The Grey Album Producer Danger Mouse Explains How He Did It

Brian Burton’s ingenious idea to mash-up Beatles’ White Album and Jay–Z’s Black Album fell flat, in my opinion. If the definition of a music mash-up is a “composition created by blending two or more pre-recorded songs, usually by overlaying the vocal track of one song seamlessly over the instrumental track of another,” (Wikipedia.org) then what Burton created is a watered-down version of one. His deconstruction of Beatles’ instrumental and voice tracks transformed Beatles’ music to the level of being unrecognizable. Therefore, he manipulated tracks to his advantage to make the necessary pieces fit, neglecting the artistry and missing the point of a mash-up, which is to combine/mix authentic tracks to produce a brand new, original composition.

There is a long history of mash-ups in music pop culture. According to Wikipedia.org, its roots go back to dance hall culture of late-1960s/early-1970s in Jamaica.  In the mid-1970s, DJs in discos were mixing mash-ups with disco songs using loops and tape edits. So, why is it that Brian Burton is getting all the attention and more importantly, why has The Grey Album resonated with so much with his audience? My guess is that in our contemporary, tech driven culture, it is much easier to reach a very large audience through the Internet than we could have reached back in the ‘70s. Also, anyone can create a mash-up because most computers come with some kind of music editing program. We end up mass producing and purging our work out into the nebulous space of the World Wide Web.

In conclusion, I wonder if it is really feasible to combine just two specific albums to create a brand new one and make every song successful. It seems to me that Burton had an idea in his head and was very determined to see that it come to fruition, thus neglecting the artistry of a mash-up. I feel like he has gained notoriety because of the volume of his project not its quality.

1+1+1+1=1 The New Math of Mashups, by Sasha Frere-Jones

 This was a very insightful article that clearly illustrates the artistry of creating a mash-up, mash-up’s implications in our pop culture and the legal challenges of sampling copywritten music.

Frere-Jones says that anyone can create a mash-up since we find “new uses for current digital technology, a new iteration of the cause-and-effect relationship behind almost every change in pop-music aesthetics.” In other words, if we are armed with the right technology, why not morph the music you do not like into something that you do? He goes to say that we do not need a distributor because the Internet is our distributor and the bedroom is our record label.

Unfortunately, a moral dilemma arises due to the freedom of the Internet and the availability of copywritten music tracks. Do we have legal rights to play around with someone else’s work and then put our own stamp on it? Is the art of mash-ups a form of piracy? In the hands of today’s tech savvy population, can piracy be avoided and can you blame people for wanting to transformed horrible junk that is put out by some artists into something that is decent and tolerable? At the end of the day, I do think that mash-ups is a form of piracy but only when someone is profiting off their creating without the approval of the artists being sampled.

Mashups take materials out of their place, put the in another place, mix them with other materials to produce a synthetic, unique, yet familiar sound. The notion of “displacing” and “Familiarity” play key roles in the aesthetics of mashups. The instant feeling of awe, hearing the vocal from your favorite song on top of some other song and its sense of duality that invites our mind to go back and forth between what we have in mind from our previous experience with the songs turn mashups into a very strong and expressive medium that resonates on various levels with the audience.

Mashup music movement -in my opinion- is significantly “alternative” and lends itself well to ignoring the authority. Bypassing legal and proprietary filters, mashup artists are constantly attempting to improve, augment and synthesize the music that is already out there.

Not only mashup combines “sounds” from two sources, but from a social perspective, it is bridging the audience as well. In this context, mashups can be very powerful tools for social commentary as well. A full-fledged synthetic creative medium.

I think Mashup is a very interesting thing to improve and develop people’s imagination and creativity. It is just like remix different style’s music, into a new and more interesting and creative song. In Mashup, nothing is impossible, only the unexpected.

Personally, a Mashup I used most is an app on iphone, it is called ’Around me’.

In this app, the API/content provider is Google map. This app can mark various location information on Google map. You could choose different kinds of places you want to know where is it. If you choose‘BANK AROUND ME’. It will show all the banks around you on the Google Map.

So I think Mashup is really useful and it has a lot of possibilities。

But, Mashups encounter a lot of challenges too.

Despite the technical challenges, I don’t want to talk about technical challenges, because technology will be developed day by day. The challenge I care about and curious about is the‘Social Challenges’。

 As Merrill said in his article, ‘’Unwitting content providers (targets of screen scraping), and even content providers might determine that their content is being used in a manner that they do not approve of’’.

Because Mashup is open, everyone can do it and make it. We could even make it in our spare time and it gives us a lot of fun. But screen scraping, such behavior may be more or less involved in part of the content providers copyright issues. So I think, if it is possible that there is a good balance, that could let Mashup keep open, there are still a lot of people to participate in it, but at the same time it will protect content providers copyright. That’s what I am thinking about.

I believe, there’s a limit to how much you can modify and tweak your raw material, how far you can take it, and still be able to call your work “Mashup”. Judging by common sense, I would say that as long as one does not modify the raw materials as much as they bear no resemblance to their original, the outcome can still be titled “Mashup” and not contradict the definition.

I do not believe that DJ Danger Mouse remains loyal to The Beatles’s unique voice and melody enough for the Grey album to be called a legitimate “Mashup”. Despite the fact that personally I enjoyed listening to this album, there were many points here and there that The Beatles’s sounds could be replaced with other musical bits from other artists and it would not change a thing.

In my opinion, the artist should choose her raw materials carefully enough for them to be as noninterchangeable as possible. That is mostly not the case about “The Grey Album”

However, I do like Jay-Z’s A Capella release. It is an open attitude that encourages sharing with an open source spirit.

A crazy example I found of a mashup from the blog www.fffound.com!

\”Superstition\” and \”Sad but True\”

The response of The Grey Album and 1+1+1+1=1

First I was so confused about Mashups. I was not sure I caught the point of its real meaning. When I finished reading The Grey Album Producer Danger Mouse Explains How He Did It and 1+1+1+1=1, I got an intuitionistic cognition of it.

These two articles are using music production as examples. They are both explaining the original meaning of Mushups: describing songs that mashed two different styles of music into one song.

For me, to get easier to understand what Mashup is, I would say it is a kind of remixing and rebuilding. But you do not need to ruin the original stuff; you should use them in your own way, deconstruct it. Here, many people may argue that Mashup in music producing seems to be kinda stealing. So back to these two articles, The Grey Album Producer Danger Mouse Explains How He Did It and 1+1+1+1+1=1, generally, they mentioned the published copyright. Simply, just considering about the commercial competition of Mashup music album production, it can act as a big role to balance the value of the New Album —- the Mashup Album. It is incontestable to say Mashup brings many benefits to support and prove the existence of it self. Actually, Mashup is fresh, but not the freshest thing, it has been here for some years. I have to say it is still improving. Obviously, if Mashup is simply remix two songs together, it might be died out. However, it has expanded to other field like the Web application. (Talked in another article.)

For The Grey Album Producer Danger Mouse Explains How He Did it, this article was talking about the specific steps of processing The Black and The White together. It is talked more about technique. Although, occasionally compelling, “The Grey Album” is not a great example of a Mashup, because the musical bed is processed so radically that its source is sometimes not clear. 1+1+1+1=1 was more focusing on marketing and the effects of entertainment.

Mashups find new uses for current digital technology, a new iteration of the cause-and-effect relationship behind almost every change in pop-music aesthetics: the gear changes, and then the music does.

Additionally, these two articles both mentioned the circumstance of processing a Mashup: Burton’s so-called studio was simple and crude.  Since Mark Vidler, known professionally as Go Home Productions, explained some other benefits of digital technology to me in London not long ago: “You don’t need a distributor, because your distribution is the Internet. You don’t need a record label, because it’s your bedroom, and you don’t need a recording studio, because that’s your computer. You do it all yourself.” Mashup seems to be a real Go Home Production. You may build your own Soho with a low cost. Nevertheless, personally, I may concern the cost of absolutely necessary software: Acid Pro, an alternative to Pro Tools that retails for about $400. I do awfully agree with “Armed with free time and the right software, people are rifling through the lesser songs of pop music and, in frustration, choosing to make some of them as good as the great ones.” But is does not mean I’d like to spend $400 in the remix software for a Mashup song.

Fortunately, Mashup also describes a Web application that combines multiple services into a single application. I also did the research of Yahoo! Pipes. Many people discussed online it is really useful and easy to get understand. I got a course of studying how to build your own Yahoo! Pipes. This is much popular and par for a person to get work with Mashup, not only the product, but also the new concept.