What Did Danger Mouse Do? The Grey Album and Musical Composition in ...

[Pages:18]What Did Danger Mouse Do? The Grey Album and Musical Composition in Configurable Culture KYLE ADAMS

This article uses The Grey Album, Danger Mouse's 2004 mashup of Jay-Z's Black Album with the Beatles' "White Album," to explore the ontological status of mashups, with a focus on determining what sort of creative work a mashup is. After situating the album in relation to other types of musical borrowing, I provide brief analyses of three of its tracks and build upon recent research in configurable-music practices to argue that the album is best conceptualized as a type of musical performance.

Keywords: The Grey Album, The Black Album, the "White Album," Danger Mouse, Jay-Z, the Beatles, mashup, configurable music.

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INTRODUCTION

I n 1989 Gary Larson published The PreHistory of The Far Side, a retrospective of his groundbreaking cartoon. In a section of the book titled Mistakes--Mine and Theirs, Larson discussed a couple of curious instances when the Dayton Daily News switched the captions for The Far Side with the one for Dennis the Menace, its neighbor on the comics page. The first of these two instances had, by far, the funnier result: on the left, we see a Far Side drawing of a family of snakes sitting around the dinner table, with the youngest snake griping to his parents, "Luckily I learned to make peanut butter sandwiches or we woulda starved to death by now." On the right we see Dennis the Menace and his friend walking along eating sandwiches, while Dennis complains, "Oh brother! . . . Not hamsters again!"1

As funny as these cartoons would have been with their original captions, each one takes on a new, unexpected twist when switched with its neighbor's caption, becoming even funnier-- if a little unsavory--in the process. In his commentary, Larson agrees: "One day, back in August of 1981, someone `accidentally' switched [The Far Side and Dennis the Menace's]

I would like to thank the following people for their invaluable input in shaping this article: Nancy Nguyen-Adams, Roman Ivanovitch, Evan Mitchell, Mark Spicer, Landon Palmer, and the anonymous readers. Unfortunately, copyright issues forbid me from reproducing the cartoons here, but they can be seen at (the quality is poor, but the cartoons are legible). The fact that copyright issues prevented me from reprinting the cartoons in an article about The Grey Album, which was itself suppressed due to copyright, would have been delightfully ironic if only it had happened to someone else.

captions. What's most embarrassing about this is how immensely improved both cartoons turned out to be."2

Larson's tantalizing use of quotation marks around "accidentally" implies that the editor responsible for switching the captions may have done so deliberately. If we assume this to be the case and agree that both cartoons are improved, a number of questions emerge. What did the editor do? He/she did not come up with a concept, did not draw a cartoon, and did not compose a caption. Rather, he/she recognized that using a preexisting caption for a different preexisting drawing had new humorous possibilities. But if both cartoons are actually improved, does the editor deserve credit for the improvement? After all, his/her raw material consisted entirely of the work of other people. But if the editor doesn't get credit, who would? Who could legitimately be called the "creator" of the new comics? What kind of a creative work is caption switching, or is it creative at all?

Just as an investigation of these two cartoons problematizes the concept of creation in the visual arts, the mashup, a musical genre unique to the twenty-first century, problematizes the concept of musical composition.3 Created when a producer combines two or more recordings into a new track, a mashup typically serves to highlight the musical ingenuity of its creator. But it is hard to determine what sort of an artwork a mashup is, and what its producer has done; the producer did not compose any of the source material, and yet the creators of that source

Larson (1989, 127). In calling the mashup a genre "unique to the twenty-first century," I am

not ignoring the genre's many antecedents from the 1980s and 90s (some of which will be discussed below). But the word "mashup" itself came into common parlance in the early twenty-first century, and the technology to create mashups became much more sophisticated and widely available then, ensuring their proliferation.

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material did not compose the mashup. Mashup producers, and their creations, therefore embody Theodor Adorno's views on popular music in ways that he would never have expected. Concerning popular music, Adorno writes: "The beginning of the chorus is replaceable by the beginning of innumerable other choruses. The interrelationship among the elements or the relationship of the elements to the whole would be unaffected. . . . In popular music, position is absolute. Every detail is substitutable; it serves its function only as a cog in a machine."4 As David Gunkel points out, "mashup artists seem to repurpose Adorno's indictment as if it were an instruction manual."5 This is true: mashup artists pride themselves on the discovery of unexpected possibilities for the types of substitutions that Adorno described.

Mashups have received quite a bit of scholarly attention in the past decade or so, most often from cultural or legal perspectives. The most recent musicological and music-theoretical studies were undertaken by Ragnhild Br?vig-Hanssen and Paul Harkins, who dissect the types of humor inherent in mashups, and Christine Boone, who presents a typology of the genre.6 The goal of this article is different: to try to determine what sort of creative act a mashup is. I will examine the issues of mashup creation and authorship through the lens of the most celebrated and notorious mashup to date: Danger Mouse's The Grey Album. After providing some background and context for mashups in general, I will situate the album in relation to other traditions of musical borrowing and follow up by providing brief analyses of three of its tracks. Finally, building on recent research on musical production and configurable culture, I will propose that the album is most accurately conceptualized not as a musical composition but as a musical performance.7

MASHUPS AND THE GREY ALBUM: BACKGROUND

The songs used in a mashup are often as dissimilar as possible, thereby generating the greatest possible amount of cognitive dissonance and demonstrating the producer's aural skills, technical skills, and sense of humor. A famous example is "Smells like Booty" by "Destiny's Child vs. Nirvana," created when two brothers calling themselves Soulwax combined Nirvana's "Smells like Teen Spirit" (1991) with Destiny's Child's "Bootylicious" (2001).8 Mashups like this one are usually classified as

Adorno (1941, 18). Gunkel (2008, 500). See Br?vig-Hanssen and Harkins (2011) and Boone (2013). Throughout this article, I have adopted Sinnreich's (2010, 70) terms "con-

figurable music" and "configurable culture" to describe the practices of sample-based musicians (and others). Like Sinnreich, I prefer this term to the more commonly used "remix culture," since a remix is only one type of configurable music. This mashup can be heard at ? v=GXGSBpMHcpA. With no "official" version having been released, the title of this mashup is sometimes styled "Smells like Teen Booty" or "Smells like Bootylicious." Soulwax also performs and records under the name 2 Many DJ's. Coincidentally, "Bootylicious" itself consists of

"A + B," and, as is the case with "Smells like Booty," they are usually credited to the two artists whose works have been combined.9 The defining characteristic of an A + B mashup is that some aspect--usually the lyrics or the music--of one or both of the source tracks is left unaltered, except for adjustments in pitch and/or tempo. Boone locates A + B mashups in her "basic" category and identifies three other types: the "cover" mashup, the "paint palette" mashup, and the "megamix" mashup.10 I would add that all these are types of musical mashups; producers like Pogo have also begun to create video mashups, which juxtapose film images in the way that mashups juxtapose musical samples.

Mashups are often intended to be humorous, and the reason behind their humor can be understood by analogy to another Far Side drawing. In a cartoon from 1984, Larson draws a large, schoolmarmish woman looking out her window and encouraging her dog to race home, with cries of "Here, Fifi! C'mon! . . . Faster, Fifi!"; while the dog enthusiastically bounds toward the front door. Unfortunately for Fifi, the dog door has been boarded shut from the inside, indicating that Fifi is about to meet a pretty unpleasant end.11

According to Gary Larson, this cartoon was "the first to score really big in the negative-reaction department," mainly from readers who felt that it encouraged animal cruelty.12 But in Larson's defense of the cartoon, he says:

The key element in any attempt at humor is conflict. Our brain is suddenly jolted into trying to accept something that is unacceptable. The punch line of a joke is the part that conflicts with the first part, thereby surprising us and throwing our synapses into some kind of fire drill. . . . In any humorous vehicle, this conflict, whether subtle or blunt, is mandatory. . . . In this cartoon there's an immediate conflict; the reader is asked to accept the unacceptable--that the dog's own master (the standard, heavy-set, matriarchal-type woman) is setting up her own dog for an unpleasant experience.13

Larson describes what John Covach has called the "incongruity theory" of humor, following the work of John Morreall: "Our laughter is the result of some perceived incongruity between concept and object."14 Discussing the music of Spinal Tap, Covach argues that incongruity among musical styles creates the "amused response" in the listener. Br?vig-Hanssen and Harkins also independently identify this incongruity as the main technique at play in humorous mashups, noting that "the combination of musical congruity and contextual incongruity is

sampled material, using for its main groove the opening guitar riff from Stevie Nicks's "Edge of Seventeen" (1981). See Marks (2010, ?14). In a practice parallel to that of classical music recordings, the creator of an A + B mashup is not given authorial credit for it, a point to which I will return later. See Boone (2013). This cartoon can be seen at Konradius5/media/Gary%20Larson%20Comics/FasterFifi.jpg.html. Larson (1989, 160). Ibid. (160). Covach (1995, 400).

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crucial, especially if the aim of a mash-up is to create a humorous effect."15

"Smells like Booty" is therefore funny for the same reason that the "Fifi" cartoon is. Its incongruity arises from forcing the audience to accept the unacceptable: that Nirvana and Destiny's Child have recorded a song together. Given that Nirvana built a career on the refusal to conform to the mainstream music and style trends that characterize groups like Destiny's Child, mashing two of their songs together creates an impossible collaboration. Nirvana's song "Smells like Teen Spirit" was intended as an anthem for the disenfranchised youth that formed the core of the grunge movement in the early 1990s, while "Bootylicious" was created for the type of top-forty radio play that the grunge audience deliberately rejected. According to Michael Serazio, Dave Grohl, the former drummer for Nirvana, heard "Smells like Booty" and reportedly called it "wretched."16 In Serazio's words, "what perhaps irks Grohl is that `Teen Spirit' has been stripped of its suicidal self-seriousness and Nirvana's sound is now enmeshed with precisely the sort of glossy pop that the band so despised."17 He continues by generalizing that mashups often "deconstruct (and mock) the arbitrarily divided and cherished pop canon,"18 just as Larson's "Fifi" cartoon deconstructs the stereotype of the matronly dog owner. But this deconstruction and its resulting humor are made possible largely because of the remarkable degree of structural correspondence between the two songs being mashed up: "Smells like Teen Spirit" and "Bootylicious" share all of the following characteristics:

1. Each song has an eight-bar verse, an eight-bar prechorus, and a four-bar bridge linking the chorus to the verse. (The chorus for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is twice as long as that of "Bootylicious," so the producers cut it in half for the mashup.)

2. Each song features some sort of intensification in the prechorus: "Teen Spirit" adds distortion and Kurt Cobain's repetitive drone on the word "hello"; in "Bootylicious," the melodic center moves a fifth higher and the number of syllables per beat increases.19

3. Both songs are in minor, and the melody from the verses of "Bootylicious," which generally emphasizes a note of the tonic triad on every other downbeat, is well suited to the two-bar repetitions of ^1?^4?^3?^6 from the bass line of "Teen Spirit."20

See Br?vig-Hanssen and Harkins (2011, 89). I should note that, unlike me, they consider "Smells like Booty" to be a particularly unsuccessful mashup.

Serazio (2008, 83). Ibid. Ibid. Summach (2011, ?3) identifies these and other "momentum-building

devices" as defining features of prechoruses, which were first described in detail by Everett (2009, 146?47). Although this is true for the most part, there are occasional conflicts between the "Bootylicious" melody and the "Teen Spirit" bass line. The original bass line for "Bootylicious" is ^1?4^?1^?^7, with the last bass note

In addition to its intrinsic humor, the mashup of these two songs also makes an implicit statement about popular music in general--that perhaps for all of their differences in values, Nirvana and Destiny's Child express themselves using many of the same formal types, harmonic progressions, and melodic gestures. Wayne Marshall noted a similar effect in "Oops! . . . The Real Slim Shady Did It Again," an A + B mashup of Eminem's "The Real Slim Shady" with Britney Spears's "Oops! I Did It Again."21 Here, in contrast to "Smells like Booty," the lyrics are provided by the "serious" artist and the music is a product of "glossy pop." Marshall writes:

"Oops! . . .The Real Slim Shady Did It Again" offers more than simple pleasures. The aural equivalence it poses presents a powerfully audible critique of Eminem's self-conscious posturing, especially in "The Real Slim Shady," as an anti-teenybopper. As the rapper appears to follow formulaic bridges running up to big schmaltzy choruses, the alignment underscores the utter lack of distance between Eminem and one of his favorite targets. Drawing attention to the pre-fab pop-ness of Eminem's song craft, the mashup essentially calls him on his bluff. . . . It seems to wink in its deft marriage of the rapper and his pop doppelg?nger.22

Both "Smells like Booty" and "Oops!" serve the same rhetorical function: to deflate the overblown self-regard of "outsider" artists by recontextualizing them into a "mainstream" setting, pointing up the many similarities between their work and the work of the types of artists against whom they ostensibly rebel. Kembrew McLeod, like Serazio, sees an even larger purpose in this, characterizing mashups as an indictment not only of the artists, but of record labels, critics, and even fans:

With mashups, one of the underlying motivations of bedroom computer composers is to undermine, disrupt, and displace the arbitrary hierarchies of taste that rule pop music. . . . By blurring high and low pop culture, these mashups demolish the elitist pop-cultural hierarchy that rock critics and music-collecting snobs perpetuate.23

McLeod's use of the terms "arbitrary" and "elitist" reflects a common trope in discussions of mashups, in which nonconformist artists create mashups as a way of undermining "big media."24 Likewise, his caricature of independent producers as "bedroom computer composers" ( pace Boone, who also refers to "the realm of mashups [as] a place for amateurs who compose

frequently supporting ^5 or ^7 in the melody. This melody creates frequent dissonances when heard above the bass ^6 of "Teen Spirit." Nirvana's bass line thus exports some of its passionate urgency into Destiny's Child's lyrics through these melody/bass clashes in the second bar. My thanks to one of the anonymous readers for pointing this out. This mashup can be heard at . It is unclear who created it: as Marshall notes, mashups tend not to have single, or reliable, sites for download, and a Google search for this particular mashup turns up several different links to YouTube and elsewhere. Marshall (2010, 309). McLeod (2005, 84). This trope unfortunately permeates the otherwise informative documentary Rip! A Remix Manifesto (Gaylor 2009).

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in their bedrooms")25 reinforces the romanticized notions of populism espoused by many mashup artists and fans.26 As Simon Reynolds puts it, musicians who sample are "framed in punk-like terms (rebellious, iconoclastic) . . . and the whole area of property rights, including copyright, [is seen as] intrinsically conservative, aligned with corporations and land-owners."27 Although mashups do have a resistive quality (see my discussion of "99 Problems" below), McLeod may be overstating the case. There is no indication that mashup artists would reject fame, wealth, and mainstream acceptance if they were offered to them; in fact, The Grey Album, the subject of the present article, led directly to its producer's mainstream success.28 In short, mashup artists might happily join the ?lite pop-culture pantheon that McLeod vilifies. But he is correct that audiences, especially those who style themselves "indie" or "underground," rejoice in the perceived dismantling of the highbrow popculture edifice, whether intentional or not.

Toward the end of 2003, the producer Brian Burton, who goes by the name Danger Mouse, created what has become the most famous mashup to date.29 He combined the lyrics from The Black Album (2003) by rapper Jay-Z with music from the "White Album" (1968), the common name for the self-titled album by the Beatles, to form The Grey Album. The Grey Album contains no original sounds by Burton; all of the lyrics are by Jay-Z and all of the music is by the Beatles. The songs on The Grey Album are not traditional A + B mashups in the model of "Smells like Booty," in which two songs are played simultaneously. Rather, The Grey Album disassembles and reassembles parts of various Beatles songs into a new beat, while leaving Jay-Z's lyrics untouched.30

See Boone (2013, ?12.3). Sinnreich (2010) goes to great lengths to deconstruct the concept of "some

kid in his bedroom," noting the high levels of artistry and professionalism among configurable-music practitioners as described by the practitioners themselves (see Chapter 5). Nevertheless, in the documentary mentioned above (n. 24), Girl Talk (Greg Gillis) is portrayed as just such a "bedroom composer," with the filmmaker positioning Gillis on the couch creating a mashup, his girlfriend sleeping beside him (Gaylor [2009], 9:03?11:06). Reynolds (2011, 314). Elsewhere, McLeod (2005, 86?87) himself notes that this is not uncommon. Record labels themselves have tried to profit from mashups, either by hiring producers to release "official" mashups (a practice also described by Frere-Jones [2013]), or by creating a "lawyer's mashup," when two cover bands are brought in to record the mashup components together. In this article, when discussing the artist as author or producer, I will typically use his/her real name; thus, this article sometimes refers to "Brian Burton," the producer who created The Grey Album, and sometimes to "Danger Mouse," the pseudonym under which Burton distributed it. I refer to "Jay-Z" rather than "Shawn Carter" in discussing the lyrics from The Black Album, since they are performed by Jay-Z, Carter's alter ego and stage name. I refer to "the Beatles" to avoid having to list the names of each band member. For this reason, Boone (2013) classifies The Grey Album as a "paint palette" mashup (?8.1), a term coined by Lessig (2008, 70), although he uses it to describe the music of Girl Talk, which Boone classifies in her "megamix mashup" category. The "paint palette" mashup is distinguished from a typical A + B mashup in that it employs more than two songs, and uses sound "like paint on a palette, [b]ut [whose] paint has been scratched off

The Grey Album problematizes some fundamental issues about musical composition in the twenty-first century: like the cartoon "mashup" between the Far Side and Dennis the Menace, it raises the question of who did what. The Beatles wrote all of the music but none of the lyrics. Jay-Z wrote all of the lyrics but none of the music. And Danger Mouse, who produced the album, wrote no lyrics or music. Thus, the question at the title of this article: In creating The Grey Album, what exactly did Danger Mouse do?

THE GREY ALBUM AND TRADITIONS OF MUSICAL BORROWING

The answer to this question seems straightforward: Danger Mouse was a composer creating a composition, albeit an unorthodox one pieced together from existing sources. But the procedure by which the album took shape, and the way in which it differs from other mashups, cast it in a much different light. Burton's process was described in some detail by MTV's Corey Moss:

The first thing the producer did was listen to The Black Album a cappella and measure the amount of beats per minute for each track. . . . Next, he scoured all 30 songs on the "White Album," listening for every strike of a drum or cymbal when no other instruments or voices were in the mix. Most were single sounds, which he would later put together to make beats. . . . After pulling every possible Ringo Starr part from the "White Album," Burton repeated the process for guitar and bass samples. Once he felt there was a workable amount of sounds banked, he started with a Jay-Z vocal track and built the music around it.31

Having produced and distributed around 3,000 copies of the album, Burton was issued a cease and desist letter by EMI records, which owns the master recordings to the "White Album."32 Burton complied, but online distribution of the album was already out of his control, and fans were downloading copies by the thousands (as of this writing, the album-- and, naturally, an "unauthorized" remastering of it--is still available for download from any number of websites). As a result, The Grey Album is probably the only officially nonexistent album to get positive reviews from the New Yorker, the Village Voice, the Boston Globe, Rolling Stone, and Entertainment Weekly, with the latter characterizing it as the best album of 2004.33 As it stands, however, the album remains illegal.

other paintings" (Lessig [2008], quoted in Boone [2013, ?8.1]). I agree with this characterization, but view The Grey Album as a subcategory of "A + B" mashups, in that it combines two works, albeit albums rather than individual songs. Thus, I will treat it as such. Moss (2004, ?12?16). This reaction against The Grey Album parallels the suppression of John Oswald's Plunderphonics album by the Canadian Recording Industry Association fifteen years earlier, as described by Holm-Hudson (1997, 21). The most significant event in the history of this album occurred on 24 February 2004, when the activist website organized Grey Tuesday, a self-described "day of coordinated electronic civil disobedience" in which the organizers encouraged as many websites as possible to make the album available for free download in protest of the music industry. Even before Grey Tuesday, however, Greenman (2004) describes the public's anticipation of the release of the album as "hysteria" (see ?5?6).

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Burton's creative process can help situate The Grey Album in relation to other traditions of musical borrowing. The use of borrowed material to create new musical works has a centuriesold history, stretching back through Charles Ives and J. S. Bach to fourteenth-century macaronic motets and medieval organum. What changed in the twentieth century was the use of recordings themselves to create derivative works.34 To varying degrees, Aram Sinnreich, Theodore Gracyk, and Albin Zak locate the ultimate origins of configurable music practices in the musique concr?te experiments of postwar avant-garde composers, Pierre Schaeffer in particular.35 At first blush, The Grey Album would seem to be part of this tradition of musical collages, like John Lennon's own "Revolution 9" that opens the final side of the "White Album," or those of Berio, Rochberg, and Zimmermann, recently discussed in this journal by Catherine Losada.36 But there is a crucial difference: most collages, musical or visual, either depend on or contain some original input by their creators. The musical collages of Ives, for example, are composed against a backdrop of original music; discussing these, Jennifer Iverson notes that the preexisting, structurally coherent work underlying the collage functions "somewhat like a canvas, while the added tunes and fragments function like the found objects."37 Among the configurablemusic descendants of Ives's collage works are the "Lessons" of Double Dee and Steinski (1983) or the various "Mega Mixx" tracks from 2 Live Crew, in which a continuous beat forms a backdrop for a collage of other musical and vocal samples. As with a visual collage, choices about the size and shape of this musical canvas will directly impact the form, and audience perception, of the final product. All these collages therefore bear the unmistakable stamp of the composers who created them; their musical meaning, like that of most Western music, lies in their musical content.

On the other hand, mashups by DJ Earworm (Jordan Roseman) and Girl Talk (Greg Gillis), while not containing any original material, chop up their musical sources into such small fragments that the cleverness and intricacy of their combination become the locus of creativity in the composition. Roseman, for example, delights in stringing together vocal fragments from multiple musical sources into a new textual narrative.38 This narrative--the words of Roseman himself as

It is worth noting here that the differences between sound recordings and musical compositions--and the fact that different copyrights are held for each--led to the numerous lawsuits over digital sampling in hip-hop, of which Bridgeport Music vs. Dimension Films is perhaps the most significant. See Cronin (n.d.) and McLeod and Dicola (2011, 139?47) for a description of the case and some of its ramifications.

See Sinnreich (2010), Gracyk (1996), and Zak (2001). In the popularmusic sphere, Spicer (2009, 351) cites the Beatles as the first pop/rock group "to employ bricolage as a consistent feature of their compositional practice."

See Losada (2009). Iverson (2011, ?6). DJ Earworm is best known for his annual "United States of Pop" mashups,

in which he rearranges pieces of the top twenty-five songs from a given year into a text that describes that year's zeitgeist. (Incidentally, I am here using

sung by popular musicians of the day--is the point of the mashup, just as the third movement of Berio's Sinfonia represents the composer's own voice as partly expressed through the works of Mahler, Ravel, and others. Likewise, Gillis, while not engaging in the creation of a new text, strives to compress as many samples as possible into a single track--his 2008 album Feed the Animals contains, by one count, 322 samples in 14 tracks. Like Roseman's mashups, the point of Gillis's work is the new composition arising from the collage of samples. Gillis's samples function like the individual pictures in a photomosaic: while listeners may enjoy recognizing and identifying individual ones, such identification is not necessary for enjoying the overall work, or appreciating the considerable skill that went into its creation. The value of the samples, like the photomosaic pictures, lies in the new artwork they can produce when combined and perceived in just the right way. Had Gillis's samples been performed live in a studio, they would no doubt have lost some of the excitement generated from hearing their original timbres, but the value of Gillis's creative act--the recognition that all the disparate samples could combine into a unified track --would remain intact. Gillis and Roseman, like Ives and Berio, are composers creating compositions; what distinguishes their work from traditional musical composition is the use of recycled material.

An A + B mashup is different. The tracks on The Grey Album, just like "Smells like Booty" and "Oops! . . . The Real Slim Shady Did It Again," depend on the timbres of the original artists to produce the types of commentary described above. The value of these mashups is in the emergent meaning arising from their juxtapositions.39 As Sinnreich argues, "the true foreground of a mash-up isn't A or B or even C, it's the relationship and recontextualization between the constituent elements that identifies a work and makes it memorable--in other words, the juxtaposition itself functions as the foreground."40 In "Smells like Booty," nothing new is created from Nirvana's music; in fact, the only modification to it is that the vocals have been removed. For "Bootylicious," the vocals remain largely intact while the music is removed. The mashup "works" to the extent that the listener identifies and responds to the timbres of both source tracks (not just their pitches and rhythms), understands the cultural underpinnings of each one, and appreciates the humor behind the violation of aesthetic codes that the mashup represents. An A + B mashup is thus a communicative vehicle for its creator, whose voice is not a composer's, but an interpreter's. A + B mashup artists do not speak through the borrowed material; they speak about the borrowed material.

The compositional process of The Grey Album distinguishes it even further from a standard A + B mashup (and accounts for

the words "text" and "textual" literally, to refer only to the words in a song.) Throughout this article, I will often refer to these juxtapositions as "recontextualizations," meaning the placement of lyrics or music (or both) into a different affective context than was originally intended. Sinnreich (2010, 163; italics in the original).

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Boone's classification of it as a "paint palette" mashup). While Burton did limit himself to two musical sources, he did not, as noted above, use any of the "White Album" tracks in their entirety; instead, he cut them into pieces, created new beats, and looped those to create a new groove for each track. If The Grey Album has a direct antecedent, it is the Plunderphonic album of John Oswald (1989), in which, to use Simon Reynolds's characterization, Oswald "put a famous song . . . through the digital mincer and then surgically reconstruct[ed] it into a convulsive and grotesquely misshapen doppelganger of itself."41 "Dab," for example, chops up and reassembles Michael Jackson's "Bad," using only enough of Jackson's voice at the beginning to ensure the original song's recognizability but otherwise pulverizing the song into a sputtering jumble of sound. This type of manipulation of the musical material suggests that Plunderphonic and The Grey Album occupy a different aesthetic niche than mashups like "Smells like Booty" or "Oops! . . . The Real Slim Shady Did It Again," whose ironic humor was made possible only because the producers maintained the structural integrity of each track. Nevertheless, what all these mashups have in common is that their producers express themselves through manipulation of preexisting music. As Kevin Holm-Hudson has said about Plunderphonic, "the context of a quotation can impose a form of commentary upon the original."42 Thus, in "Dab," the voice that emerges is unmistakably Oswald's, not Jackson's; the track functions as a commentary on Jackson's music. Similarly, Burton's fragmentation of the "White Album" to create new beats injects his personal voice into the mashup, as the following three analyses will show.

" PROBLEMS": MASHUP AS PERFORMATIVE UTTERANCE

"99 Problems" is the best-known song from Jay-Z's Black Album. The song deals with the difficulties faced by young black men in the late twentieth century, a standard topic in rap music of the time. For The Grey Album, Burton set Jay-Z's lyrics to "Helter Skelter," recognizing that its insistent, forward-thrusting bass line and potent drum sounds would effectively complement Jay-Z's defiant lyrics, even for listeners unfamiliar with either of the original songs.43 This affective correspondence between the two tracks raises the question of why the Grey Album version is necessary, since neither Jay-Z's lyrics nor the Beatles' music has been recontextualized. The new

Reynolds (2011, 317). Holm-Hudson (1997, 18). The song can be heard at ?

v=DtfEYuZhDjo. Given my own lack of familiarity with the "White Album" before hearing The Grey Album, I disagree with Kembrew McLeod's statement that mashups "depend on the recognizability of the original" (2005, 86). Recognition of the original tracks certainly enhances enjoyment of a mashup, and is probably necessary to enjoy mashups like "Smells like Booty," but is not a universal requirement for the appreciation of mashups.

version of "99 Problems" contains none of the humorous or ironic gestures for which mashup artists typically strive. Intense, angry lyrics have been refitted with different intense, angry music. So why create this mashup at all?

One answer lies in the production of the original song. The Black Album version of "99 Problems" was produced by Rick Rubin, a legendary name in popular music, and the first producer to self-consciously combine rap music with rock and roll (in the 1986 hit "Walk this Way," by Run-D.M.C. and Aerosmith).44 The mashup of "99 Problems" can thus be seen as a regicidal act, a throwing down of the gauntlet in which Brian Burton claims that he can beat Rubin at his own crossover game. Such an interpretation of "99 Problems" posits the mashup as a kind of twenty-first-century cutting contest. Cutting contests were informal competitions held between jazz musicians in the early- to mid-1940s, in which competitors strove to play tunes faster, or with more figuration, or in more remote keys than their peers.45 This practice already has several descendants in modern rap music, most notably in turntable battles, rap battles, and the more informal "cypher," or streetcorner freestyle rap competition. As Reginald Thomas put it, "just as the jazz artist improvises, so does the rap artist `freestyle.'"46 Mashups, too, can be seen as direct descendants of jazz practices: a preexisting "tune" (in this case, an entire song by a different artist) is subjected to all sorts of modifications in order to demonstrate the technical skill of the individual producing it. Just as early jazz musicians would bend a tune to their will in order to showcase their own musical abilities, Burton has taken Jay-Z's "tune" and bent it to his will in order to stake his claim in the world of hip-hop production. In the process, he engaged in the same kind of one-upmanship toward Rick Rubin that jazz musicians engaged in toward one another in cutting contests.47

Viewed this way, The Grey Album represents Burton's rather clever way of negotiating between the forces that help establish underground credibility and those that engender mainstream success. The making of The Grey Album has the character of a performative utterance, following the original definition by J. L. Austin as an utterance about which "we should say that [its author] is doing something rather than merely saying

Typical of the critics' responses to Rubin's work is MTV's dubbing him "the most important producer of the last 20 years" (Moss 2004b, ?4).

See Giddins and Deveaux (2009), who describe some of the common practices of cutting contests: performers could "count off a tune at a ridiculously fast tempo or play it in an unfamiliar key. Sometimes tunes would modulate up a half step with every chorus. . . . Favorite tunes like `I Got Rhythm' would be recast with blisteringly different harmonic substitutions" (297).

Thomas (2001, 166). A prime example of this one-upmanship: at 3:43 in "99 Problems," Jay-Z

exclaims to Rubin, "You're crazy for this one, Rick!" In the original version, this sounds like nothing more than a celebration of the track and its production; but in The Grey Album version, the words seem to offer Rubin a self-satisfied nose-thumbing on Burton's behalf.

WHAT DID DANGER MOUSE DO? THE GREY ALBUM AND MUSICAL COMPOSITION IN CONFIGURABLE CULTURE

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something."48 The performative utterance in this case is one of resistance against the perceived hegemony of major record labels.49 As Gracyk pointed out well before mashups even existed, "in an age when multinational corporations can get the American Congress to consider a new tax on blank cassette tapes to compensate them for copyright payments lost in home taping, home taping takes on a resistive air."50 The very act of reproducing the work of another artist, let alone reshaping and reconfiguring it, can be seen as a form of resistance against those who control the original artwork, especially when "those in control" are perceived not to be the artists who created it, but the faceless corporations that claim ownership over it: if "99 Problems" is an act of friendly competition against Rick Rubin, it is also an act of resistance against EMI. By combining the most iconic albums from the Beatles and Jay-Z, and by doing so with skill and finesse, Burton was not only staking a claim in the world of music production, but also publicly asserting his own authority over musical material and his willingness to disregard conventions of copyright and ownership in service of his art.

One can only imagine that Burton knew, or at least hoped, such a successful and high-quality mashup would attract the attention of the very same record labels that the album challenged. And indeed, The Grey Album is often credited with providing Danger Mouse his entry into mainstream music production. He also had to have been well aware of the consequences of distributing the album online, and free: the album would naturally reach the four corners of the earth before EMI could take any action; furthermore, this dissemination would ensure that he could graciously comply with said action and avoid legal problems. Thus, in producing and distributing his work, Burton was able to gain an enormous amount of subcultural capital--by mashing up two classic albums and making the result available to anyone who wanted it--while at the same time showing superficial deference to the record label whose catalogue he had plundered. In that sense, The Grey Album is a performative act of resistance without any negative consequences; it established Danger Mouse's credibility in both the "underground" and "mainstream" communities simultaneously.

"WHAT MORE CAN I SAY?": MASHUP AS REINTERPRETATION

The preceding discussion extrapolated characteristics of Burton's work in order to generalize about the performative nature of The Grey Album, through its blatant challenge to the esteemed production values of Rick Rubin and its defiance of the recording industry as a whole. But many of the same claims have been made about mashups and mashup culture in general (recall McLeod's characterization of mashups quoted earlier). Danger Mouse vaulted himself to stardom and secured his reputation by mashing up music with more cultural significance than most mashups, and by doing so more creatively than many other mashup artists do; but at heart, "99 Problems" is simply an extreme example of the kind of statement that any A + B mashup is capable of making.

By contrast, "What More Can I Say?" bears a much more personal imprint. In this case, the affect of the mashup differs radically from that of the Black Album version. In a style closer to that of a traditional A + B mashup, Burton has used the Beatles' music to reinterpret the lyrics according to his own emotional reaction to them, regardless of Jay-Z's original intentions.51 The original opening of the song is presented as Example 1.52

The original beat, produced by the Buchanans, interprets the title as a boast.53 The song opens with a monologue from the 2000 movie Gladiator, after which the music enters with a flourish. The simultaneous entrance of all the musical layers and the rapper gives the song a forceful, emphatic quality, and the unified rhythm in the first half-bar of the beat allows it to aggressively assert its identity as an equal participant in the track, rather than as accompaniment to Jay-Z's lyrics. The sampled brass and strings evoke images of 1970s-era Las Vegas, and one can imagine the rapper in the middle of a boxing ring, arms held out to the sides in the classic pose of both victory and challenge.54 The rhetorical meaning of "What More Can I Say?" in this context therefore seems to be its implication that nothing more needs to be said, as if the rapper is bragging, I am the greatest. What more can I say?

The Grey Album version of the song is strikingly different.55 The opening of this version is presented as Example 2.56 Burton chose to set the same lyrics to the Beatles' poignant and

See Austin (1962, 222). Austin's classic example of a performative utterance is "I now pronounce you man and wife." His notion of performativity has been most famously expanded by Judith Butler (1993 and 1997) in her work on gender studies and politics.

It has almost become a clich? of popular culture that musicians, especially rappers and rock musicians, adopt poses of personal rebellion against "mainstream" culture while simultaneously enjoying the benefits of majorlabel distribution. This phenomenon is discussed at length throughout Gracyk (1996), especially in Chapter 7, "Romanticizing Rock Music," where he notes that "rock musicians have always had crass commercial motives, playing dance music to mostly teen audiences. Their lyrics featured . . . little in the way of overt rebellion and, prior to 1965, almost nothing in the way of personal expression" (193).

Gracyk (1996, 210).

Gracyk (2013) has argued that redefining a song's words, or the context in which they are understood, is one of the characteristic markers of popularsong performance: "Authorial intentions guide but do not necessarily limit the pragmatic meanings associated with a song's incarnations as a structure-in-use, namely, its performances" (30).

The original song can be heard at ? v=UIJjK3IV3E0.

My use of the word "beat" here follows standard hip-hop practice, where the term encompasses all of the nonvocal layers; it is synonymous with "accompaniment."

The sampled music in this version was taken from MFSB's 1973 song "Something for Nothing."

The song can be heard at ? v=O3VVykEt37c.

For simplicity's sake, my transcription omits the barely audible strummed acoustic guitar.

MUSIC THEORY SPECTRUM ()

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EXAMPLE . "What More Can I Say?" (from The Black Album), 0:31?37.

introspective "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." This version does not begin with the simultaneous entrance of the rapper and six instrumental layers, but rather with a gentler build-up of instruments and voice.57 The lyrics enter in the middle of an eight-bar piano solo, so that the rapper begins in medias res, rather than presenting himself triumphantly with the entrance of the instruments as he did on The Black Album. Moreover, the beat is much more expansive; instead of a fanfare-like flourish that repeats every two bars, this version uses a lament-type bass line and an eight-bar basic beat, four times as long as that of the original. Although the tempo remains the same, the increased length of the sample in the Grey Album version, along with its slower harmonic rhythm, has a decelerating effect on the song, allowing the lyrics to occupy a larger expressive space. The doleful beat of this version interprets the title question as a valediction, a statement meaning not that nothing more needs to be said, but that nothing more can be said. If you haven't understood me by now, the rapper seems to ask, what more can I say?58

The differences between the two versions are especially pointed at the end of the song. As the final verse ends, the rapper finishes his last line and can be heard walking out of the studio, the door closing behind him. Immediately after he finishes, there is one more iteration of the song's hook. The two

The entrances in this version are therefore akin to the accumulative processes described by Spicer (2004).

The valedictory interpretation presented here is supported by the history of the song. The Black Album was intended to be Jay-Z's final album, his swan song. In her 2004 Boston Globe review of the album, Ren?e Graham noted that "with Jay-Z's introspective lyrics about leaving the rap game he has dominated for so long . . . the song's ringing guitars almost sound like church bells marking the end of a glorious era" (?9).

different versions of the ending are presented as Example 3. In the original version (Example 3[a]), the harmonic progression underlying the hook, from E minor to A major, is open-ended. It could be interpreted as i?IV in E minor or E Dorian, both of which are common enough in popular music, but either way, the harmony sounds as though it begins on tonic and moves away, leaving the listener to mentally finish the progression. The sung hook is identical to most of the musical layers in both pitch and rhythm, a feature that infuses it with their triumphant quality. This is consistent with the boastful affect of the original: at the end, the music smugly invites the listener to imagine what more could be said, while remaining confident that any voices challenging Jay-Z's authority have been rendered mute. The Grey Album version (Example 3[b]), by contrast, has an air of finality. The vocal melody, untethered from its instrumental support, hovers around upper and lower neighbors to A, unquestionably the tonic in this version, before finally coming to rest on it, after which the Beatles' music gradually fades out. The complete lack of musical support for the melody in this version throws into relief the fact that it has no melodic or rhythmic relationship to any of the sampled music. This, too, is consistent with the affect of this version of the song, as the ending music settles into a kind of soft resignation that anything the rapper might say has already been said, as though he is asking himself, not the audience, the title question.

"CHANGE CLOTHES": MASHUP AS SYNTHESIS

The Grey Album's version of "Change Clothes" carries the most appropriate title, in that it differs the most markedly from the

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