Written by: Paul Gleason

(The photograph of John Lennon is an insert, included with the LP edition of The Beatles).

Back in 2004, Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album rolled over me like an avalanche, unstoppable and powerful.

I was working as a tutor at a small liberal arts college, and one of my students came to his session with a ripped CD in one hand and a notebook and pen in the other. An aspiring MC, he told me that his assignment for his music appreciation class was to write a paper on an album that had influenced him. He went on to explain that the album was rare – an illegal bootleg that mashed up Jay-Z’s The Black Album and The Beatles’ The Beatles (aka “The White Album”).

From our previous small talk, my student knew that I was familiar with Jay-Z (whose Black Album had come out the previous year) and that I was an all-out Beatles’ nerd (I had a picture of John Lennon in my office but not one of my wife and kids!).

He slipped the ripped CD – Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album – into my computer disc drive and asked me to listen to the album with him track-by-track, so that I could identify The Beatles’ songs over which Jay rapped. I did so, with diligence and ease – and Danger Mouse’s record kicked my ass so hard that my student gave me his ripped copy at the end of the session. He had plenty of others at home.

I give you this long preamble because it’s the only way I know how to introduce the drive of Charles Fairchild’s important book on The Grey Album, which is essential reading for anyone interested in the album and, more importantly, the way in which corporations – despite everything you hear about the democratization of the internet and the decline in revenue in the music industry – still control the way we consume music.

To quote Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus,” “I’ll say it again”: control the way we consume music.

But, before I jump into Fairchild’s argument, I need your indulgence. Let me return to that tutoring session. My student and I, although we were both familiar with downloading and sampling, didn’t think that Danger Mouse was doing anything aesthetically new or fresh. We thought he was like DJ Shadow or the bevy of other hip-hop artists we adored, from OutKast to Wu-Tang Clan, in participating in sampling culture. We didn’t even ponder why The Grey Album was illegal. And, as a teacher, I was proud that Danger Mouse was introducing a young guy, who rightly thought that Jay was one of the greatest MCs ever to walk the earth, to The Beatles. In fact, when I had the student again in my “History of Rock ‘n’ Roll” class, he asked me to burn him a copy of Revolver, so that he could rap over “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spjcPS4ekOA

So, back in 2004, my student and I were getting at the heart of Fairchild’s thesis, namely that The Grey Album has been wrongly perceived as a radical departure from and rebellion against (and, therefore, illegal departure from) the corporate-controlled music industry, which is consists of the “Big Thee” labels: Universal, Sony, and Warner.

The reality is, in Fairchild’s opinion, that The Grey Album just extends practices that disco, dub, and hip-hop had already legitimized. Indeed, how different is Danger Mouse’s record from disco DJs dating back to the early 1970s? Dub? The hip-hop sampling in records like Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, which preceded The Grey Album by 15 years?

The answer to all these questions is that there’s no difference. So why was The Grey Album such a big deal in 2004?

Fairchild’s response is that the corporations hadn’t yet learned how to police “internet file sharing.” They had to find the lawyers who could introduce the laws that could illegitimatize file sharing as “theft.”

In other words, Fairchild argues, it was all about distribution – and who had the rights to distribute music. It was all about coming up with a way in which the mall-purchased CD could become “legally” obsolete and that downloads could occur under the surveillance of the panoptic corporate system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2l-dvU9tOw

And did the corporations come out on top, winning the game after making a few minor mistakes! Now, we have iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, Facebook, and every other corporate entity that controls the way the internet allows the listener to find new music.

Let’s be honest. These are the primary – and corporate ways – that we discover music. And bands, journalists (including your reporter), and fans are given no other choice than to play this game.

And it is a game. I play it whenever I use Facebook to promote a story published at Stereo Embers Magazine. I play it whenever I ask a publicist for a band interview or for a review copy. I play it whenever I ask an artist to “repost” a Stereo Embers piece.

Radiohead, according to Fairchild, even plays the game. Just read his insightful analysis of the In Rainbows campaign, and you’ll see what I mean. Thom, Jonny, and the rest of the boys won’t come across as the integrative geniuses that you think them to be after you read what Fairchild informs you of what really went down with In Rainbows.

The upshot? Danger Mouse appears as a scapegoat of sorts – a guy whose brilliant record got caught up on the cusp of a corporate music industry that was trying to find a way to monetize (to their advantage!) internet-file sharing.

It turns out that the corporations won the day (the mega-stars still make most of the money, through touring and merchandise sales), Danger Mouse wasn’t a revolutionary artist (see Fairchild’s analysis of the music on The Grey Album), and Foucault’s panopticon is still in full effect, policing you even as you read this article.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OufRRcMwcKk

I’m just happy that I had that moment with my student a decade ago and that I can crank up The Grey Album whenever the spirit moves me.