Grey Tuesday brings mashups to the mainstream
The phenomenon known as the mashup can be traced back through at least several decades of radio DJs and record producers manipulating or remixing one or more existing recordings to create a new musical work.With the rise of digitally distributed music and of inexpensive sophisticated production technologies in the late 1990s however the phenomenon was radically democratized and a trend was borna trend that reached its highest level of public awareness with the event known as Grey Tuesday which took place on this day in 2004.Grey Tuesday was a well-organized one-day effort to distribute from as many Internet sources as possible a controversial work called The Grey Album created by the American DJProducer Brian Joseph Burton aka Danger Mouse.Burton lived in England in the early 2000s at a time when the mashup phenomenon exploded in the UK thanks to a radio program called The Remix which invited its listeners to send in their own examples of what was also known as bastard pop.
Among the most popular and creatively successful mashups introduced on The Remix were Freelance Hellraisers A Stroke of Genie-us (2001) which paired Christina Aguileras vocal from Genie in a Bottle with the instrumental track of The Strokes Hard To Explain and Go Home Productions brilliantly titled Ray of Gob (2003) which combined Madonnas Ray of Light with the Sex Pistols Pretty Vacant and God Save the Queen.Burtons inspiration for The Grey Album came in December 2003 while listening to the Beatles White Album shortly after hearing an a capella version of Jay-Zs Black Album.Over an intense two-week period Burton constructed a brand-new version of the Jay-Z album layered over beats and samples lifted from the Beatles.Burton created The Grey Album only to share among his friends so he never even tried to clear the rights to the Beatles samples it contained.
Even as The Grey Album caught on as a word-of-mouth Internet phenomenon Burtons only concern was a creative one Im just worried whether Jay-Z will like it or whether Paul and Ringo will like it.It is fair to say that EMI the owners of the rights to the Beatles master recordings did not.The intensity of their legal response to The Grey Album however did not sit well with vocal Internet opponents of the music industry and Grey Tuesday was organized in protest.On that day hundreds of websites organized to offer Burtons album for free download in defiance of EMI.
That protest and its attendant publicity combined to make The Grey Album the most widely distributed mashup album in history.
