Sampling has remained a contentious topic in music for decades. Initially many in the music-listening public were against it, not for copyright or ethical or financial reasons, but quite frankly because they thought it was dumb and didn’t constitute “making music”. How could you call yourself a musician if you didn’t actually play your own music? That would be like an artist using other people’s art to make their own.
Which, of course, is a real thing. It’s called collage, and almost every person reading this (not that I’m under the impression that’s a large number of people) made some kind of collage art as a kid, cutting out pictures or words from books or magazines and using other kinds of found paper with designs, pasting them onto a piece of paper or cardboard to create your own “thing”. Collage as we think of it today is arguable a relatively new-ish art form, emerging in the early 1900s, and I suspect in large part that’s because prior to low-cost printing (and the complete non-existence of photography) one wouldn’t simply cut up a book or print – it was too valuable an object in its own right. That being said, there are all kids of pre-1900s examples of adding paper or other materials, including the gold leaf you see in many Christian icons and panels, to a primary piece of art. Even back in the day people were looking for ways to add flair.
I don’t think Brian Burton would have used the word flair as he was thinking about his new sonic idea in the early 2000s. He probably didn’t think about what he was doing as a collage either. Maybe a mashup. Or maybe he didn’t have a word for it at all. But what he had was a unique concept. Take the vocals from Jay-Z’s The Black Album and overlay them on top of the music from The Beatles’ White Album (technically called The Beatles, though if you actually called it that in a conversation no one would have any idea what you were talking about and explaining yourself would seem, well, pretentious; it would be like calling Led Zeppelin IV something like Untitled, Four Symbols, or ZoSo, which would probably cause even a diehard Zep-head to just stare at you with disdain). The result was The Grey Album, which Burton self-released under his nom de hip hop Danger Mouse.
Danger Mouse pressed 3,000 copies of his new album and began distributing them in February, 2004. The press on it was excellent, including a review in The New Yorker, and that meant it quickly caught the eye of EMI, who owned The Beatles’ catalog and had lots of well-paid lawyers. Many trees lost their lives as letters were sent to and fro demanding stores pull the album from their shelves and that Burton destroy his remaining copies, which by all accounts he did and which is why copies sell for hundreds of dollars today. As near as I can tell you can’t even stream The Grey Album, though people will post it on YouTube until it is inevitably take down. In a way it’s a sort of lost masterpiece.
But where there’s a will, or more precisely an opportunity to make money, there’s a way, and intrepid bootleggers have put out various versions of The Grey Album on vinyl and CD over the years. These labels are usually based outside the US where copyright laws may put this type of work into a legal grey zone (pun not intended, but apt), though it still results in these versions being blocked from sale on many websites like Discogs. But we live in the internet age and, well, stuff can slip through the cracks and if we look hard enough we can find those cracks. And by cracks I mean a 2021 red vinyl pressing of The Grey Album put out by the Italian label Gray Boy that you could have shipped to your home in a plain brown box.
Full transparency here. I’ve listened to the White Album a lot. I bought it as soon as it got its first CD release in 1987, a release that was a very big deal and widely reported in the music press. That seems crazy when viewed through the lens of today, but back then not a lot of stuff had been re-released on CD. I was a very early adopter of the CD, having bought a Radio Shack Realistic CD player back in probably 1985 or so, back when the Musicland at the mall might have all of 200 titles available on the format. The Black Album, though, well… I doubt I’ve ever listened to it? I never had a Jay-Z phase. I’m sure I’ve heard some of the songs, but outside of “99 Problems” I couldn’t name one (once again, pun not intended, but apt). I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the people first hearing this in 2004 were similar to me – very familiar with one artist, but with almost no familiarity with the other.
Anyway…. so what about The Grey Album? It’s charming, and when it works, it really, really works. “December 4th” is truly lovely and stands in sharp contracts to the more rocking treatment of “99 Problems”. At times it’s difficult to hear The Beatles’ influence (“Moment of Clarity”), but other times it’s right out front. The challenge to hearing it for the first time 22 years after its release is that its impossible to re-create the context of experiencing it in 2004, which is a common problem when it comes to understanding ground-breaking works well after they were created – I’ve heard two decades of works influenced by The Grey Album, so it’s hard for it to sound fresh to my ears. That being said, it still has a uniqueness about it – it doesn’t have the over-produced quality of a modern mashup, and I can respect how much more difficult it would have been to create this back in the day.
These various Gray Boy pressings seem to be of inconsistent quality – I’ve seen reviews of the same pressing that range from “unlistenable” to “amazing”. The 2021 red vinyl version I listened to was good, but not great. Definitely some pops and clicks, but I don’t mind that too much. There are a few passages that feel “off”, though having never heard an original or digital version, I’m not sure if those are intentional or the result of a pressing issue. Is The Grey Album worth it? Well… that’s more for the listener to decide. You can expect to spend about $50, which is I guess a bit more than a typical new vinyl release, but not enough that it would give you sticker shock.