The Grey Album and where did it come from? There is a more encompassing idea that

I have not seen linked with this album very often that

can help us answer these questions: tradition. There are

at least two key things that define the musical tradition of which The Grey Album is a part: (1) the characteristic use of pre-existing musical materials; and (2) the ways in which the music produced through these characteristic

techniques moves through the world within an existing

medium that people use to make sense of that music.

Of course, we know in the most basic terms what The

Grey Album is, how it moved through the world, and how a lot of people made sense of it. It was a carefully

rendered digital amalgam of an a cappella version of Jay-Z’s The Black Album and the Beatles’ eponymous The Beatles, otherwise known as “The White Album.”

It was produced in a limited run of 3,000 CDs and

distributed to a small number of online retailers, music

websites and music industry peers. We also know that

the response was mostly positive. The album was posted

for download on music blogs, offered for sale and

re-sale by specialist hip hop and DJ culture websites

and record stores, and supposedly turned up on eBay. It

was glowingly reviewed by Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Spin and the New Yorker, amongst others. The reviews then attracted the attention of Capitol Records’ lawyers. We

also know that when Capitol’s letter was posted online

the reaction against a perceived corporate incursion

into a coherent and autonomous music community was

swift. An activist organization called Downhill Battle

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convinced about 200 websites to participate in “Grey

Tuesday” on February 24, 2004. They offered the album

for free download and turned their sites grey for the day as a protest against what they thought of as corporate

censorship.2

But there is a lot more to be said about where it came

from. The Grey Album grew directly out of a tradition of musical practice that we can simply call sample-based

music. This tradition of music-making is founded on the

complex intertwined histories of electronic dance music,

hip hop, and dub. It has an enormous number of contem-

porary derivatives. The techniques Danger Mouse used to

make it clearly mark it as part of this tradition. My goal is to show that what is most musically important about this

work is how it emerged from this long-standing tradition

of musical practice through the defining characteristics

of that tradition, characteristics that are familiar and

integral to large swathes of contemporary popular music

all over the world. This is important because the political campaign that surrounded the album could only have

succeeded if the medium of which this album was a part

was a robust and living musical tradition. In other words, the continuing existence of The Grey Album is dependent on the existing networks of aesthetic meaning and value

that helped create it in the first place.

The aesthetic legitimacy of The Grey Album

A lot of the writing about The Grey Album largely ignored the music Danger Mouse made. There are a few reasons

for this. For a lot of people such as music critics, essayists, and fans, this music was so familiar, and for some such an

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exemplary iteration of a well-established way of making

music, that a lot of its musical characteristics could be taken for granted.3 Many people paid more attention to

the more pressing political issues surrounding it. The

reason why a lot of academic writing did not focus on the music was slightly different. It was mostly because the

legal and industrial disputes over The Grey Album could be slotted so seamlessly into a pre-existing academic

framework that appeared to perfectly describe what

many cultural theorists claimed was the revolutionary

nature of online creative communities in general and the

subversive character of sample-based music in particular.4

In nearly all academic work on this album and its

musical tradition, the supposedly enfolding presence of

what was called a “remix culture” or a culture of “configurable music” has dominated.5 This culture, it was often

said, allowed musicians to do some remarkable things.

It allowed musicians to challenge or even transcend the

“old binaries,” such as the supposedly once all-important distinction between artist and audience. No longer must

we enjoy art “in reverent awe,” one scholar said. Instead, we could now extend our innate creativity and insight

through endlessly mutable, editable, networked spaces

shot through multifarious manifestations of unlimited

human expressiveness.6 Further, musicians could

now change the very conditions through which we

understand all music. “Mash-up culture,” according to

another scholar, “denaturalizes the modes of differen-

tiation that have been institutionalized in music industry marketing.”7 This is because the very act of sampling

strips the original source material of its existing meanings and radically detaches that music from its own history.

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Sampling allows a space of “play and rupture” to emerge.

This space is populated by what some call “infinitely

flexible signifiers” that “resist the absolutism of linear signification.”8 Beyond even this, sample-based music

“deconstructs artistry” by facilitating what yet another

scholar calls the “‘irruptive emergence’ of a new under-

standing, one that exceeds the grasp and traverses the

limits of the existing conceptual order [by] advancing a

fundamental challenge to the … privilege of originality.”9

I don’t think these claims are necessarily wrong. They

are simply rhetorically overheated theoretical interpretations that miss the point. They lead us down a very short path to an abrupt analytical dead end. If we embrace

the story that this music is, by definition, the music of rebellion, then what do we do with it when it goes straight or becomes mainstream, as it most certainly has? Sooner

or later we will have to explain why the revolution it was always carrying inside itself did not come off. One such

scholar more or less theorized himself into this exact

interpretive corner forcing himself to scold practitioners and fans of sample-based music for not being rebellious

enough. They succumbed, he said, to the “seemingly

inescapable pull” of “recuperation.” This collective

backsliding compromised an otherwise rebellious art,

drawing it backwards into a morass of what we can only

presume is a benign and timidly accommodationist art.

The revolutionary potential of sample-based music has

been undermined, this theorist says, both by advocates and fans who have already accommodated themselves to “the

vocabulary and logic of the very … system [this music] is supposed to put in question.” Apparently, the agency of

the musical form is more powerful than the agency of the

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people actually making it. So we are left only to express surprise and dismay when practitioners and advocates of

sample-based music “surrender themselves” by falling

prey to the sinful world around them and its infinitely

seductive charms such as “authenticity,” “artistry” or

“innovation.” These musicians are censured for signally

failing to follow through on the prescriptions of cultural theory to resist and destroy the system.10

The problem with a lot of academic writing about

sample-based music is that it has tended towards two

basic errors: using a very small number of aesthetic

gestures to stand in for a whole tradition of music and

then claiming that this small number of aesthetic gestures are evidence of an inherently revolutionary or subversive practice. In doing so, the aesthetic lineage that produced The Grey Album has been marginalized or ignored.

Ignoring the aesthetic lineage of this work then forces

us to place the entire burden of its aesthetic legitimacy on the slim shoulders of its supposedly inherent rebelliousness. Unfortunately, such presumed rebelliousness

often has a very short shelf-life.11 These narratives of

revolution obscure much of what is important about

The Grey Album. Specifically, attributing these rather remarkable qualities and accomplishments to the culture

of sample-based music ignores at least two crucial,

characteristic elements of the many forms sample-based

music takes which constitute the cornerstones of its

aesthetic legitimacy: (1) the use of previously existing

recorded materials to make new works through both

live performance and recordings; and (2) the play of

recognition of those materials between practitioners and

audiences that results from these new works.

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The musical traditions that shaped The Grey Album

The Grey Album is drawn from a long, richly endowed history of “extractive” musical practice.12 Like any

musical tradition, this one is defined by characteristic

forms of musical manipulation. These practices are legit-

imated publicly through constantly evolving debates

and contests over what counts as music that people who

already know and understand similar forms of music can

recognize and accept as being within that tradition.13

To put it simply, this stuff doesn’t just pop up out of

nowhere. The techniques musicians in this tradition have

used to extract material from existing works to derive

new ones include: specific ways of listening to source

material, specific ways of extracting sounds from those

pre-existing works, and similarly specific ways of reassembling those sounds. These practices form new works that

derive directly from a massive range of source texts and

indirectly from a larger culture replete with influences, predecessors, and evolving sets of conventions that shape new works. The most immediate predecessors for The

Grey Album are hip hop and electronic dance music.

However, the tradition that produced it also includes

the key informing practices of early disco and Jamaican

dub as well. While The Grey Album is part of a tradition of musical borrowing and reassembly in popular music

generally, it is these three forms of music that have most directly shaped the contemporary practices of musical

borrowing, reuse, and versioning that define the music

Danger Mouse made. This tradition is held together by

two things. First, it exhibits particular kinds of musical fidelity, or the relationships between the new, derivative

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text and its source texts. These relationships create

various kinds of consonance and dissonance between

source texts and the new works derived from them.

Second, it is held together by particular kinds of aesthetic legitimacy, or the ways in which the relationship between a new work and older works within its tradition of

practice is understood and accepted. Aesthetic legitimacy is conferred on works within this tradition through the

play of recognition between producers and audiences

produced by new uses of previously existing recorded

music. Sample-based music such as The Grey Album

works with this form of ‘play’ in ways markedly similar

to many of the other forms of sample-based music

stretching back at least to the mid-1960s.

Dub, hip hop, and electronic dance music each have

their own characteristic forms of compositional practice, listening practices, ways of extracting material from

source texts, and patterns of reassembling source materials in new forms through such widely used techniques such

as synching, looping, and dropping. Each grew from

distinct but related forms of the public performance

of recorded music, the improvisatory manipulation

of which helped foster a complex set of relationships

between practitioners and audiences.

Dub grew out of the Jamaican sound system culture

that emerged in Kingston in the mid-1950s. The spread of

increasingly sophisticated and powerful audio equipment

to the country after World War II allowed semi-portable

music broadcast systems to evolve from street corner,

shop front or mobile audio systems into community-

wide social gatherings, often in intensely competitive

economic and aesthetic environments, set up in back

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lots, yards or clearings in urban spaces. As historians of Jamaican music have explained, these events were multi-faceted reflections of the total life of the communities

that produced them.14 These gatherings were centered

around what Michael Veal has called “sonic powerhouses

capable of delivering tens of thousands of watts of power, producing sound that could be heard for miles around.”15

As part of the intense economic work involved in

grabbing and holding audiences, sound system operators

worked with local recording studios and recording labels

to try to get the newest songs exclusively for their

events. Operators, recording engineers and producers

also worked to create both unique versions of songs as

well as unique sonic effects for these events.16

The struggle to attract and hold a constituency at these

gatherings also inspired “increasingly creative strategies of song mixing” amongst sound systems operators which

were mimicked, replicated, and eventually surpassed by

engineers at local recording studios.17 Sound system

operators, studio producers, and DJs eventually worked

collaboratively and competitively to create ever-changing moods of excitement and surprise in their audiences by

mixing and remixing songs by variously fading the

vocal and instrumental parts in and out improvisa-

tionally. Practitioners listened primarily to the dynamic relationship between what was commonly referred to

as the riddim, or the underlying groove of a song that could be expressed in almost any part of an ensemble,

and the melodies and hooks, which appeared primarily

in the voices and horns. The goal was to play with their

audience’s knowledge and perceptions by withholding

key parts of a song (sometimes the audience would even

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spontaneously fill in the missing vocals). This often had the effect of lengthening a song, rendering its original

form into something more complex and alluring by

spreading the more prominent and immediately catchy

and recognizable riffs and hooks across a much longer

form always underpinned by the riddim.18 The riddim itself would also be subjected to often extreme forms

of aural transformation through echo, reverb, EQ, and

were sometimes filtered through secretively assembled

homemade sound filters that gave sound systems their

distinct sonic profiles. Veal calls the dub aesthetic one of “surprise and suspense, collapse and incompletion.”19

Dubs of individual songs would often be “strung together

by the selector into extended ‘sets,’ enabling the ‘musical director’ of the sound system to become a type of ‘macro-composer’” creating new thematically cohesive, socially

configured metacompositions. Not unlike dance music

DJs, sound system DJs would extract elements from

the most recognizable parts of a song, reassemble those

elements by redistributing their constituent elements

over a much longer form.20

From the mid-1960s to early 1970s other largely

autonomous cultures of the live performance of recorded

music developed in markedly similar ways in cities such

as Paris, New York, and London. Early electronic dance

music exhibited similar relationships between source

texts and the works which DJs derived from them as

produced in Jamaica in roughly the same time period.

However, unlike the yard parties of Jamaica or street

parties in New York, dance music thrived by setting itself off from the ruck and maul of everyday life. In some

crucial respects, this has helped define and foster the

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quasi-spiritual intensity with which it is so often experienced (well, that and the drugs). Yet, the techniques of

musical manipulation have long been similar to those of

dub and the spaces in which this music was made had an

almost symbiotic relationship with the music DJs made

in them. This was true as far back as the founding of

the Loft, New York’s prototypical dance music space, in

1970. In Tim Lawrence’s enthusiastic history Love Saves the Day, founder David Mancuso explained that the Loft was a different kind of place. “Once you walked into the

Loft,” Mancuso said, “you were cut off from the outside

world …You got into a timeless, mindless state.”21 The

way recorded music was manipulated was shaped by that

environment. Lawrence describes how DJs developed

blending techniques such as slip-cueing to play the tail

end of one record over the start of another, an effect

that “maintained the musical flow and helped generate

a hypnotic effect.”22 Grasso and others gradually worked

out ways to synch different tracks and, by reading the

surfaces of vinyl records, smoothly extend their sets

seamlessly across longer and longer periods of time.

Early dance music DJs valued the seamless integration

of large numbers of individual tracks across an entire

evening of work at dance clubs. They would also play

with the dramatic effects of ebb, flow, tension and release over many hours in ways familiar to anyone who’s ever

been to a dance club.23 Brewster and Broughton broadly

summarize how the club DJ “will be layering parts of

records over each other, introducing snatches of one

into a second, weaving and splicing different elements

to make an original suite of music.”24 Using an ever-

increasing variety of blending techniques, DJs sought to

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create seamless successions of songs, that both manipu-

lated and responded to actions of club-goers. They

listened for breaks, beats, segues, and distinct moods

across a wide range of individual records that they could mesh and work into a unified form, often by repeatedly

looping material in multiple configurations improvisa-

tionally over the top of a steady beat.25 As dance music

practices evolved, DJs added new techniques such as

phasing, or playing two of the same record not quite

simultaneously, and dropping, the strategic placement

of high-profile fragments of multiple records over the

augmented breaks from one or more records. The breaks

themselves often formed a constant rhythmic backdrop

which would itself be subject to careful beat matching

and blending with other breaks and beats as well as

increasingly sophisticated sequencer patterns.26

As with dub and disco, hip hop also developed within

a larger enfolding culture of music, dancing, and social

gathering. Hip hop DJs also found ways to play records

in live improvisational performances that would take a

great abundance of sources and create long-form sets

of rhythm and sound out of them. As has been widely

suggested, the various techniques of mixing recorded

music in hip hop were developed in ways similar to

dub and electronic dance music.27 Most profound and

obvious is the break, or that part of an existing soul, funk or R&B recording during which the vocals stop and the rhythm section is foregrounded, often presenting bass

and drum breakdowns or solos. As Jeff Chang reports,

it was Kool Herc who noticed that the one moment

when “the dancers really got wild was in a song’s short

instrumental break, when the band would drop out and

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the rhythm section would get elemental. Forget melody,

chorus songs—it was all about the groove and keeping

it going.”28

Like their disco and club DJ peers, hip hop DJs began

sampling breaks in clubs and street parties, playing it

on one turntable and then seamlessly repeating it on

another, extending the break indefinitely, playing with

their audience’s recognition of the song or style from

which the break was extracted. The ways in which

hip hop DJs extended songs, restructured them and

reassembled them in a dynamic relationship with their

audiences exhibited important distinctions. Whereas

sound system operators and dance DJs listened for

ways to expand and reinterpret their sources while still

keeping to a more or less structurally coherent form,

hip hop DJs would often take breaks from multiple

sources and string them together independent of the

songs in which they originally appeared. As hip hop

scholar Joseph Schloss explains, when “breaks are torn

from their original context and repeated, they are recon-

ceived—by performer and listener alike—as circular.”

They become not only part of “a style of musical repro-

duction” but a novel form of composition.29 Hip hop

DJs listened for breaks that could be reconfigured into a new structure, not reinterpreted within a largely similar one. With the advent of digital sampling, this circular

aesthetic grew into the construction of loops consisting

of samples taken from multiple records which could

then be reassembled into the larger modular, composite

constructions of contemporary global hip hop.

The fact that hip hop loops often demand multiple

sources heightened the importance of collecting source

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materials in hip hop. As most sources indicate, hip hop

DJs will dig widely and comprehensively in order to

find useful breaks and beats which are often processed

in accord with a fairly esoteric set of informal rules. As Schloss demonstrates, hip hop DJs listen to their sources for a broad range of attributes from underlying rhythmic

structures to individual snare drum hits or hi hat sounds to several minutes of complete grooves. Most seek to

find unused sources to make their work fresh, organizing

their sampled source materials into cyclical patterns

that are “not only rhythmically consistent but timbrally

consistent.”30 Schloss argues that the symbolic value of

the sample has been “almost universally overstated by

scholars” seeking to pinpoint a DJ’s motivation to use a

sample from a particular source. Instead, Schloss argues

that DJs mostly use sampling “as a venue for ambiguity

and manipulation.”31 In this, Schloss notes an important

difference between hip hop and both dub and electronic

dance music. “In order for the meaning of the song to

be apparent to the audience,” he argues, “they must

be familiar with the record. And a producer that too

often samples songs that a broad audience would know

is considered to be pandering.”32 Instead of the recog-

nition between DJ and audience being dependent on

the blending of transparently recognizable sources, hip

hop DJs began to create an internally dynamic canonical

language of different rhythms, timbres, textures and

moods using existing recordings in new configurations

that were often disassembled and reassembled in a far

more radically comprehensive way than was the case

with many other practitioners. In short, it was a very

different form of the same game.

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Despite their obvious and important differences, there

are several unavoidable links between these traditions

that established both the conceptual and practical space

that contemporary forms of sample-based music such as

The Grey Album would eventually occupy. All of these forms of music pursued an ideal of seamless integration

of source texts into a new work which would be viewed

as a coherent thing in and of itself. Practitioners across these traditions would listen to their source texts in ways that produced some kind of conceptual commonality

first, then they manipulated those sources, often quite

intensely, in order to blend them into a larger whole,

in order to display their detailed knowledge of their

source texts at the same time. This way their skill at

manipulating them could be more readily demonstrated.

Dub DJs would display not only their skill at specific

types of sonic manipulation, but also unique methods

of transforming fragments of source texts to demon-

strate their understanding of the structural and sonic

dynamics of the original songs. Hip hop and dance music

DJs would display their knowledge of huge swathes of

existing recordings by extracting what were often only

minute fragments to reuse, often taking what were once

overlooked parts of songs and making them central to

a new work. They used this knowledge to demonstrate

detailed insight into their sources which they used to

excite, comfort, surprise or confound their audiences.

The most important connection between any dub, hip

hop or dance music DJ is the specific range of sources

they work their skills on whether these are manipulated

in the moment or on a recording. In each of these three

forms of sample-based music, the ways in which DJs

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used their repertoire to engage in a play of recognition

of their source texts with their audiences are enticingly similar. The practitioners of each form of music play

with both the listening and compositional conventions

of their source texts and their own traditions of manipu-

lating these conventions at the same time. Because of

this, each form of music gradually attained a much wider

symbolic resonance than it had when it started. That is,

each of these three forms of music are now genuinely

global phenomena with each inspiring wide-ranging

forms of music-making in a huge number of subsidiary

and derivative styles and genres.

In the early years of Jamaican sound systems, the

repertoire presented by DJs in the late-1950s and early-

1960s was a complex and diverse amalgam of Caribbean

and North American styles, primarily drawn from the

traditions of the African musical diaspora in the Western hemisphere. This was in keeping with the long history

of ecumenical expressive interplay in Caribbean music

in general and in Jamaican music in particular.33 The

range was wide, encompassing merengue, Latin jazz,

rhumba, salsa, mento, and calypso. Crucially, the early

sound systems also played a lot of post-war American

jazz and R&B, especially those songs widely played in African American-owned radio stations in the south,

such as WDIA in Memphis and WLAC in Nashville.

Their clear-channel signals bounced and surged through

the atmosphere carrying with them Louis Jordan, Fats

Domino, and Johnny Ace.34 They also carried with them

the technical rhythmic intricacies of the small ensemble

jazz and shuffle blues of the southern Mississippi corridor, regional variations of wider styles that helped inform

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the subtle and beautifully ingratiating rhythms of ska,

rocksteady and reggae.35 Recording studio scouts would

routinely go to Miami, New Orleans and Memphis and

bring back cases of 45s.36

Crucially, dub developed at the same time as the

indigenization of record production and vinyl pressing

in Jamaica from the mid-1960s onwards. This meant,

in true sound system style, a new repertoire. As Prince

Buster has explained, the evolution of the sound system

was in part a struggle against the domination of African

American rhythm and blues. As he noted, “its influence

penetrated deep into the fabric of society and had a devas-tating effect on our folk music, our dialect, even our dress code.” Despite loving R&B, Buster wanted to indigenize it.37 Building on some of the more popular characteristics of southern R&B, especially the perfectly named “back to front boogie” with its heavy emphasis on the offbeat,

the lineage of repertoire that producers would eventually begin to manipulate more and more aggressively

emerged: ska and rocksteady. Buster’s “Oh Carolina”

was the first song to take “one of the few surviving

African-based artforms,” burru drumming, and transform it into “commercially viable mainstream expression.”38

In the complex and tumultuous period immediately

before and after independence, the increasing focus on

local music, in origin, form and content, had the salutary effect of making diverse international forms more local

in character.39 As a result, sound systems now had the

potential to represent something even more powerful

than the galvanizing effect of the music they played.

They could come to represent the fashioning of a

powerful, collective sense of post-colonial selfhood.

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The repertoire of early electronic dance music, while

having only a few types of music in common with that

of dub, played a very similar role in the ways in which

the relationship between early influential dance DJs

and their audiences developed. In this case, it was the

defining presence of a multicultural, sexually libera-

tionist music culture centered in New York City that

most strongly shaped this relationship. Not surpris-

ingly, this meant that the music that was incorporated

into what Tim Lawrence has called disco’s “intricate

musical tapestry” came from all over the place.40 Early

DJs were able to use staple materials such as Babe Ruth’s

“The Mexican” in the same sets as the Beatles, Manu

Dibango or Traffic. Others might move from Dibango

to the Doobie Brothers while later synching the O’Jays

to Wilson Pickett.41 The range of factors that might

shape a set were numerous, but always pivoted around

the DJ’s ability to read a room and produce the kinds

of drama and communal pleasure demanded of them.

Perhaps one of the more important accomplishments

of this culture of music-making was the fostering of

the utopian promise of “an alternative society that is

organized around pleasure rather than labor, expressivity rather than uniformity, cooperation rather than competition, tolerance rather than prejudice, and communality

rather than individualism.”42 Very loud music pouring

from enormous sound systems can often have a symbolic

power that goes beyond the content of that music. This

is especially true when that music is carefully blended

and melded to create new entities with a novel form of

coherence, even if that form might only exist for a brief moment in time.43 It is the molding of these new forms

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of coherence that we can hear so clearly in The Grey

Album.

Hip hop has long produced its own inflections on the

musical archive it shares with disco and dub. However,

the use of repertoire to set out a distinct space of

connection was often different in hip hop. Part of

what accounts for some of the differences in the play

of recognition in hip hop with those in dub or disco is

the nature of the hip hop break which strongly shaped

the kinds of material that were used in hip hop culture

more generally. The broad similarities between early hip

hop and disco should be obvious, notably in the mixing

and blending techniques as well as the broad kinds of

relationships that existed between DJs and dancers.44

But hip hop developed through very different kinds of

social gatherings in very different kinds of places than

did electronic dance music. While club and disco DJs

had particular types of relationships with dancers, so did hip hop DJs. As Schloss has shown, a canon of particular

songs developed fairly early within breakdancing culture.

B-Boys “danced to these songs in their entirety, saving

their best (or most hostile) moves for the break. It was

this practice that led DJs to focus on the break in the

first place.”45 DJing or breakdancing contests demanded

a special set of skills in choosing and using breaks; these skills were distinct from those required in club work.46

While many disco DJs have long used breaks, they

have tended to do so in the context of extremely long

sets of music presented in clubs, sets made by “looping

breaks in order to generate tension before switching

to a euphoria-inducing vocal crescendo.” They did this

because “dancers loved the rhythmic dynamism of [the]

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breaks as well as the way in which these percussive interludes contrasted with other instrumental and vocal parts”

as part of the long-form drama of multiple moments of

tension and release over the course of a night out.47 Hip hop breaks and loops moved within a different kind of

drama, those of the display of the full range and depth of a community’s skills in breakdancing, MCing and DJing.

Dub, electronic dance music and hip hop, became

symbolically resonant musical practices for increasing

numbers of people in similar ways. The increasing preva-

lence of dub carved from the strong presence of roots

reggae in sound system playlists from the late-1960s

was closely linked to a new understanding of collective

identity that many Jamaicans developed in that period.

Early disco similarly transformed the self-fashioning

possibilities for various groups of people who sought out some other kind of world than the ones they inhabited.

Hip hop developed in a context of economic and cultural

oppression and marginalization to which its creators,

practitioners and fans were able to respond with a shrewd creativity. All of these forms were the descendants of

a much larger and longer-lived culture of the use of

recorded music as a form of live performance whether

in house parties, street parties, clubs, or on live radio.

We can link all of these phenomena to the emergence of

mash-ups in the mid-to-late-1990s. We can see this most

directly by looking at the tradition of practice of which The Grey Album is most directly a part.

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Musical fidelity and sample-based music

The idea of juxtaposing materials from different pieces

of music and placing them in immediate proximity to one

another in a new or derivative work has a long history. Such techniques have taken shape formally, informally, legally and illegally. Some have been made by professionals

and some by amateurs.48 Some composers borrowed

from others and some borrowed from themselves.49

Works with borrowed material have been presented by

orchestras, chamber ensembles, opera companies, jazz

and R&B ensembles, soul groups, and rock bands of

all stripes. Such works have been made by composers,

arrangers, songwriters, DJs, and producers. They form

parts of operas, symphonies, masses, concertos, musicals, vaudeville shows, minstrel shows, medicine shows, film

music, radio programs, medleys, and hit songs.50 The

people who made these new, composite works were

diverse. Their goals were multifarious. The means by

which these amalgams were effected, too. Unfortunately,

since the emergence of the term “mash-up,” the unique

place of this form of sample-based music within this

long, rich lineage of borrowing and appropriation has

been marginalized. Instead, mash-ups have been defined

down to only a few characteristics neatly arranged by

various authorities on music, the media, technology, or

the law. Critics, academics, and writers have focused

almost entirely on the humor, rebelliousness, and DIY

ethos of the form.

It’s not hard to see why this might be the case. Take

a piece like “Rebel Without A Pause (Whipped Cream

Mix)” from The Evolution Control Committe’s 1994

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cassette, Gunderphonic. The ECC deftly and seamlessly

meshed the vocals from Public Enemy’s “Rebel Without

a Pause” off their It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold

Us Back album with Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’

“Bittersweet Samba” off Whipped Cream and Other Delights.

Laying down Alpert’s bouncy horn line, hackneyed

fill-ins, and blandly standard modulating harmonies

under Chuck D. and Flav’s urgent vocals is immediately

striking. The subtle looseness of the dynamic rhythmic

relationship between the two uncannily evokes an almost

live feel to the production with the vocals both pushing

and pulling around Alpert’s beat. While the vocals render the Alpert’s particular brand of cheese suspect, surprisingly, the Alpert does the same to the controlled fury of Chuck D. His righteous anger suddenly becomes weirdly

inappropriate.51 Underpinning the satire of artists such

as the ECC is a playful and winning contempt for basic

principles of the music industry, from the parceling out

of sounds into “genres” or “styles” to their routinely

excessive copyright-enforcement measures. It is a stance

that has proven persistent and influential.

Artists such as Girl Talk or 2ManyDJs have built

on the work of artists like the ECC, John Oswald,

and Negativland by bringing to bear the techniques

and aesthetics of audio collage and so-called “plunder-

phonics” on the most straightforward of musical

sources.52 Girl Talk’s All Day from 2010, for example, consists of hundreds of samples arranged in endlessly

evolving, intricately-layered arrangements that seem to

perpetually cascade down on the listener. Girl Talk’s

elaborate, almost ornate bed of samples is synched with

the vocals taken from a cappella versions from the more

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typically boastful, bling-oriented end of hip hop and

placed over what are meant to be plainly incongruous,

clearly recognizable samples of rock, pop, soul, and

R&B recordings stretching from the mid-1960s to the

present. The goal is to tweak the best-known music with

a self-consciously clever form of “bratty” post-adolescent humor.53 Much of All Day stays fairly rigidly within the bounds of what we might call the “rock era” and rarely

leaves the stylistic confines of mainstream; of course,

that’s the point.

Mash-up artists are most often described as challenging

the values of the culture of mainstream popular music.

We are told they act as outsiders paradoxically by

demonstrating an almost admirable tolerance for a lot

of music specifically drawn from that mainstream.54

They are said to afford a “musical détente” between the

cool and the uncool, governed by an almost ecumenical

appreciation for any and all music that might prove itself amenable to being made useful or interesting again.55

The Grey Album, however, is in many important ways an exception to these supposedly inherent characteristics of the mash-up. The Beatles certainly didn’t need Danger

Mouse to rehabilitate their work. Danger Mouse made

very little effort to be a rebel. The Grey Album is more of a tribute album than a satire. It isn’t even particularly funny, unless I’m missing something. What links this

work to the tradition of practice called the “mash-up”

are the characteristic ways Danger Mouse manipulated

his sources and the plays of recognition he created with

his audience. The way he did each of these things is

what links The Grey Album to its tradition of musical practice.

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Mash-ups from this period, including The Grey Album, often created distinct forms of musical fidelity, or the

relationship between the new, derivative text and its

source texts. Perhaps the most widely known form

of the mash-up features the immediate juxtaposition

of complete vocal tracks from one source and struc-

turally coherent instrumental samples from another.

Two famous pieces such as “A Stroke of Genie-us” by

Freelance Hellraiser, or “Smells Like Booty” by Soulwax

both from 2001, place seemingly incongruous sources

on top of each other, using Cristina Aguilera and the

Strokes, and Nirvana and Destiny’s Child respectively.

The humor lies not only in the immediate cognitive

friction produced by the aural congruence effected by

the artists,56 but also in the maintenance of that aural

congruence and conceptual incongruence throughout

the full length of the piece. Obviously, this is not the

only kind of play of recognition this technique might

provide. For example, Soulwax’s “Independent Women

Part 1 [A Capella]/Dreadlock Holiday” from 2002’s

As Heard On Radio Soulwax Pt. 2 slips Destiny’s Child into 10cc without the slightest hint of conflict. Without prompting, you might not notice it’s a mash-up simply

by listening to it. The point is that there are dozens of techniques and forms of digital versioning that run the

gamut from the plainly obvious to the impossible to

discern. The play of recognition in mash-ups runs the

same general course as dub, electronic dance music and

hip hop, also invoking surprise, suspense, collapse and

incompletion in similar measure.

The techniques of the mash-up were not particularly

novel. What was new was the medium through which

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these musical forms and techniques made sense. This

medium was comprised of websites, laptops, software,

mp3s, and social media. It was populated by people who

made “old” music work as a form of comment on and

reclamation of a collective musical past that was becoming more present and accessible. Practitioners and aficionados easily moved back and forth across the spectrum

of musical practices from production to commentary to

assessment to consumption in order to create productive

relationships with that past. Mash-ups infused a new

aural vibrancy and technique into the broader cultures of popular music. Participants often regarded themselves as

open, pluralistic, and sympathetic towards a wide range

of music.57 Their new works chimed with the broader

experience of contemporary mass media in their snarky,

sarcastic, and continual reassessment and reorganization

of the increasing abundance and symbolic instability of

commonly known music by repurposing, reusing, and

reinvigorating that music. In the last chapter, I will show how Danger Mouse took two forms of music no one

had thought to connect to one another and set out to

redefine the very limits of their meaning.

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4

The Music of The Grey Album

I made a decision to do something artistically without

a clear reason as to why, except to show people what I

could do.1

The Grey Album was not the first time Danger Mouse had decided to mess with the Beatles. According to

Spin, he devoted some time on his early mixtapes to

“tinkering with the Beatles by pairing the bass line from

‘Come Together’ with Wu-Tang Clan’s ‘C.R.E.A.M.’ and

overhauling ‘A Day in the Life.’” Apparently, one of the

album covers even had “mock-Beatles, all-white artwork”

with only the words “Danger Mouse” appearing on the

front.2 In fact, the Beatles would not have been out of

place on any of the promo albums and EPs Danger

Mouse put together between 1998 and 2003. While

his tracklists were dominated by the required canonical

sources, such as Nas, Common, Mos Def, and a panoply

of names from the Wu-Tang empire, Danger Mouse

also incorporated his own take on previously remixed

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versions of Yes’s, “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” Edie

Brickell’s “What I Am,” Blondie’s “Call Me,” and Hall and Oates’ “Maneater.” We can learn at least two important

things from these choices. They suggest Danger Mouse’s

ability to listen past the surface characteristics of a broad range of sources for their potential uses in his own

work and they demonstrate his ability to incorporate a

disparate range of expected and unexpected sources into

a coherent whole. These are the skills that made The

Grey Album possible.

In keeping with my dogged pursuit of the two

questions at the heart of this book, what is The Grey Album and where did it come from, I am now going to look at the music on this album guided by the same two

ideas that have got us this far: Danger Mouse’s charac-

teristic manipulation of source texts and the plays of

recognition that resulted. Both depend heavily on the

character and content of his two source texts and the

links Danger Mouse drew between them. This is the

basis on which listeners can hear this work and recognize its meaning and value. There are three ways in which I

am going to look at how this worked.

First, the Beatles’ The Beatles and Jay-Z’s The Black Album have both left long, rich trails of meaning behind them as they moved through the world. Their respective

wakes of meaningfulness are as much a part of Danger

Mouse’s materials and medium as the actual sounds he

took from these albums were. Beyond Danger Mouse’s

explicitly stated intentions, understanding the legacies

of each of his source texts provides us with stable, less historically soluble links between these two albums that

can help us understand what Danger Mouse did to

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them and why it worked for so many people. These

links depend on the collective experience of our broader

musical culture. Second, the skills that Danger Mouse

exercised on those materials also point us towards an

understanding of this album based on the tradition

of which he is a part, one which I have just spent the

last chapter detailing. If we can get a sense of Danger

Mouse’s techniques and how he brought these to bear

on his sources, then we can see why this album became

meaningful and valuable in the way that it did. We will

also see how The Beatles provided an extraordinarily rich palette from which to construct a new bed of sounds

for Jay-Z’s complex and engaging vocals. Finally, I will

look at the flow of specific tracks on The Grey Album and show how Danger Mouse drew on a broad range of

overlapping themes, ideas and musical gestures that he

expected people to understand. I will also push beyond

any specific intentions he might have had to show how

the links and themes that resonate between Jay-Z and the

Beatles are bigger than any of the albums we are talking

about here, black, white or grey. These pre-existing ideas are in large part what made The Grey Album work.

The legacies of The Beatles and The Black Album

The Beatles and The Black Album have a lot in common.

The sometimes rueful labors that produced these albums

were copiously documented and have been extensively

celebrated. The production of both was guided by

artists with almost nothing to prove. Despite this, both

the Beatles and Jay-Z were extremely purposeful and

ambitious throughout lengthy and laborious recording

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sessions.3 Both albums are composite compilations of

songs produced and performed by different people, often

with no direct collaboration between many of them.

Both are marked by extensive aesthetic synthesis. They

are rich, kaleidoscopic albums, full of allusions, refer-

ences, and suggestions. There is a prodigious amount of

stylistic promiscuity on each. Each album took hold of

pieces of our collective musical past and reworked them.

Both abound with themes of retrospective introspection

and autobiography. Both albums act as fulcrums on

which these artists’ pasts and futures tilted. Each makes extensive musical and lyrical references to professional

and personal histories. Both make a fair bit of self-

referential hay about being “Jay-Z” or being a “Beatle”

when those roles were chafing against the people under-

neath. As a result, both albums seem almost obsessed

with the authenticity thought to be lying beneath their

carefully crafted exteriors. Finally, both albums appeared as their authors were diversifying into other ventures.

Jay-Z moved into music production, A&R, running his

own record label, and a sweatshop-produced fashion

line. The Beatles moved into exactly the same range of

activities (although the contents of the Apple boutique

were sourced more humanely).4 In both cases, these

artists aspired to become part of the entertainment

industry establishment in a more substantial way than

simply providing its soundtrack. This told fans implicitly and explicitly that something was coming to an end. As

a consequence both albums are viewed by many as a

kind of biographical, if not musical, apotheosis. George

Harrison summed up the position the Beatles found

themselves in at the time, suggesting, “We had a lot of

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ideas of ‘we could do this and we could do that,’ but when it came down to it really, the only thing we could do was write songs and make records and be Beatles, successfully.”5 Jay-Z, characteristically, put it more bluntly: “The game ain’t hot. I love when someone makes a hot album

and then you’ve got to make a hot album. I love that. But it ain’t hot.”6

It is important to understand that none of these

commonalities was planned and none has much to do

with the intentions of the artists involved. What links

them most firmly for our purposes is the fact that

Danger Mouse’s relationship to each of his sources was

exactly the same. He took what many people regard as

great works and incorporated them into his own work.

This simple fact infuses The Grey Album with a certain, obvious coherence that is drawn from the legacy of each

source album. Without these histories for Danger Mouse

to play with, his work would have meant a lot less. It

is worth looking at each album briefly to explain the

connections I am drawing between them.

The Beatles was made after the Beatles famously

and publicly went to India. It followed on from the

extraordinary burst of creativity that produced Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, and the Magical Mystery Tour, three albums increasingly dependent on the studio, not only for

production, but for songwriting and composition as well.

By all accounts, being away from London and Abbey

Road Studios demanded a different way of writing songs.

Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison all focused on the

acoustic guitar and this trip allowed them to produce

more personal, introspective songs with less collabo-

ration with each other than they had ever experienced

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before. These methods seemed to have worked as the

trip produced a “luxurious outpouring of songs” almost

all of which would end up on The Beatles.7 The well-documented production history of this album reveals a

troubled creative environment. The musicians sniped

at each other, walked out on each other, played the

other’s instruments on their own songs, and invited in

contributors that stretched the tolerance of the others

to the limit. The sessions that produced this album were

more intense and grueling than most of their previous

projects had been. This clearly left the band facing the

end, without much sense of exactly when it would come.8

Musically, The Beatles has long been lauded for the broad horizon of styles it evoked or enacted, and just

as often scorned for its lack of stylistic and aesthetic

coherence. Critic Tim Riley argues that the band

extended the form of “musical caricature” developed

on Sgt. Pepper suggesting somewhat grandiosely that they did so in order to “highlight both the polar-ities at work within the band and the catalogue of

styles rock had grown to encompass.”9 Riley notes that

the varied recording techniques used make the album

sound as if it was recorded by entirely different bands.10

The stylistic borrowings range from the British folk-

inflected “Blackbird” and “Mother Nature’s Son” to the

vaudeville-styled country show tunes “Rocky Raccoon”

or “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill.”11 “Back

in the U.S.S.R” even manages to channel the Beach

Boys channeling Chuck Berry in a deft, straight-faced

comedic form.12 Sometimes multiple stylistic changes

were plastered together in one song, as with “Happiness

is a Warm Gun” which manages to embrace minor key

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finger-picking blues, acid rock, and doo wop. However,

instead of the doo wop back-up vocals singing “shoo

be doo wop,” they gleefully intone “bang, bang, shoot,

shoot.”13 At this point on the album, the last song on the first of four sides, it probably would have been clear to most listeners that this was not a band feeling much in

the way of constraint anymore.

The Black Album has its points of continuity with The Beatles, notably arriving at a similar point in the artist’s career trajectory and being heavily laden with autobiography. The album begins with Just Blaze’s “Interlude,”

on which the producer’s manipulated voice tells us,

“all things that must come to an end. It is an inevitable part of the cycle of existence.” This was placed under

what he called “spacey” samples taken from “Dizzy” off

Hugo Montenegro’s Moog Power from 1969.14 This oddly unexpected entrée eases the listener into the heraldic

sample from The Chi-Lites’ “That’s How Long,” which,

along with Gloria Carter’s reflections on her son’s birth, begins “December 4th”; this serves as the retirement

announcement fans would have known was coming.

What follows is what one critic called a “self-celebratory biopic” in which Jay-Z addresses his demons, critics, and competitors in a long series of nimble boasts, toasts, and explanations, alternating with assured control between

candor, humor, and pathos. Like John Lennon’s “Glass

Onion,” Jay-Z’s targets include the infrastructure of

stardom, and as with George Harrison’s “Piggies,” he

sternly articulates the broad gulf between the rest of

society and himself. This album is widely regarded as

exceptional for its revelatory tone, with one critic noting,

“Jay-Z is a confidence artist, and he’s gotten rich by not

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making it personal—teaching the swagger, but seldom

betraying the emotional limp that caused it.”15 The Black Album changed all that by decontextualizing his earlier work with a somber shade of self-awareness. At one

point he even prays for forgiveness for all that he has

done wrong. As with the Beatles, it is Jay-Z’s artistry that is placed before us as the force of redemption. Pharrell

Williams describes Jay-Z at work:

There’s no pen and paper anywhere in sight. You got

to see this guy listening to the music, mumbling to

himself, and then, you know, he goes into the booth.

It sounds a lot like the Oracle of Delphi’s process. You

know she’s leaning over, like, cracks in the cave that have like methane hydrate coming out, high as, you know, an

eagle’s ass, and she’s mumbling shit, and next thing you

know she has a prophecy.16

All of these themes and ideas constitute the store of

received wisdom on which The Grey Album is based.

They are the pre-existing medium from which Danger

Mouse excised his materials which he then reinserted

into this medium in the form of beats and loops. The

collective understanding of these two albums was a

crucial part of the framework through which peers and

fans made their assessments and critiques.

The making of The Grey Album

It is important to understand Brian Burton’s stated

motives for making The Grey Album. As he told The New York Times, “I did not make ‘The Grey Album’

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for music fans. I made it to impress people who were

really into sampling.”17 While this project was as much

a technical exercise as anything else, as I suggested in

the last chapter, the practice of sampling demands not

only a technical mastery of one’s sources, but also a deep understanding of their broader social meaning. Burton

demonstrated this understanding by listening to his

sources in a very particular way and crafting his beats

and loops for very particular purposes. As he said later, he wanted to end up with something more than a mere

alliance of samples: “You can throw an a cappella over the beat and as long as they’re the same [time], it’ll somewhat match. But it doesn’t mean it’ll feel natural, … I didn’t want it to sound that kind of way. I wanted to make sure

I had the feelings of the song.”18 Burton engaged in a

fairly intense process of working for 20 12-to-16 hour

days to get what he wanted. This process would most

likely seem familiar to the practitioners and aficionados he sought to impress. Beyond seeking the respect of his

peers, however, he also wanted to show his appreciation

of the materials he was working with. Burton always

insisted he was making an “art project”19 that grew out

of his appreciation of this music. He told the New Yorker,

“I’m just worried whether Jay-Z will like it, or whether

Paul and Ringo will like it. If they say that they hate it, and that I messed up their music, I think I’ll put my tail between my legs and go.”20

Burton began work on The Grey Album by listening to the a cappella version of The Black Album and measuring the beats per minute for each track. As many writers

have noted, this is “a common technique for club DJs

who want to seamlessly mix music together.”21 Then, he

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listened to The Beatles all the way through, repeatedly. He said he was “listening for anything that I thought I might be able to use, and then I started pulling tiny bits off

the album.”22 He listened for every strike of percussion

he could find that was not covered in the mix by other

instruments or voices. He used these individual sounds to construct his beats. Given the intricate methods Burton

used for the beats and loops on The Grey Album, “he could have easily tossed in a kick drum from another

album here or a bass drum there, and no one would have

noticed.”23 However, Burton said he “thought it would be

more challenging and more fun and more of a statement

to show what you could do with sampling alone,” so he

restricted himself to using sounds that were only on The Beatles.24

After extracting the materials for his beats, Burton

then applied the same process to create samples for his

loops and drops. He extracted a series of instrumental

and vocal riffs from individual songs, meshing them into

loops that often had just enough material to make them

recognizable as specific Beatles’ songs. Once he had

culled enough material, he started constructing beats

and loops around Jay-Z’s vocal tracks. He usually layered between 15 and 25 separate tracks of samples on top of

each other for each song. To make the music fit more

smoothly with Jay-Z’s lyrics and, as he put it, to make it

“sound more like hip-hop,” Burton set about altering his

samples. For example, he doubled handclaps and phased

them slightly. He applied the same sort of tweaking to

other instrumental parts, for example, by dramatically

emphasizing the bass frequencies of acoustic guitar parts and using them to act as stand-alone bass lines. Burton

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made a conscious decision to use obvious samples of The Beatles, “that way people know what I worked with.”25

The palette of sounds Burton had to work with on

The Beatles provided a wealth of sampling and remixing opportunities. When one repeats Burton’s listening task,

all those familiar old songs come alive in a new way.

Similarly, after cutting out pieces from only a few of

the songs from The Beatles, one can also hear both The Beatles and The Grey Album with more depth and clarity.

Confining ourselves only to drum sounds as an example,

I found it fairly easy and not particularly time-consuming to at least line up a decent collection of drum sounds

taken from across this sprawling collection of music.

There’s the muffled snare and hi-hat combination from

“Birthday” which is later amended with a tambourine

as Ringo whacks away on his four on the floor beat.

There is also the skittering, resonant floor tom-snare

drum combination that opens the song. You could also

choose the flat snare fill that starts off the slow bake of

“Yer Blues” or the fill that comes in slightly later, filled out with flams between the floor toms and snare. For an

entirely different sound, listen to the trebly, muffled floor tom that starts “Mother Nature’s Son.” Or perhaps you

might want to listen to the bright tone and gated reverb

of the snare from “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide

Except Me and My Monkey.” It contrasts nicely with the

floor toms used later in this song that sound like they

have been processed with porridge or placed in a small,

damp, resonant cistern. The muffled jittery, snare shuffle from the start of “Savoy Truffle” offers still further

possibilities as does the surprising variety of quarter-

note drum fills on “Glass Onion” as well as the bizarrely

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phased toms from “The Continuing Story of Bungalow

Bill.” I have to admit, I never thought of “Why Don’t

We Do It in the Road” as anything special before. Now

I think of it as a goldmine.

My point is that in making this album, Danger Mouse

energetically and thoroughly transformed small sections

from The Beatles by manipulating exactly those categories of musical ontology that matter most to his musical

tradition: rhythm, timbre, texture, tone, and tempo. By

listening intently and purposefully within his tradition

of practice, Danger Mouse managed to rework these

familiar source texts in ways that brought out character-

istics that no one had noticed quite in this way before.

He was only able to do this because he worked with those

materials within his own tradition of practice, placing his reassessment and reinvention of these sounds within an

existing medium they had not been in before, creating

new resonances and meanings out of them. In doing so,

he was able to expand the boundaries of popular music

just that little bit to make them include what he was

doing.

The flow of The Grey Album

It is telling that probably the most significant manipu-

lation Danger Mouse made to his source texts wasn’t

made with his software. It was his decision to completely reorder The Black Album. Instead of the original track list, Danger Mouse presented Jay-Z’s songs as follows.

I’ve noted each along with the Beatles’ songs sampled

on each track:

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Section 1

1. Public Service Announcement/Long, Long, Long

2. What More Can I Say/While My Guitar Gently

Weeps

Section 2

3. Encore/Glass Onion/Savoy Truffle

4. December 4th/Mother Nature’s Son

5. 99 Problems/Helter Skelter

Section 3

6. Dirt Off Your Shoulder/Julia

7. Moment of Clarity/Happiness Is a Warm Gun

Section 4

8. Change Clothes/Piggies/Dear Prudence

9. Allure/Dear Prudence

10. Justify My Thug/Rocky Raccoon

Section 5

11. Lucifer 9/Interlude/Revolution 9/I’m So Tired

12. My 1st Song/Cry Baby Cry/Savoy Truffle/Helter

Skelter

As you can see, I hear five divisions in this material. The first section features two understated, mid-tempo versions

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of Jay-Z songs. In the second, the tempo and intensity

rise noticeably and this intensity is maintained through

the end of Burton’s masterful version of “99 Problems,”

an iteration that outpaces the original by some distance.

The third section features a clear deceleration, with

two tracks based on the finger-picking guitar of John

Lennon. The next section starts with an abrupt change

of tempo and timbre with a loop of a bright, busy harpsi-

chord pattern from George Harrison’s “Piggies” rattling

away, leading into the upbeat version of “Allure” under-

pinned by percussive snatches of “Dear Prudence” that

sound far bolder than anything from the original. This

leads into an appropriately combative version of “Justify My Thug,” the two linked by the descending guitar coda

taken from “Dear Prudence” that ends “Allure” and the

opening strumming and picking pattern from “Rocky

Raccoon” that begins the new version “Justify My Thug.”

In the final section, Danger Mouse simply shows off

his skills, madly mixing and manipulating a potpourri

of material far more extensively than anywhere else on

the album, perhaps nodding collegially in the direction

of the most reviled track on The Beatles, the epic closer, Lennon and Ono’s tape collage “Revolution 9.” In what

follows I am going to work my way through The Grey

Album from start to finish.

Danger Mouse starts The Grey Album with the

signature acoustic guitar figure at the start of George

Harrison’s “Long, Long, Long.” It lopes along in waltz

time, rhythmically straightened, and brought up to

speed. It is then twinned with a thudding, muffled

bass note sitting on top of the mix, keeping time on

the beat with a bit of Paul McCartney’s organ tagging

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along underneath. It is the rising guitar riff that tells us what song Danger Mouse is using. On top of this

comes Just Blaze’s announcement from “Public Service Announcement”: “Fellow Americans. It is with the

utmost pride and sincerity that I present this recording

as a living testament and recollection of history in the

making during our generation.” Then the man himself

arrives bellowing “Allow me to reintroduce myself. My

name is Hov, H to the O V.” It’s a clever move by Danger

Mouse, as he is the one facilitating the (re)introductions by imposing his will on this material. As Jay-Z’s vocals

start, the underlying sample bed moves from the opening

guitar gesture of “Long, Long, Long,” to a second sample

which is taken from the passage that immediately follows

this riff in the original. In doing this, Danger Mouse

has managed to evoke, not only the texture and tone of

the original, but its flow as well. As Jay-Z’s rhymes then begin in earnest, the verse sample kicks in.

If you look at Figure 4.1, you can see how Danger

Mouse has created an entirely new structure to set under

Jay-Z’s words. He spliced together three samples from

different parts of the Beatles’ song, forming a new and

Figure 4.1 ‘Long, Long, Long’ by The Beatles

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unique composite. The first box represents the languid

guitar riff that starts the song and the second box represents the second half of this phrase which Danger Mouse

uses to link together the introduction and the verses. As you can tell, these two boxes are linked together both

in the original and the remix. The third box represents

the first part of the verse sample. Either of the two

samples marked in with the number three could be the

correct one; I can’t tell exactly where Danger Mouse

got it from, but it is most likely from the areas I have

marked. This material is always linked with that in the

last box. In the original, the first part of the material I have marked as number three had three beats to the bar

and was clearly marked by an acoustic guitar strumming

on the beat. This was accompanied by a smooth, light

organ. Danger Mouse has created five bars of four

beats each but has still maintained the original tone and texture of the Beatles’ instrumentation, expanding the

beat to fit his new pattern by reordering the harmonies

of the original. The final two bars of the five-bar verse sample (number four) maintain a key characteristic of the original material, the stretching of two groups of three

notes evenly across four beats. Danger Mouse’s new

structure consists of a pretty serviceable song structure in itself, comprising an introduction, three five-bar verses, a reprise of the introductory material, and six evolving

versions of the verse material to close his track out. All of this is underpinned by a relentless pattern of muffled, yet punchy drums and hi-hat that provide welcome company

for the droning organ.

The next piece is Danger Mouse’s version of “What

More Can I Say?” The original features the bright

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bounce of the classic soul samples taken from MFSB’s

“Something for Nothing.” These were beautifully

meshed with new vocals on Jay-Z’s album. Danger

Mouse takes his version in a different direction. He takes the opening bars of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”

and lengthens them by slowing it down, enhancing

the already prominent bass line of the original, and

placing it on a rocky foundation of a busy half-time beat.

Remarkably, he is able to harmonically meld the Beatles

with the back-up singers from The Black Album who themselves were singing along with the MFSB sample

by filling out its harmonies. Danger Mouse creates a

passage of intricate counterpoint between his sources,

with the soul singers seamlessly bridging Jay-Z’s lyrics

with Harrison’s vocals at one point. Here, Danger Mouse

brings together both of his stated goals, the display of

his technical skills and his musical understanding of the mood, feel, and content of his sources (and his source’s

sources). He also implicitly provides a broad intimation

of the Beatles’ often overlooked reliance on a variety of African-American musical forms throughout their career.

What I hear as the second section on this album starts

with a significant change of pace. As the final sample of the piano from “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” fades,

Danger Mouse’s version of “Encore” leaps into the space

it leaves behind. Underneath Jay-Z asking us if we “want

more,” rides a chunk of “Glass Onion,” John Lennon’s

snarky reassessment of being a Beatle. But Danger Mouse

doesn’t rely on the introductory groove or the swooning

strings of the bridge. Instead, he excises the more urgent, rising minor key harmonies of the section between the

bridge and the chorus in which Lennon repeatedly says

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“Oh yeah.” Danger Mouse intensifies the urgency in

this original passage by looping it. This section becomes more insistent when looped because the contrast between

the smooth string figures and the offbeat accents on

the electric guitar is heightened and never resolved.

The rhythmic support this sample provides for Jay-Z’s

insistent vocals is substantial, highlighted by several

moments punctuated by the complete suspension of the

beat. Danger Mouse slots the first two of these moments

in at the end of two phrases: “Who you know fresher than

Hov riddle me that?” and “I know where I’m lyrically

at.” The most important of these moments turns on a

dime halfway through the song and gives us an entirely

new foundation for the second half of the track. Danger

Mouse has swapped the sample from “Glass Onion” for

a break about 35 seconds into “Savoy Truffle.” The new

sample also features offbeat accents in the guitar and the slight tempo difference between the two originals has

been tweaked so they match. However, Danger Mouse

seems to have left the harmonies as they were, effecting

a sly key change of his own. Within a simple two-part

structure, this change provides fresh momentum and

interest. Despite using an impressive simplicity of means, Danger Mouse was still able to demonstrate his keen

understanding of the Beatles’ music.

Danger Mouse’s version of “December 4th” is one of

the few times that he makes any kind of direct thematic

connection between a Beatles’ song and a Jay-Z song so

it’s worth spending a little time looking at it. “December 4th” was the original opener on The Black Album, after the spacey, indistinct “Interlude.” It began with the

opening salvo of strings and horns from the Chi-Lites

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noted above accompanied by Jay-Z’s mother recounting

her son’s birth. She attests to his character at different points throughout the song while Jay-Z recounts key

moments in his life in an unusually revealing way. Danger Mouse, as usual, went in a very different direction.

He linked Jay-Z’s epic act of self-fashioning with Paul

McCartney’s bucolic fantasy “Mother Nature’s Son,” an

acoustic ballad that is increasingly supplemented with

low horns. McCartney’s guitar holds down the tempo

throughout and the horns, at first placed magnificently in the background, gradually expand along with drums that

McCartney recorded himself after Ringo had left the

project in a huff. All remain at a respectful aural distance from McCartney’s pristine double tracked vocals and

skillful, relentless guitar picking.

If you look at Figure 4.2, you can see where Danger

Mouse excised pieces of McCartney’s song. The first

sample denoted by the black box represents the initial

descending guitar figure that opens the song, a languid

glide down the harmony to come. The second in the dark

grey box is an eight-bar phrase that brings the first verse to a close. The phrase already has a circular quality to it with McCartney noodling around his central D chord,

Figure 4.2 “Mother Nature’s Son” by The Beatles

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both starting and finishing on it. The trumpets enter

in bar four as subtly as trumpets can with a sustained

note that acts as an entrée to the arrival of the full horn section at the start of the second verse. Danger Mouse

takes this eight-bar phrase, loops it and speeds it up,

laying it on top of a busy, sharp, buzzy drum pattern. The combination of the beat and the loop makes McCartney’s

guitar seem even more percussive. He then adds what

I suspect to be a heavily manipulated bass note taken

from the end of the song which I have noted as a light

grey box. Here, McCartney mimics the rising bass figure

played by the horns earlier in the song. He does so on

his unaccompanied guitar. This is represented by the

last box and my sourcing of it is admittedly somewhat

speculative.

As you can tell from Figure 4.2, Danger Mouse put all

of these pieces together in a crisp, regular pattern. Again, he provides an entirely new structure for Jay-Z’s vocals.

In the verses, he combines the eight-bar sample with

his manipulated bass note creating a tight, continuous,

undulating counterpoint between these two samples

and his beat in the repeating patterns I have noted. The

continuity of this counterpoint is interrupted seven

times at increasingly important moments in Jay-Z’s

narrative. The first break comes when the eight-bar

sample cuts out on Jay-Z’s particularly rhythmic inter-

jection on the words “I gave her my first real scare, I

made up for birth when I got here.” The second comes

when the sample cuts out again on the words “what’s

buried under there was a kid torn apart once his pop

disappeared.” In both cases, the poignancy of the lyric is highlighted. The third and fourth interruptions are even

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more significant. Gloria Carter’s reflections on her son’s life and character appear for the first time when she says the words “I noticed a change in him when me and my

husband broke up.” Here, the beat and the verse samples

cut out entirely and Danger Mouse inserts McCartney’s

melancholy descending guitar figure from the opening

of the original song. This break repeats itself about one minute later, again underpinning Gloria Carter’s reflections, in this case matching up with her words “that was

my way to keep him close to me and out of trouble.”

Following these interjections from his mother, the sixth

break comes just after Jay-Z asks for forgiveness for all of his bad decisions. The sample cuts out as he says “It’s nobody’s fault. I made the decisions I made. This is the

life I chose, or rather the life that chose me.” It is at this point in the story that he puts his past to rest. Then,

the vocals fade out on the lines, “If you can’t respect

that, your whole perspective is wack. Maybe you’ll love

me when I fade to black.” The final break brings us full

circle with the original verse sample leading into the

descending guitar figure from the original to close the

track.

Danger Mouse again displays his technical skill at

reconstituting his source materials in a coherent and

engaging way and he shows us how well he understands

these materials. He makes sure McCartney’s guitar

remains the central rhythmic feature of the sampled

material, just as it was in the original song, and he deftly links the opening guitar figure to key moments in Jay-Z’s life story. Beyond this, there is an evocative contrast in the form and tone of the remembrances from the two

source texts. McCartney wrote “Mother Nature’s Son”

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after being inspired by a lecture given the Maharishi

Mahesh Yogi about our relationship to the natural world.

It is very much an invented idyll that McCartney evokes,

aspiring to the condition of universal peace and harmony.

The ideas infused in the song are those of a kind of

authentic self in an organic relationship to the natural

world. The authenticity Jay-Z calls into being is of a very different and far more personal kind. Jay-Z’s not-quite-remorseful, reflective autobiography doesn’t shy away

from describing the pain his father’s abandonment

caused him and the years he spent drug dealing and

street hustling. His own mother validates the narrative

describing her son “Shawn” as a very shy child of whom

she was especially protective, all moments highlighted by Danger Mouse. In contrast to much of Jay-Z’s work to

this point in his career, “December 4th” presents us with a vulnerable character whose story is almost touching.

The recollections by Gloria Carter about “Shawn” are

given added poignancy by Danger Mouse’s light-handed

use of McCartney’s finger-picked guitar and the nearly

mournful use of the descending guitar figure used as a

break at precisely the right moments.

Without question, the highlight of The Grey Album up to this point is the fifth track, Danger Mouse’s version

of “99 Problems.” He merged the sarcastic, aggressive

original with “Helter Skelter,” one of the Beatles’ best-

known, but least-successful tracks from The Beatles.26

The Jay-Z original centers around an old school beat

complete with scratching and power chord samples that

frame “Jay-Z’s boastful bravado with beats that resur-

rected rap’s early homage to rock breaks.”27 “Helter

Skelter” was a mostly failed attempt by the Beatles to

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Figure 4.3 “Helter Skelter ” by the Beatles

keep pace with the increased volume and power of late

1960s rock. The song ends up sounding like a parody

of the genre rather than an example of it.28 Figure 4.3

shows the spots where Danger Mouse found his samples.

The dark black box denotes the iconic descending riff

in the electric guitar and the dark grey box attached to

it represents the upward wail of the guitar that follows

this riff. The light grey box is meant to show the grungy churning of the guitar and bass preceding the second

verse and the white box is meant to show the backing

vocals that interject with McCartney’s lead vocals, also

in the second verse. As with several of the other songs

examined so far, Danger Mouse has used these materials

to create a new structure for Jay-Z’s vocals through

patterns of intercut samples. However, there is no clear

pattern of repetition as there is with his versions of

“Public Service Announcement” or “December 4th.”

This would seem to be in keeping with the themes of

chaos and disruption that have attended the Beatles’

original for decades. Danger Mouse did three things with

his samples to create a complex, compelling rendering of

“99 Problems.” First, he cut up the vocal sample and the

guitar riff samples and interlaced them with each other

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in what seems an almost improvisational way. You can

see from the chart how they appear in the exact same

configuration only a few times. Sometimes the iconic riff appears in its totality and at other times Danger Mouse

cuts it into two, sliding the vocal sample in between. This is sometimes preceded by the wailing guitar samples,

sometimes not. Second, the sample that consists of the

grungy churning of guitar and bass is used in a continual pattern of counterpoint with the two guitar riff samples

and the vocal sample. The vocal and guitar samples are

used to repeatedly create strong moments of contrast

and tension with the guitar churn as all three samples are continuously batted back and forth across the length of

the song. Third, as with some of his other tracks on this album, Danger Mouse punctuates his new structure with

moments when his beats and samples cut out completely

leaving only Jay-Z’s vocals. Again, these moments are

carefully chosen. The first comes as Jay-Z says “Got beef with radio if I don’t play they show they don’t play my

hits. Well I don’t give a shit, SO!” Everything cuts out

on “so.” The second comes during Jay-Z’s vignette about

being capriciously pulled over by a police officer when

Jay-Z mockingly has the office say “Well you were doing

fifty-five in the fifty-four.” The next two come at the

end of the song’s tagline, “I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain’t one,” after which Jay-Z interjects “hit me!” These

are more percussive effects than anything else. The last

such moment comes as Jay-Z changes up the tagline to

“I got 99 problems, but being a bitch ain’t one, hit me!”

In each case, these are percussive interjections, but they also have a larger structural effect. They synch up with

key shifts in Jay-Z’s lyrics, such as when he is moving

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from one target, such as the music industry, to another,

the police.

The tone and purpose of The Grey Album changes

significantly after this. The next two pieces are “Dirt

Off Your Shoulder” which is mixed with “Julia” and

“Moment of Clarity” which is mixed with “Happiness

Is a Warm Gun.” As the churning and riffing of “99

Problems” ends, the finger picking of John Lennon’s

“Julia” begins. This song was his deeply felt message to

Lennon’s mother who died when he was a teenager. The

first ten seconds or so of Danger Mouse’s track presents

the rising harmony of the introduction from Lennon’s

original. After this, Danger Mouse simply mutilates it,

demonstrating a skill for rapid fire reassembly not yet

presented on this album. His samples and beats flutter

around without any apparent grounding and yet it holds

together remarkably well. Individual notes plucked on

and from the guitar are interspersed with small pieces

of Lennon’s vocals as well as his strumming patterns.

These are anchored by the unusually strong rhythmic

patterns of Jay-Z’s vocals. The tension between the

convoluted samples and beats make it seem like the track

might collapse at any moment. Yet Jay-Z’s rhythmically

sophisticated bravura and boasting holds it all together.

We emerge from these disorienting patterns at the end

of the track when the original sample from the start

suddenly starts to reassemble itself before it fades out. It fades almost seamlessly into the electric guitar picking

of another Lennon song, “Happiness is a Warm Gun”

which starts the new version of “Moment of Clarity.”

Danger Mouse eases us very gently into a new sample

placed in the same minor key at almost exactly the same

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tempo. The break between the two is so slight you

could easily miss it. He also eases us from the lengthy

proclamations of the self-defined “greatest rapper ever”

into a song to which if you “listen close, you’ll hear what I’m about.” These two tracks work as one unit and an

interesting thing starts to happen when you listen to

these two songs as one. As the unappealing conjunction

of Jay-Z’s endless boasting over the disfigured pieces of

“Julia” begins to grate, “Moment of Clarity” starts. It is set over the minor key guitar from the start of Lennon’s

song and Jay-Z’s mournful, penitent vocals begin to work

on you. They kindle a sympathy that the previous few

tracks did not. Danger Mouse has set these two songs off

from the tracks that preceded them in their tone, texture, and meaning. Just when you might have forgotten some

of the more important things Jay-Z was trying to say on

The Black Album, Danger Mouse reminds us.

To say the next track presents a change of pace would

be an understatement. Danger Mouse starts his version

of “Change Clothes” with the harpsichord part from a

break in the middle of “Piggies” which he has turned

into a clattering racket by adding a stuttering, bouncy

beat with heavily altered samples of what is supposed to

be the bass line “Dear Prudence” and what also sounds

like crunched, thudding pieces of harpsichord. We are

taken through this rattling collection of sounds overlaid on top of each other under Jay-Z’s vocals. The track is

repeatedly interrupted with the back-up vocalists telling us in a light R&B falsetto to “change clothes and go.”

After Danger Mouse wraps the piece up with the final

chamber orchestra cadence from the Beatles’ original,

we are immediately hustled into “Allure.” Danger Mouse

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takes a collective vocal interjection from the end of

the second chorus of “Dear Prudence” and uses it as

a sonic stab at the start of his sample to link it to a

snippet of the four beats of electric guitar strum that

immediately precedes the initial offering of the words

“Dear Prudence.” He turns the two into an unrelenting

mid-tempo drone.

Danger Mouse’s version of “Justify My Thug” rounds

out this three-song set, a set that is the most ambiguous and least effective on the album. This track, however, is one of the strongest on the second half of the album.

It is mixed with Paul McCartney’s slightly cartoonish

“Rocky Raccoon,” a song that straddles a very thin line

between acting as an homage to the classic American folk

ballad and mocking it. The original Jay-Z track is a fairly detailed explanation of a kind of thug life code, typified in the lines, “I ain’t never pay [no one] to do no dirt for me I was scared to do myself. I will never tell even if it means sittin’ in a cell.” Later, Jay-Z continues: “Honesty, loyalty, friends and then wealth. Death before dishonor

and I tell you what else, I tighten my belt ’fore I beg for help.” Burton’s insight was to link this song to the semi-comic Rocky Raccoon, a maudlin story of another man

also living by a fairly pigheaded personal code of honor

and eventually paying the price for it.

Both songs are versions of well-used templates from

popular music history. “Rocky Raccoon” is a play on the

traditional ‘bad man ballad,’ an archaic form found across both Anglo-American and African-American folk traditions since at least the late-19th century. Importantly, this ballad form, especially as it appears in the classic blues repertoire, is a crucial part of the storytelling tradition

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from which gangsta rap eventually emerged. In each, the

Beatles and Jay-Z are playing on familiar conventions

they unwittingly share. Not only do the lyrics hold a

number of fairly obvious themes in common, both songs

are distinctly stylized iterations of this tradition. Both artists are engaged in a kind of pantomime on these

shared narrative themes infusing them with humor,

wordplay and even pathos in the ways in which they

express what are otherwise fairly stock standard senti-

ments. As noted earlier, sample-based music practitioners very often play with both the conventions of their source texts and their own traditions of manipulating them at

the same time. In this case, Danger Mouse has taken

two works separated by 35 years and a substantial gulf in expressive means and linked them in ways one might not

have imagined possible.

The last seven minutes of The Grey Album fill out the balance of Brian Burton’s résumé. In another set of two

songs that can barely be distinguished from one another

if you are not paying attention, Danger Mouse takes

“Lucifer” and “Interlude” from The Black Album and conjoins them with “Revolution 9” and “I’m So Tired”

from The Beatles. Then, he takes the lyrics from Jay-Z’s

“My 1st Song” and sets them within a swirling mess of

sound whipped up out of bits and pieces of “Cry Baby

Cry,” “Savoy Truffle,” and Helter Skelter.” It is these two final pieces that put a big exclamation point on Danger

Mouse’s effort to claim some kind of artistic ownership

over these source texts. This is where his explicitly stated aims, to make something that would “impress people

who were really into sampling” and to “show people what

I could do,” are most directly and exuberantly indulged.

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While he manipulated his source texts throughout using

techniques widely known to be characteristic of this

particular tradition of sample-based music, it is here that he takes out his full arsenal of skills. Suddenly, it’s Jay-Z

going backwards, while the Beatles slide by him going

the other direction. Then, an orchestra morphs into a

lounge piano which then elides back into the Beatles who

now sound like the cheesy rock and roll covers band they

were in the early-1950s. He slices up his sources in so

many disorienting ways here that he produces as many of

the shrewd and adroitly executed plays of recognition in

these last two tracks as he did on the rest of the album. It is here that Danger Mouse’s in-depth exploration of the

character and content of his source texts almost spins out of control. However, it is precisely when the established basis on which the meaning and value of this work start

to become most vulnerable and threatened with disso-

lution that everything suddenly becomes perfectly clear.

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5

Conclusion

In early 2004, Brian Burton was a moderately well-known

hip hop producer with only a few credits to his name. By

2014, he was hailed as “Producer of the Decade” by the

Australian gearhead bible Audio Technology. More tellingly, he was asked to be “the central producer” on U2’s thirteenth studio album, succeeding none other than Brian Eno and

Daniel Lanois who had produced five of the preceding

six.1 After rising to the peak of his profession, Burton

still seemed puzzled by his career trajectory. Remarking

on the flood of offers that poured in after its release, he noted, “The Grey Album was a remix album. I mean it was intricate, took me a long time, and I was proud of it. But why would you want me to do that, just because I did this?

It didn’t even make any sense.”2 What did make sense was

the first step of the unlikely path to prominence taken by The Grey Album. It is hard to imagine a more consequential cease and desist letter than the one Capitol Records sent to Danger Mouse and his supporters. It just had exactly the

opposite effect to the one Capitol intended.

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The gearheads have hardly been alone in lauding

Burton’s skill and imagination. The commentary on The Grey Album has been almost entirely positive since the beginning. Only a few weeks after its release, Burton

started “receiving a steady stream of phone calls and

e-mail messages [about it].” As one story noted at the time, the head of the hip hop label that represented Danger

Mouse said: “There’s a level of hysteria surrounding

the album … More people say they have heard it than

can possibly have heard it.”3 The consensus of those

who reviewed it, and there were many, is still easily and immediately available online. It is instructive to review these assessments as they tell us a few important things.

They tell us that remixes of The Black Album were hardly rare in 2004. There was a pretty big rank of competitors

lined up to have a crack at what was then rumored to

be Jay-Z’s final album. They also tell us that The Grey Album was thought by many to be exceptional within this crowded field not only for the skill with which it

was executed, but the imaginative connections it drew

between its source texts. As Spin’s critic noted at the time,

“Danger Mouse’s album is a whole different rodent—it

doesn’t sound the least bit slapped together, and while

the novelty factor alone makes it worth the download

time, it works as a cohesive album long after the initial shock (“Blimey, he’s rapping over ‘Helter Skelter!’”)

wears off.4

Third, the criticism and appreciations show us that

they were not the product of a nascent, “revolutionary”

music culture brashly announcing itself to the world.

They were the responses of seasoned writers who had

long been very well aware of the tools, tricks and

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techniques that defined the tradition of musical practice from which this album sprang. They immediately recognized how Danger Mouse both fit into and expanded this

tradition. This album was made by a producer listening

to his sources in ways others had not. We can literally

hear him appropriating those sources and manipulating

them in distinct ways. Then he sent them out into the

world to be assessed, critiqued and accepted or rejected

by those who could gauge for themselves the meaning

and value of what he had done. They could only do this

because they were able to hear his sources in the same

way he did. Many judged that he did so in a way they

found to be exemplary. This was only possible because

The Grey Album appeared from within a long, rich

tradition established by a huge number of predecessors

that had long been asking them to do exactly the same

thing.

This album presents us with musical practices,

emergent at the time, taken for granted ten years later,

that make it an important marker of the intense and

persistent struggles over the production, distribution,

and consumption of popular music. None of the skills

Danger Mouse brought to bear on this album were

new. He listened to his source materials in ways DJs

had for decades. He dismantled and reconstructed those

sources in ways that would have been familiar to musical

practitioners going back to at least the early 1970s.

And he deftly brokered a relationship between those

sources that would certainly have been familiar to those

producers as well. The perceived “corporate censorship”

of what was clearly a respected work of art set firmly

within its well-established tradition of practice effected

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a collision between the supporters of that tradition and

outsiders who simply had no real understanding of what

they were dealing with. Most importantly, it was the

widespread recognition of Burton’s skill and his mastery

of his tradition that made his supporters shape their

resentment into the blunt force of civil disobedience.

I have carefully avoided making any claims about

the superiority or greatness of The Grey Album or its creator. That is not the point of this book. My point

has been to dig into the history and tradition of the

musical practices that made this album possible and

to come out with something more important than a

simple, subjective declaration of this work’s standing.

This book is meant to be a demonstration of this work’s

aesthetic legitimacy. The aesthetic legitimacy of The Grey Album does not depend on how clever its producer is or how faultless the manipulation he enacted on his

source materials might have been. Nor does it depend

on how artistically successful it might be. Its aesthetic legitimacy depends on it being recognized and accepted

as a part of an identifiable and living tradition of artistic practice. This work is legitimate because it grew from

musical practices that were already widely influential

and increasingly prized and venerated around the world

at the time it was made. And it proved to be legitimate

because its author expanded the boundaries of this

tradition to include himself. This tradition has been

established through the use of recorded sound as grist

for the seemingly endless configuration, amalgamation

and juxtaposition of snippets of familiar and unfamiliar

music. While practitioners such as Danger Mouse often

deliberately arrange their source materials to create

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some kind of aural and cognitive friction through their

varied techniques of digital musical borrowing, they just as often effect a reconciliation between diverse sources

as well. Burton did both. This is not something that

could have been done by either The Beatles or The Black Album. That is why The Grey Album is an important album.

The legitimacy of The Grey Album has also been

earned from its adherence to a common goal charac-

teristic to all of the forms of music I’ve looked at in

this book: the effective play with our perceptions of the aesthetic materials in question. The Grey Album plays with the conventions of its source texts and existing traditions of manipulating them at the same time. This is a more

important point than it may seem to be on the surface.

These aesthetic materials are not simply source materials that have been sampled and then accompanied by some

beats. They are sounds a lot of people already found

meaningful and powerful before Danger Mouse got his

hands on them. They are musical materials that continue

to move through the world in a medium through which

they are still made meaningful and valuable by listeners.

It is a medium that consists of an audience’s perceptions and recognition of how those sources are manipulated

and transformed in relation to established conventions. It is through this process whose outcome is unpredictable

and controlled by no one that the meaning and value of

this work has been validated and its aesthetic legitimacy affirmed. Danger Mouse played with his sources in a

way that was by almost every measure conventional. Yet,

the specific ways in which he did so transformed these

conventions, expanding them, reconfirming their power

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and meaning, but in new ways. That is also why The Grey Album is an important album.

The fact that The Grey Album might have briefly

fallen into that peculiar category of larceny reserved

for works of art has very little relevance to its aesthetic legitimacy or value. It has proved far too easy to get

caught up in the legal debates surrounding this and

other forms of sample-based music. This has made it

too easy to forget how this album shows us what makes

this tradition of music-making valuable and important

in the first place. The ways in which Danger Mouse

took Jay-Z’s vocals and, leaving them unadorned and

untroubled, managed to create a whole new bed of

sound around them is impressively skillful. The fact

that this new bed of sound came from the shredding

and reconstruction of some of the most familiar and

potent music of the last half century was a bold

move. The realization of this amalgam had a few

notable effects. Danger Mouse seemed to humanize

Jay-Z in ways the rapper’s own work could not. What

could easily be taken as mere boasting by a man

who called himself another word for god eased into

more thoughtful terrain when leavened with George

Harrison’s searching introspection. The brittle edges

of Shawn Carter’s public persona, slightly smoothed

through honest and unexpected introspection, achieved

more range than might have been initially granted when

twinned with Paul McCartney’s Arcadian ramblings.

Danger Mouse’s insight was to go beyond both sources

into new territory, making this music mean new things

in new ways. Reflecting on his body of work in 2014,

Burton explained his approach:

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It’s always been important for the project I’m working on not to sound like musicians playing instruments because

I don’t want people to visualize someone playing guitar

and drums and bass … Whatever the part is, and how

it sounds, should make somebody think of something

else—a place, a dream—not the people who made the

music.5

The broader public language used to describe the

methods Danger Mouse used to create The Grey Album

has taken on a distinctly ideological cast in recent

years, through the use of words such as “liberate,”

“steal,” and “piracy.” These loaded terms obscure the

more substantial aesthetic traditions that link these novel forms of borrowing to established ones. Casting these

traditions merely as “rebellious” or “subversive” drops

them into a battle they cannot win with institutions

whose political power and deep pockets will ensure their

longevity and dominance for at least the foreseeable

future. In order to understand how the common, if not

pervasive practices of covering, versioning, borrowing,

appropriation and reinterpretation reflect back on our

evolving understandings of the sources they use, we need

to get past the tactical battles over property and theft.

We need to deal more directly with what makes these

forms of music cohere as part of a tradition of practice

defined by the exigencies of the ever-changing forms of

musical imagination they continually place before us.

Brian Burton is an interesting figure in this history

and The Grey Album was an unwitting watershed in the continuing battles over the definition of what acts

count as art and what acts count as theft. This particular

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work came along at the exact moment when it could

and would act as a kind of lens that could inadvertently

bring a whole range of issues into focus. I’ve placed the music of The Grey Album in a place it has not often held at the heart of these debates. I’ve worked my way to the

music, not only through the well-trodden paths others

have already gone down, but also through the long living

history and tradition of musical practices without which

this album would not have existed. Further, without the

previously existing network of peers, fans, practitioners, and supporters who could articulate exactly what it was

they found valuable and important about this album, it

might have been wiped out of existence.

The Grey Album is important not simply because it is a cleverly assembled collection of sounds. It is important because it changed how we think about the traditions

of practice of which it is a part. Brian Burton created

new resonances and patterns of meaning out of familiar

sounds and sentiments. He managed to make them both

unfamiliar and strikingly new while still allowing us to

see and hear what we somehow already knew was in

there. That’s a pretty good effort by any standard.

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Notes

Introduction

1 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 42.

2 “125 Best Albums of the Past 25 Years”; “Danger

Mouse, The Grey Album,” Rolling Stone.

3 Matthew Rimmer, “The Grey Album,” 40.

4 Cowan, Liebowitz and Latman, P. C.

5 Ibid.

6 Proudhon, 42.

7 Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture; Matthew Rimmer, Digital Copyright and the Consumer Revolution.

8 Christopher Ketcham and Travis Kelly, “The Cloud

Panopticon”; Pratap Chaterjee, “The New Cyber-

Industrial Complex Is Spying On Us”; Darwin

Bond-Graham, “Iron Cagebook.”

9 John Villasenor, Recording Everything; Elliot Cohen, Mass Surveillance and State Control.

10 Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody; Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price.

11 Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture.

12 Matthew Stahl, Unfree Masters.

13 Tarleton Gillespie, Wired Shut.

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14 Joel Bakan, The Corporation, 36–7.

15 Bakan, 101–2.

16 Peter Drahos, Information Feudalism.

17 Ibid., 4.

18 Brian Winston, Media Technology and Society, 11.

19 Ibid.

20 Timothy Mitchell, “Dreamland,” 21.

21 Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm And Noise, 72.

22 Ibid.

1 Music, Incorporated

1 Benjamin Oliver, “Observations on Music.”

2 Steve Knopper, Appetite for Self-Destruction;

Eric Pfanner, “Music Industry Braces for the

Unthinkable”; Charles Blow, “Swan Songs?”

3 Ed Christman, “Road Curves Ahead”; “Statement

of Financial Position 2010: Sennheiser Achieves

Record Turnover.”

4 Emma Janson, and Robin Mansell, “A Case of

Electronic Commerce”; Olufunmilayo Arewa,

“YouTube, UGC, and Digital Music.”

5 Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture.

6 This idea originally came from digital luminary

Kevin Kelly. For a strong critique of his ideas see

Will Page, “Can 1000 Fans Replace the Music

Industry?”

7 Mark Binelli, “The Future According to Radiohead.”

8 Guy Morrow, “Radiohead’s Managerial Creativity.”

9 Binelli, “The Future According to Radiohead.”

10 Morrow, “Radiohead’s Managerial Creativity”; Will

Page, “In Rainbows, On Torrents.”

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11 Binelli, “The Future According to Radiohead.”

12 “Radiohead reveal how successful ‘In Rainbows’

download really was”; Daniel Kreps, “Radiohead

Publishers Reveal ‘In Rainbows’ Numbers.”

13 Binelli, “The Future According to Radiohead.”

14 Page, “In Rainbows, On Torrents.”

15 On attention economy in the music industry see

Charles Fairchild, Pop Idols and Pirates, 75–7, 81–2.

16 Mark Crispin Miller, “The National Entertainment

State III: Who Controls the Music?”; Thierry Rayna

and Ludmila Striukova, “Monometapoly or the

Economics of the Music Business.”

17 Ed Christman, “Taking Share”; Juliette Garside,

“Warner Music Buys Parlophone Label”; Eamonn

Forde, “EMI: The Sad Demise of a Very British

Company.”

18 Ed Christman, “Have Sales Finally Hit Bottom?”

19 Ken Terry, “Global Music Sales Surged in ’88,

IFPI Says”; Dave Laing, “World Record Sales

1992–2002.”

20 Gordon Masson, “IFPI Reports Global Decline for

2001 Music Shipments.”

21 Gordon Masson, “IFPI Report Shows Surge in

Pirate Music Sales.”

22 Michael Masnick and Michael Ho, The Sky is Rising;

“The Recorded-Music Industry Is Still a US$40

Billion Business,” Music and Copyright.

23 Fairchild, Pop Idols and Pirates, 66–72.

24 Ibid.

25 Jim Dawson and Steve Propes, 45 RPM; Jeff Clark-Meads, “CDs Fuel 10% Value Growth in 1995

Global Music Sales.”

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26 Fairchild, Pop Idols and Pirates, 59, 69; Ed Christman,

“Fate of Singles.”

27 Ed Christman, “Hit-Driven Album Sales Lead in ’99

Report.”

28 Ed Christman, “Sony Slashes Singles Prices”; Ed

Christman, “Labels Taking Fresh Look at Singles”;

Don Jeffery, “As Sales Drop, Singles Debate Heats

Up.”

29 Jeff Clark-Meads, 98.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid.

32 Ed Christman, “Hit-Driven Album Sales.”

33 Ibid.

34 Ed Christman, “U.S. Music Sales Hit a Wall: Albums

Down.”

35 Brian Garrity, “A Song at Any Cost.”

36 Ed Christman, “Fate of Singles”; Ed Christman,

“U.S. Music Sales Hit a Wall”; Ed Christman,

“Album Sales Increase by Only 4% in 2000.”

37 I should note very clearly that the number of releases tracked in the article cited here includes all albums

in print at that time, not just new releases.

38 Ed Christman, “1995 Figures Show Industry

Imbalance”; Ed Christman, “Hit-Driven Album

Sales”; Ed Christman, “SoundScan Numbers Show

.35% of Albums Account for Half of All Units Sold”;

Ed Christman, “Average Sale of Albums Dropped

in ’02 as Labels Released More, Sold Less”; Ed

Christman, “2005 Sales Data: Long Tail Is Wagging.”

39 “The Nielsen Company and Billboard’s 2011 Music

Industry Report.”

40 Glenn Peoples, “Heavy Hitters.”

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41 Will Page, “The Long Tail of P2P.”

42 Ed Christman, “Average Sale of Albums”; Ed

Christman, “2005 Sales Data”; “The Nielsen

Soundscan 2011 Report.”

43 Chris Anderson, The Long Tail.

44 Glenn Peoples, “The Long Tale?”; Glenn Peoples,

“Heavy Hitters.”

45 Glenn Peoples, “The Long Tale?”, 28.

46 Ibid.

47 Fairchild, 2008, 66.

48 Geoff Mayfield and Keith Caulfield, “Seeds of

Doubt.”

49 Ibid.

50 Mayfield and Caulfield, “Seeds of Doubt,” 27–30.

51 Patrick Warfield, “John Philip Sousa and ‘The

Menace of Mechanical Music’”.

52 Lisa Gitelman, “Media, Materiality, and the Measure

of the Digital.”

53 Jim Dawson and Steve Propes, 45 RPM; David

Suisman, Selling Sounds; Kerry Segrave, Payola in the Music Industry.

54 Jennifer Sullivan, “MP3: Flash in the Pan”;

Christopher Jones, “Digital Music at the

Crossroads”; Martin Kretschmer et al., “Music in

Electronic Markets”; Charles Mann, “The Year the

Music Dies.”

55 Joshua Friedlander, “News and Notes on RIAA

Music Industry Shipment and Revenue Statistics.”

56 Bill Holland, “Majors Agree to Direct Payments”;

Bill Holland, “Digital $$’s Stream In.”

57 John Qualen, The Music Industry: The End of Vinyl, 13.

58 Ibid.

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59 Brian Garrity, “Sounds: 2001 in Review”; Aaron

Furgason, “Afraid of Technology? Major Label

Response to Advancements in Digital Technology.”

60 Brian Garrity, “Distant Profits or ‘Pipe Dreams.’”

61 Brian Garrity and Bill Holland, “Majors Face

Antitrust Probe.”

62 Ibid.

63 Brian Garrity, “Seeking Profits at 99¢”; Steve

Knopper states that the labels get 67 cents per track,

but this most likely includes ancillary payments

that might not go exclusively to the label; Knopper,

Appetite for Destruction, 172.

64 Antony Bruno and Glenn Peoples, “The Price You

Pay”; Glenn Peoples, “UpFront: Retail–Down is the

New Up.”

65 Bruno and Peoples, “The Price You Pay,” 22.

66 Ibid.

67 Charles Arthur, “ITunes is Ten Years Old Today.”

68 Fairchild, Pop Idols and Pirates, Chapters 6 and 7.

69 Ben Butler and Eli Greenblat, “Signing Over

Your Life: Inside the X Factor Contract”; see also

Matthew Stahl, Unfree Masters.

70 Sudip Bhattacharjee et al., “Re-Tuning the

Music Industry: Can They Re-Attain Business

Resonance,” Communications of the ACM 52 (2009):

137. Unfortunately, the authors didn’t reveal their

source. Even if they are half-right that is still a lot of tie-ins.

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2 Danger Mouse v. Capitol, Capitol v. Music

1 Kretschmer et al., 434.

2 Joel Bakan, The Corporation.

3 Tia DeNora, Music in Everyday Life, 39–40. Antoine Hennion, “Music and Mediation: Toward a New

Sociology of Music.”

4 Kernfeld,

Pop Song Piracy.

5 Jim Rogers, The Death and Life of the Music Industry in the Digital Age; Stahl, Unfree Masters.

6 Tarleton Gillespie, Wired Shut, 11.

7 Patrick Burkart, Music and Cyberliberties, 20.

8 Joanna Demers, Steal This Music; Ronald Rosen, Music and Copyright.

9 Jason Mazzone, “Administering Fair Use,” 1.

10 Gideon Parchomovsky and Kevin A. Goldman, “Fair

Use Harbors,” 1484–5.

11 Lessig, Free Culture; Lewis Hyde, Common As Air; Olufunmilayo Arewa, “From J.C. Bach to Hip

Hop: Musical Borrowing, Copyright and Cultural

Context.”

12 Peter Decherney, “From Fair Use to Exemption.”

13 See for example, Negativland, “Two Relationships to

a Cultural Public Domain.”

14 Cowan, Liebowitz and Latman, P. C., “Re: The Grey Album.”

15 See Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola, Creative

License.

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3 The Aesthetics of The Grey Album

1 John Philip Sousa, Through the Year with Sousa.

2 Joseph Patel, “Producer Of The Grey Album,

Jay-Z/ Beatles Mash-Up, Gets Served.”; Bill Werde,

“Defiant Downloads Rise From Underground”; Ben

Gook, “Past + Present = Future”; Matthew Rimmer,

“The Grey Album,” 40–2.

3 Ben Greenman, “The Mouse That Remixed”; Chris

Ryan, “Danger Mouse: The Grey Album”; Ryan

Dombal, “Danger Mouse: The Grey Album.”

4 Kembrew McLeod, “Confessions of an Intellectual

(Property)”; Michael Serazio, “The Apolitical Irony

of Generation Mash-Up”; Michael Ayers, “The

Cyberactivism of a Dangermouse.”

5 Lawrence Lessig, Remix; Aram Sinnreich, Mashed Up; for a strong critique of claims about “remix

culture,” see Margie Borschke, “Rethinking the

Rhetoric of Remix.”

6 Sinnreich, 72–4.

7 John Shiga, “Copy-and-Persist.”

8 Vanessa Chang, “Records That Play.”

9 David Gunkel, “Audible Transgressions,” 55–6.

10 Ibid.

11 See Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool.

12 Thomas Porcello, “The Ethics of Digital

Audio Sampling.”

13 Gracyk, 71.

14 Lloyd Bradley, Bass Culture.

15 Michael Veal, Dub, 42.

16 Veal, 53; Dick Hebdige, Cut ‘N’ Mix, 64.

17 Veal, 51.

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18 Peter Manuel and Wayne Marshall, “The Riddim

Method.”

19 Veal, 77.

20 Veal, 86.

21 Tim Lawrence, Love Saves the Day, 24.

22 Ibid., 35.

23 Ibid., 106–8.

24 Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, Last Night a DJ

Saved My Life, 353.

25 Lawrence, 149.

26 Kai Fikentscher, “There’s Not a Problem I Can’t

Fix,” 302.

27 Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop; David Toop, Rap Attack.

28 Chang, 79.

29 Joseph Schloss, Making Beat, 33.

30 Ibid., 140.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid., 140–1.

33 Joseph Heathcott, “Urban Spaces and Working-

Class Expressions Across the Black Atlantic.”

34 Phil Etgart, Liner Notes, Jumping the Shuffle Blues.

35 Ibid.; see also Dick Hebdige, Cut ‘N’ Mix, 62–4.

36 Dick Hebdige, Cut ‘N’ Mix, 64.

37 Prince Buster, “Foreward,” Lloyd Bradley, Bass

Culture, xv.

38 Bradley, 53–62.

39 Bradley, 272.

40 Lawrence, 86.

41 Ibid., 84–5.

42 Ibid., 441.

43 Lawrence and Brewster and Broughton provide

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numerous telling examples of the repertoire of

electronic dance music.

44 Tim Lawrence, “Disco Madness.”

45 Joseph Schloss, “Like Old Folk Songs Handed

Down from Generation to Generation,” 420.

46 Ibid., 413–14.

47 Lawrence, “Disco Madness,” 281–2.

48 J. Peter Burkholder, All Made of Tunes; Jennifer Williams Brown, “On the Road with the ‘Suitcase

Aria.’”

49 Two paradigm examples would be Luciano Berio’s

Sinfonia or general film music practice in the 1960s and 1970s. See David Osmond-Smith, Berio; William Wrobel, “Self-Borrowing in the Work of Bernard

Herrmann.”

50 For a conceptual overview of musical borrowing in

classical music, see J. Peter Burkholder, “The Uses of

Existing Music”; for case studies across many genres,

see David Metzger, Quotation and Cultural Meaning

in Twentieth-Century Music.

51 Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen and Paul Harkins,

“Contextual Incongruity and Musical Congruity.”

52 Brett Gaylor, RiP!: A Remix Manifesto.

53 Christopher Mosley, “Interview: Girl Talk on His

Roots and the Influence of Manny Theiner.”

54 Shiga, 94–6.

55 Sasha Frere-Jones, “1 + 1+ 1 = 1.”

56 Brøvig-Hanssen and Harkins, 97.

57 Shiga, 111.

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4 The Music of The Grey Album

1 DJ Danger Mouse quoted in Chuck Klosterman,

“The D.J. Auteur.”

2 Caryn Ganz, “The Mouse That Roared.”

3 Ernest Baker, “Moment of Clarity”; Ian MacDonald,

Revolution in the Head, 223–62.

4 Robin D. G. Kelley, “Empire State of Mind”; “The

Fool, the Beatles and the Story of Apple Boutique.”

5 The Beatles Anthology, ep. 7.

6 Touré, “Superstardom is Boring: Jay-Z Quits.”

7 Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography, 770.

8 Anthology, ep. 7.

9 Tim Riley, Tell Me Why, 260;

10 Walter Everett, The Beatles As Musicians, 164.

11 Everett, 163–5; Ian Inglis, “Revolution,” 122.

12 MacDonald, 247; David Quantick, Revolution, 68–70.

13 MacDonald, 254–5; Quantick, 95.

14 “Just Blaze Recounts Making ‘Interlude’ for Jay-Z’s

‘Black Album.’”

15 Elizabeth Mendez Berry, “The Last Hustle.”

16 “Pharrell Breaks Down His Work On The Black

Album.”

17 Klosterman, “The D.J. Auteur.”

18 Shaheem Reid and Joseph Patel, “Remixers Turn

Jay-Z’s Black Album Grey, White and Brown.”

19 Matthew Rimmer, “The Grey Album,” 40.

20 Greenman, “The Mouse That Roared.”

21 Corey Moss, “Grey Album Producer Danger Mouse

Explains How He Did It.”

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid.

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24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 As MacDonald convincingly argues, “Helter Skelter”

tries and fails to match the increasingly heavy rock

sounds of late 1960s bands such as the Who and

Cream, 239–40.

27 Shaheem Reid and Joseph Patel, “Remixers Turn

Jay-Z’s Black Album Grey, White and Brown.”

28 MacDonald, 239–40.

5 Conclusion

1 Michaels, Sean. “U2’s album still planned for this

year.” The Guardian, 11 March 2014.

2 Davie, Mark. “Danger Mouse: Producer of the

Decade.” Audio Technology, no. 100, 2014, p. 41.

3 Greenman, Ben.

4 Ryan, Chris.

5 Davie, Mark, 44.

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Also available in the series

1. Dusty in Memphis by Warren

19. Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli

Zanes

20. Ramones by Nicholas Rombes

2. Forever Changes by Andrew

21. Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno

Hultkrans

22. Murmur by J. Niimi

3. Harvest by Sam Inglis

23. Grace by Daphne Brooks

4. The Kinks Are the Village Green

24. Endtroducing … by Eliot Wilder

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25. Kick Out the Jams by Don

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5. Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice

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Document Outline

FC

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Grey Album in a Post-Album World

1. Music, Incorporated

New world, old industry

Selling the album, destroying the single

Crowds, clouds and idols

2. Danger Mouse v. Capitol, Capitol v. Music

The aesthetic practices of the powerful

From fair use to safe harbors

Ownership rights, authorship rights and natural rights to music

3. The Aesthetics of The Grey Album

The aesthetic legitimacy of The Grey Album

The musical traditions that shaped The Grey Album

Musical fidelity and sample-based music

4. The Music of The Grey Album

The legacies of The Beatles and The Black Album

The making of The Grey Album

The flow of The Grey Album

5. Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography