Music may be a universal language, but many pop fans never study anything beyond a handful of its more common dialects. The mainstream audience remains as segregated by style, slang, and collective sound as a high-school cafeteria, each clique guarding its primacy and its prejudices. Hip-hop history regularly revises itself by referring to any rappers preceding the currently popular crop as "old school," while a significant wing of the self-righteous refuse to believe that pop has produced a single worthy fizz since 1980, or 1977, or 1969.
DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album, like all of pop's great crossover dreams, comes from the planet next door -- a place where such lines seem never to have been drawn. A crazed, controlled hybrid of the Beatles' 1968 White Album and Jay-Z's 2003 Black Album, it's a breakthrough example of the mash-up, an emergent underground form in which fan-remixers use amateur-accessible computer software to combine existing recordings in new forms. Spliced, looped, and throttled, familiar tracks from disparate artists (Nirvana and Destiny's Child, say) combine wildly in a perverse and beat-happy remix, usually available only via illegal downloads from cagily rotating Internet outlets. There is nothing to dislike in this trend, whether you're a democrat, a deconstructionist, a rank-and-file fan, or all three. It's pure underground action, audience talking back to artist, a grass-roots subversion of conglomerate monopoly that offers endless possibilities for revelation, outrage, hilarity, and boredom. Pop lives!
The Grey Album, which over the past few months has been fueling an Internet frenzy of discussion and downloading -- and was swiftly enjoined under a cease-and-desist order from EMI, the Beatles' parent company -- may be the first mash-up to qualify as a great pop album. DJ Danger Mouse is Brian Burton, an American who has been mashing it up in Britain for a few years, and on this evidence he deserves the designation Todd Rundgren once handed himself: a wizard, a true star.
Like anyone who creates something new and shocking -- shocking in its newness, pleasurable in its shockingness -- he makes an utterly personal synthesis of familiar sources. The creativity is in the combination, and the question of sampling-as-theft is obviated by the fact that, under Mouse's splicing, both Jay-Z and the Beatles are cut into forms no one else has envisioned. Also, the nature of theft is that you don't give back what you've stolen. You certainly don't give it back in a whole new form.
The Grey Album isn't perfect: Two or three tracks go splat. What's left, though, is a run of masterworks, demented looping, and eyeball-shaking hooks.
"What More Can I Say" makes scary use of the piano opening to "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and a multitracked chorus of sighing George Harrisons. For "December 4th" -- Jay-Z's boyhood memoir, featuring his mother in spoken passages -- Mouse employs a folkie filigree from "Mother Nature's Son," and there's nothing facile in the contrast between urban rap and acoustic refrain.
The grandest rave-up and greatest hook comes in "99 Problems," which slashes the rap star's paranoid rant with the riffs and screams of "Helter Skelter." The intertextuality grows dizzying on "Justify My Thug," which layers Jay-Z's rap, an opening quote from Bill Haley, a mock-Madonna motif, and the harmonica from "Rocky Raccoon." On "Interlude," Mouse finds, or creates, the Duane Eddy-ness in the guitar opening of "I'm So Tired."
Jay-Z's original Black Album beats were, many felt, so underwhelming that they cried out for remixing and replacement. The White Album was an inspired choice of source beats and organizing riffs, seeing as it featured some of the earliest samples and proto mash-ups to ever reach the pop mainstream.
"Happiness is a Warm Gun" was a brutal collage of clashing styles, cut with a knife. "Bungalow Bill" featured instrumentation drawn from the samples installed in John Lennon's Mellotron. And then there was the epic cut-up "Revolution 9," from whose vast randomness emerged passages of near-musical synchronicity -- overheard voices, underlying pulses, and overarching sound effects embracing for moments before vanishing in the clatter of an evolving nightmare.
"Revolution 9" also figures in "My 1st Song," the collection's finale and its most complex montage of tempos and textures. Beneath Jay-Z's farewell rap and loving shout out to family and friends runs a sped-up version of "Savoy Truffle"'s chewy beat and belching horns, with Paul McCartney's "can you take me back" voice revolving constantly in the background, retaining, Möbius-strip-like, a perfect purity of horizontal form.
The beat stops and starts abruptly, and Mouse makes exhilaration from this headlong comedy of hiccups and anxiety, fluty voices and funk. The thrill, finally, is in loving so easily a thing so proudly freakish. As in The Grey Album's other strongest tracks, there is nothing in "My 1st Song" that anyone other than Mouse could have guessed would work, and not a beat that feels wrong, thus proving for all doubters that the remix is itself an instrument, the mixer a creator.
The Grey Album demonstrates the Beatles' continuing artistic usefulness while subjecting the group to a necessary nose breaking, a systematic debeautification. Mashed up and chopped around by DJ Danger Mouse, the Beatles fight back -- and are invigorated by the challenge. A predictable pity that EMI seeks to quash such an irreverent tribute.
Recently I wrote in The American Prospect that, for all their influence elsewhere, the Beatles have been largely absent from hip-hop. DJ Danger Mouse now puts them smack at the center of it. I also wrote that the Beatle organization should show sufficient nerve and imagination to create, and welcome from others, radical recontextualizations of the band's art. Though expecting corporations not to file cease-and-desist papers is like asking angry elephants not to roar, the results of The Grey Album show that the Beatles can not only face such a challenge in the millennial marketplace, they can profit from it. The fan base is expanded, crossover potentials are multiplied; more black kids buy The White Album, and more white kids buy The Black Album. Pop lives, and we all win.
Devin McKinney is the author of Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History.
