COURTESY: Last.FM
When Kanye West released “Only One” on his website in the hours before New Years 2015, the ode to his daughter, North, created a stir. Mixed between heartfelt lyrics, West believed his words were channeled through him by his deceased mother, “Only One” features organs played by esteemed guest and former Beatle guitarist, Paul McCartney.
After its release, news came that West and McCartney had spent 2014 working on upwards of nine songs, many of which are scheduled to be released on the rapper’s upcoming album “So Help Me God.”
The partnership between the 72-year old rock luminary and hip-hop’s foremost producer/rapper may come as a shock to fans. On the surface, the two entities don’t mix. Some West followers even took to Twitter in response praising West for supporting “untapped talent.”
However, this doesn’t mark the first time a Beatle has played a major role in hip-hop.
In December 2003, then-little-known hip-hop producer Brian Burton, whose stage name is Danger Mouse, set out to remix Jay-Z’s “The Black Album,” which, at the time, was touted to be his last offering as a solo artist in the rap industry.
Two and a half weeks of work went into the unique, 12-song project that paired Jay-Z’s street corner savvy lyricism with another monumental music goliath. All the beats on Danger Mouse’s iteration of “The Black Album” came from The Beatles’ self-titled 1968 album, affectionately dubbed by fans as “The White Album” to make “The Grey Album.”
After releasing “The Grey Album” in February 2004 in a limited 3,000 copy pressing, Danger Mouse quickly rose within the ranks of producers bringing their own spin to Jay-Z’s curtain call album. Unlike many mash-up artists of the time who simply lay one song’s vocals over the existing instrumental parts of another, Danger Mouse painstakingly broke each Beatles song he used into pieces. He extracted as much as he could of each drum stroke and cymbal crash played by band member, Ringo Starr. He did the same with other essential instruments like guitar and bass. With these clips, he built beats of his own, tailored to the moods of each song on the Jay-Z album.
In a March 2004 interview with MTV.com, he explained his process of translating The Beatles’ vintage rock sound into a more modern rap structure.
“Taking one little Beatles’ handclap wasn’t going to do it…but if you double it up and move them away from each other, so they’re doubling up the delay, and then take of the pitch of it and throw it up in the air and make it a higher pitch.”
Even over a decade after its initial release, “The Grey Album” somehow manages to hold up better than the official Jay-Z release that it owes its origins.
With Jay-Z’s album already on the charts for a handful of months, Danger Mouse paced his album substantially better than its predecessor. Well-known singles are scattered about the track list. In a bold move, “Public Service Announcement,” a record stuffed into “The Black Album” almost as if it was an afterthought leads Mouse’s version. “Allow me to reintroduce myself,” Jay-Z raps at the song’s opening.
Most impressively, Danger Mouse found ways time and time again to blend the aesthetics of Beatles’ songs he sampled with Jay-Z’s raps, while matching the mood of each song’s official, more well-known counterpart. This practice is on full display with “99 Problems.”
The single burst into rap radio formats in April 2004 with an unusually brash Jay-Z. The oftentimes laid-back rapper enlisted the help of Rick Rubin. Danger Mouse pulls no punches in his take on the song, isolating the most punk-sounding elements of Beatles’ number, “Helter Skelter” to provide an equally heavy backdrop to Jay’s detailed narrative account about racial profiling.
Danger Mouse even replicates the sporadic signature sound of legendary beat-maker and longtime Jay-Z collaborator, Timbaland’s only offering to the album, “Dirt Off Your Shoulder.” Listening to Mouse’ Fab Four-inspired version, would leave most hip-hop fans wondering if Timbo himself was able to step into the studio to assist in turning the Lennon-McCartney-penned “Julia” into a club banger.
Danger Mouse’s “The Grey Album” led him to overnight success in a career that eventually led him to teaming up with Atlanta-based singer and rapper, Cee-Lo, to form Gnarls Barkley.
Danger Mouse’s triumph, however, did not come without controversy. Just months after “The Grey Album” hit the Internet, EMI served Danger Mouse a cease and desist order. The company holds the rights to The Beatles’ material on behalf of Capitol Records.
In response, Downhill Battle, a grassroots online activism group launched a project known as “Grey Tuesday” to spread awareness about Danger Mouse, “The Grey Album” and the sharing of artistic ideas regardless of their violations of copyrights. Danger Mouse fought further legal recourse by stating his project was only for close friends, and he would participate in no further distribution of the project after the original 3,000 CDs he pressed were gone. GreyTuesday.com, however, offered curious listeners a place to download the album and some online retailers even began selling bootlegged versions.
In a 2011 interview with BBC Radio 1 McCartney agreed that EMI’s legal reprimanding of Mouse was absurd. “I don’t mind when something like that happened with ‘The Grey Album,’ but the record company minded,” he said, “They put up a fuss, but it was like; ‘take it easy guys, it’s a tribute.’”
Jay-Z also came out in the defense of Danger Mouse’s creative license.
The legacy of this distinctive experiment in hip-hop still exists today, in a more direct and intimate form. In 2004, rap and rock fans alike would probably flip at the news that Paul McCartney was working so closely within rap music. But with Kanye West and Paul McCartney’s latest collaboration no such controversy will arise. This time, there should be no cease and desist.
