The Grey Album and Musical Composition in Configurable Culture

What Did Danger Mouse Do? The Grey Album and Musical Composition in Configurable Culture 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. Downloaded from captions. What’s most embarrassing about this is how http://mts.oxfordjournals.org/ immensely improved both cartoons turned out to be.”2 n 1989 Gary Larson published The PreHistory of The Far Larson’s tantalizing use of quotation marks around “acci- Side, a retrospective of his groundbreaking cartoon. In a dentally” implies that the editor responsible for switching the I section of the book titled Mistakes—Mine and Theirs, captions may have done so deliberately. If we assume this to be Larson discussed a couple of curious instances when the Dayton the case and agree that both cartoons are improved, a number of Daily News switched the captions for The Far Side with the one questions emerge. What did the editor do? He/she did not for Dennis the Menace, its neighbor on the comics page. The come up with a concept, did not draw a cartoon, and did not first of these two instances had, by far, the funnier result: on the compose a caption. Rather, he/she recognized that using a by guest on September 23, 2015 left, we see a Far Side drawing of a family of snakes sitting preexisting caption for a different preexisting drawing had new around the dinner table, with the youngest snake griping to his humorous possibilities. But if both cartoons are actually parents, “Luckily I learned to make peanut butter sandwiches improved, does the editor deserve credit for the improvement? or we woulda starved to death by now.” On the right we see After all, his/her raw material consisted entirely of the work of Dennis the Menace and his friend walking along eating sand- other people. But if the editor doesn’t get credit, who would? wiches, while Dennis complains, “Oh brother! . Not ham- Who could legitimately be called the “creator” of the new sters again!”1 comics? What kind of a creative work is caption switching, or is As funny as these cartoons would have been with their origi- it creative at all? nal captions, each one takes on a new, unexpected twist when Just as an investigation of these two cartoons problematizes switched with its neighbor’s caption, becoming even funnier— the concept of creation in the visual arts, the mashup, a musical if a little unsavory—in the process. In his commentary, Larson genre unique to the twenty-first century, problematizes the agrees: “One day, back in August of 1981, someone ‘acci- concept of musical composition.3 Created when a producer dentally’ switched [The Far Side and Dennis the Menace’s] 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, I would like to thank the following people for their invaluable input in and what its producer has done; the producer did not compose shaping this article: Nancy Nguyen-Adams, Roman Ivanovitch, Evan any of the source material, and yet the creators of that source 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 http://www.neatorama.com/2013/08/15/A- Larson (1989, 127). Newspaper-Accidentally-Switched-the-Captions-for-The-Far-Side-and- In calling the mashup a genre “unique to the twenty-first century,” Iam Dennis-the-Menace-Twice/ (the quality is poor, but the cartoons are not ignoring the genre’s many antecedents from the 1980s and 90s (some legible). The fact that copyright issues prevented me from reprinting the of which will be discussed below). But the word “mashup” itself came into cartoons in an article about The Grey Album, which was itself suppressed common parlance in the early twenty-first century, and the technology to due to copyright, would have been delightfully ironic if only it had hap- create mashups became much more sophisticated and widely available then, pened to someone else. ensuring their proliferation. () material did not compose the mashup. Mashup producers, and “A+B,” and, as is the case with “Smells like Booty,” they are their creations, therefore embody Theodor Adorno’s views on usually credited to the two artists whose works have been com- popular music in ways that he would never have expected. Con- bined.9 The defining characteristic of an A + B mashup is that cerning popular music, Adorno writes: “The beginning of the some aspect—usually the lyrics or the music—of one or both of chorus is replaceable by the beginning of innumerable other the source tracks is left unaltered, except for adjustments in choruses. The interrelationship among the elements or the rela- pitch and/or tempo. Boone locates A + B mashups in her tionship of the elements to the whole would be unaffected. “basic” category and identifies three other types: the “cover” In popular music, position is absolute. Every detail is substitut- mashup, the “paint palette” mashup, and the “megamix” able; it serves its function only as a cog in a machine.”4 As mashup.10 I would add that all these are types of musical David Gunkel points out, “mashup artists seem to repurpose mashups; producers like Pogo have also begun to create video Adorno’s indictment as if it were an instruction manual.”5 This mashups, which juxtapose film images in the way that mashups is true: mashup artists pride themselves on the discovery of juxtapose musical samples. unexpected possibilities for the types of substitutions that Mashups are often intended to be humorous, and the reason Adorno described. behind their humor can be understood by analogy to another Mashups have received quite a bit of scholarly attention in Far Side drawing. In a cartoon from 1984, Larson draws a large, the past decade or so, most often from cultural or legal perspec- schoolmarmish woman looking out her window and encourag- “ fi ’ tives. The most recent musicological and music-theoretical ing her dog to race home, with cries of Here, Fi !Cmon! . Downloaded from studies were undertaken by Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen and Paul Faster, Fifi!”; while the dog enthusiastically bounds toward the Harkins, who dissect the types of humor inherent in mashups, front door. Unfortunately for Fifi, the dog door has been and Christine Boone, who presents a typology of the genre.6 boarded shut from the inside, indicating that Fifi is about to The goal of this article is different: to try to determine what sort meet a pretty unpleasant end.11 “ fi of creative act a mashup is. I will examine the issues of mashup According to Gary Larson, this cartoon was the rst to http://mts.oxfordjournals.org/ creation and authorship through the lens of the most celebrated score really big in the negative-reaction department,” mainly and notorious mashup to date: Danger Mouse’s The Grey from readers who felt that it encouraged animal cruelty.12 But Album. After providing some background and context for in Larson’s defense of the cartoon, he says: mashups in general, I will situate the album in relation to other fl traditions of musical borrowing and follow up by providing The key element in any attempt at humor is con ict. Our brain is suddenly jolted into trying to accept something that is unaccept- brief analyses of three of its tracks. Finally, building on recent fl fi able. The punch line of a joke is the part that con icts with the research on musical production and con gurable culture, I will first part, thereby surprising us and throwing our synapses into propose that the album is most accurately conceptualized not as some kind of fire drill. In any humorous vehicle, this conflict, by guest on September 23, 2015 7 a musical composition but as a musical performance. whether subtle or blunt, is mandatory. In this cartoon there’s an immediate conflict; the reader is asked to accept the unaccept- able—that the dog’s own master (the standard, heavy-set, matri- : archal-type woman) is setting up her own dog for an unpleasant experience.13 The songs used in a mashup are often as dissimilar as possible, “ thereby generating the greatest possible amount of cognitive Larson describes what John Covach has called the incongruity ” “ dissonance and demonstrating the producer’s aural skills, tech- theory of humor, following the work of John Morreall: Our nical skills, and sense of humor. A famous example is “Smells laughter is the result of some perceived incongruity between ”14 like Booty” by “Destiny’s Child vs. Nirvana,” created when two concept and object. Discussing the music of Spinal Tap, brothers calling themselves Soulwax combined Nirvana’s Covach argues that incongruity among musical styles creates the “ ” “Smells like Teen Spirit” (1991) with Destiny’s Child’s “Boot- amused response in the listener. Brøvig-Hanssen and ylicious” (2001).8 Mashups like this one are usually classified as Harkins also independently identify this incongruity as the main technique at play in humorous mashups, noting that “the Adorno (1941, 18).

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