It seems EMI does not share Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder's vision of ebony and ivory. Earlier this month it issued a "cease and desist order" to Danger Mouse. Explain to your friends that this is not the British cartoon character but the recording moniker of Brian Burton, a Los Angeles DJ, whose crime is The Grey Album - described by the New York Times as "a collection of tracks created ... by layering Jay-Z's a cappella raps from The Black Album ... over the melodies and rhythms from [the album] The Beatles, commonly known as The White Album. Mr Burton did not seek permission from EMI, which owns the publishing rights to The White Album."
If your friends shrug and point out that sampling is no big deal, borrow a piece from the Boston Globe: "While everyone from Frank Sinatra to ... Earth, Wind & Fire has covered Beatles songs, hip-hop artists have tended to stay away from the Beatles, if only because it is nearly impossible and prohibitively expensive to clear samples in their name."
Stealing from the Sunday Telegraph, you remark that The Grey Album was "an art project, never intended for mass production". Only 3,000 CDs were pressed. Yet EMI's wrath, which stems from the album's internet availability, has become the focus of anti-censorship groups. On February 24, 300 websites staged a 24-hour protest over EMI's "efforts to stop them from offering downloadable copies ...
The protesters billed the event as Grey Tuesday ... [and] offered the album for download" (New York Times). You weren't surprised to learn 100,000 copies were made. "That made it the most popular music in [the US], besting the actual sales of Norah Jones," you say, lifting from the Detroit Free Press. As a geek yourself, you can't help but feel the album highlights how "the record companies and copyright law are being left in the dust by internet-savvy musical innovators and the technology that stokes them" (Brisbane Courier Mail).
But what's the album like? Along with the NME, you aver that it sounds like a gimmicky joke, but "the results are as brilliant as they are blasphemous. This is down to the LA-based deck maestro's reading of the Beatles."
"It's the ultimate remix record ... that sounds oddly ahead of its time," you say with a nod to Rolling Stone, before returning to the Boston Globe for the final judgment: "As fun as it is daring, The Grey Album is, if not the best album of this still-new year, then certainly its most creatively captivating. Danger Mouse has brought the Beatles into the hip-hop generation while giving props to timeless innovation of the band, which through its boundary-breaking musical philosophy may have helped pave the way for the free-flowing deconstruction of rap music."