Danger Mouse’s first big commercial splash in 2006 was more like a tsunami. Teaming up with CeeLo Green as Gnarls Barkley, the duo released the smash single “Crazy,” which went on to win a Grammy for Best Urban/Alternative Performance and, as of this writing, has been streamed just short of one billion times on Spotify. Building on that momentum, Danger Mouse (born Brian Burton) has built a successful recording and production career, having worked with U2, ASAP Rocky, Black Thought, Norah Jones, Jack White, and Karen O., among others.
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Yet it’s hard to imagine that Danger Mouse would have built such an impressive résumé without the experiment known as The Grey Album. In 2004, Danger Mouse made the fateful decision to recreate Jay-Z’s The Black Album as a mashup with The Beatles’ self-titled 1968 album, known as The White Album. It was a clever conceit, but there is much more to The Grey Album than bringing a pair of generation-defining artists together with a witty album title and concept.
The Origins of The Grey Album
In November 2003, Jay-Z released what he stated at the time would be his final album, The Black Album. (He has gone on to release another five albums, and counting, since then.) The following month, he released an a capella version of the album with the intention of making it easier for other artists to remix his work. Danger Mouse wanted to experiment with creating a mashup album, but one that didn’t require him to pull samples from a variety of different sources. Now that he had an entire a capella version of The Black Album available, he just had to figure out what other album to mix it with. Danger Mouse settled on The White Album, which allowed him to work with the music of a pair of artists whom he greatly admired.
The Grey Album’s Ingenious Mashups
One listen to The Grey Album reveals that there was nothing obvious or simple about bringing Jay-Z and The Beatles together. Danger Mouse gave himself the difficult task of finding the right musical accompaniment and beats to complement the vocals for each song from The Black Album. (Danger Mouse did exclude “Interlude” and “Threat” from his version of The Black Album.) Some of his choices are instantly recognizable, such as backing “What More Can I Say” with “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” using “Glass Onion” and “Savoy Truffle” as the backdrops for “Encore,” or pairing a riff and vocal harmonies from “Helter Skelter” with “99 Problems.” These songs blend together so well that, once heard, it’s hard to hear one of them without expecting to hear the paired song along with it.
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For the most part, though, listeners—other than Beatles fanatics—have to listen closely to identify the tracks from which Danger Mouse pulled snippets. For example, on “Moment of Clarity” (the original of which was co-written and co-produced by Eminem), Danger Mouse speeds up and loops a passage from early in the first section of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” while interspersing some chords from later in that section. For “Allure,” Danger Mouse repeats a single guitar chord from “Dear Prudence” throughout the tune and pieces together some backing vocals from the same song. In either case, it may not be immediately apparent where the instrumental parts came from. Even though The Beatles provided the source material, Danger Mouse configured some of them in a way that made them unique.
The “Grey Tuesday” Controversy
If you’re wondering if Danger Mouse was able to blend elements from these two albums without running into legal obstacles—especially since he did not get permission to use any part of The White Album—he did manage to emerge largely unscathed. EMI, which held the copyrights for The Beatles’ recorded work, issued a cease-and-desist order against Danger Mouse and The Grey Album’s distributors, requiring them to destroy all copies of the album. Distributors protested the order by organizing a “Grey Tuesday” event, in which they made the album available for free downloads. EMI did not press charges against the protestors, who facilitated more than 100,000 free downloads during the event.
Jay-Z not only made the mashup album possible, but he approved of Danger Mouse’s creation and called the blending of the two albums “a genius idea.” For their part, the two surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, had no problems with music from The White Album being used for The Grey Album.
The Grey Album’s Legacy
Danger Mouse wasn’t the first artist to remix The Black Album. Kev Brown’s jazzy The Brown Album and DJ Lt. Dan’s The Black Album Remixes were among those that predated The Grey Album, but they didn’t achieve the same popularity. The album created enough buzz around Danger Mouse that, in 2006, he found himself getting the same treatment he afforded Jay-Z and The Beatles. The DJ collective known as Sound Advice combined beats from Gnarls Barkley’s 2006 album St. Elsewhere, with raps by Notorious B.I.G. in a project called Gnarls Biggie. The Grey Album had sufficient staying power that it inspired a remastered version, created by Colorado Springs-based engineer John Stewart in 2012.
Mashups were around years before Danger Mouse released The Grey Album, but his experiment showed how producers could take them to another level. Not every mashup is the equal of the sum of its parts, but in the right hands, it can add something valuable to pieces of music that were great to begin with. That was certainly the case with The Grey Album, which still ranks as one of the best mashup projects to date.
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