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). combination of musical congruity and contextual incongruity is  Gunkel (2008, 500).  See Brøvig-Hanssen and Harkins (2011) and Boone (2013). sampled material, using for its main groove the opening guitar riff from  Throughout this article, I have adopted Sinnreich’s (2010, 70) terms “con- Stevie Nicks’s “Edge of Seventeen” (1981). See Marks (2010, §14). figurable music” and “configurable culture” to describe the practices of  In a practice parallel to that of classical music recordings, the creator of an sample-based musicians (and others). Like Sinnreich, I prefer this term to A + B mashup is not given authorial credit for it, a point to which I will the more commonly used “remix culture,” since a remix is only one type of return later. configurable music.  See Boone (2013).  This mashup can be heard at https://www.youtube.com/watch?  This cartoon can be seen at http://s674.photobucket.com/user/ v=GXGSBpMHcpA. With no “official” version having been released, the Konradius5/media/Gary%20Larson%20Comics/FasterFifi.jpg.html. title of this mashup is sometimes styled “Smells like Teen Booty” or  Larson (1989, 160). “Smells like Bootylicious.” Soulwax also performs and records under the  Ibid. (160). name 2 Many DJ’s. Coincidentally, “Bootylicious” itself consists of  Covach (1995, 400).     ?          

crucial, especially if the aim of a mash-up is to create a humor- In addition to its intrinsic humor, the mashup of these two ous effect.”15 songs also makes an implicit statement about popular music in “Smells like Booty” is therefore funny for the same reason general—that perhaps for all of their differences in values, that the “Fifi” cartoon is. Its incongruity arises from forcing the Nirvana and Destiny’s Child express themselves using many of audience to accept the unacceptable: that Nirvana and Destiny’s the same formal types, harmonic progressions, and melodic ges- Child have recorded a song together. Given that Nirvana built a tures. Wayne Marshall noted a similar effect in “Oops! . . . The career on the refusal to conform to the mainstream music and Real Slim Shady Did It Again,” an A + B mashup of Eminem’s style trends that characterize groups like Destiny’s Child, “The Real Slim Shady” with Britney Spears’s “Oops! I Did It mashing two of their songs together creates an impossible col- Again.”21 Here, in contrast to “Smells like Booty,” the lyrics are laboration. Nirvana’s song “Smells like Teen Spirit” was provided by the “serious” artist and the music is a product intended as an anthem for the disenfranchised youth that of “glossy pop.” Marshall writes: formed the core of the grunge movement in the early 1990s, “ ” “ ” Oops! . . .The Real Slim Shady Did It Again offers more than while Bootylicious was created for the type of top-forty radio simple pleasures. The aural equivalence it poses presents a power- play that the grunge audience deliberately rejected. According fully audible critique of Eminem’sself-consciousposturing,espe- to Michael Serazio, Dave Grohl, the former drummer for cially in “The Real Slim Shady,” as an anti-teenybopper. As the Nirvana, heard “Smells like Booty” and reportedly called it rapper appears to follow formulaic bridges running up to big “ ”16 ’ “

wretched. In Serazio s words, what perhaps irks Grohl is schmaltzy choruses, the alignment underscores the utter lack of Downloaded from that ‘Teen Spirit’ has been stripped of its suicidal self-serious- distance between Eminem and one of his favorite targets. Drawing ness and Nirvana’s sound is now enmeshed with precisely the attention to the pre-fab pop-ness of Eminem’s song craft, the sort of glossy pop that the band so despised.”17 He continues by mashup essentially calls him on his bluff. . . . It seems to wink in 22 generalizing that mashups often “deconstruct (and mock) the its deft marriage of the rapper and his pop doppelgänger. ”18 ’ arbitrarily divided and cherished pop canon, just as Larson s Both “Smells like Booty” and “Oops!” serve the same rhetorical http://mts.oxfordjournals.org/ “ fi” Fi cartoon deconstructs the stereotype of the matronly dog function: to deflate the overblown self-regard of “outsider” owner. But this deconstruction and its resulting humor are artists by recontextualizing them into a “mainstream” setting, made possible largely because of the remarkable degree of struc- pointing up the many similarities between their work and the tural correspondence between the two songs being mashed up: work of the types of artists against whom they ostensibly rebel. “ ” “ ” Smells like Teen Spirit and Bootylicious share all of the fol- Kembrew McLeod, like Serazio, sees an even larger purpose in lowing characteristics: this, characterizing mashups as an indictment not only of the artists, but of record labels, critics, and even fans: 1. Each song has an eight-bar verse, an eight-bar prechorus, by guest on September 23, 2015 and a four-bar bridge linking the chorus to the verse. (The With mashups, one of the underlying motivations of bedroom chorus for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is twice as long as that computer composers is to undermine, disrupt, and displace the of “Bootylicious,” so the producers cut it in half for the arbitrary hierarchies of taste that rule pop music. . . . By blurring mashup.) high and low pop culture, these mashups demolish the elitist pop-cultural hierarchy that rock critics and music-collecting 2. Each song features some sort of intensification in the pre- snobs perpetuate.23 chorus: “Teen Spirit” adds distortion and Kurt Cobain’s repetitive drone on the word “hello”;in“Bootylicious,” the McLeod’s use of the terms “arbitrary” and “elitist” reflects a melodic center moves a fifth higher and the number of syl- common trope in discussions of mashups, in which noncon- lables per beat increases.19 formist artists create mashups as a way of undermining “big 3. Both songs are in minor, and the melody from the verses of media.”24 Likewise, his caricature of independent producers as “Bootylicious,” which generally emphasizes a note of the “bedroom computer composers” (pace Boone, who also refers to tonic triad on every other downbeat, is well suited to the “the realm of mashups [as] a place for amateurs who compose ^ ^ ^ ^ two-bar repetitions of 1–4–3–6 from the bass line of “Teen Spirit.”20 ^ ^ frequently supporting 5or♭7 in the melody. This melody creates frequent ^  See Brøvig-Hanssen and Harkins (2011, 89). I should note that, unlike dissonances when heard above the bass 6of“Teen Spirit.” Nirvana’s bass me, they consider “Smells like Booty” to be a particularly unsuccessful line thus exports some of its passionate urgency into Destiny’s Child’s mashup. lyrics through these melody/bass clashes in the second bar. My thanks to  Serazio (2008, 83). one of the anonymous readers for pointing this out.  Ibid.  This mashup can be heard at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blRjrSv-  Ibid. qAY. It is unclear who created it: as Marshall notes, mashups tend not to  Summach (2011, §3) identifies these and other “momentum-building have single, or reliable, sites for download, and a Google search for this par- devices” as defining features of prechoruses, which were first described in ticular mashup turns up several different links to YouTube and elsewhere. detail by Everett (2009, 146–47).  Marshall (2010, 309).  Although this is true for the most part, there are occasional conflicts  McLeod (2005, 84). between the “Bootylicious” melody and the “Teen Spirit” bass line. The  This trope unfortunately permeates the otherwise informative documentary ^ ^ ^ ^ original bass line for “Bootylicious” is 1–4–1–♭7, with the last bass note Rip! A Remix Manifesto (Gaylor 2009).      ()

in their bedrooms”)25 reinforces the romanticized notions of The Grey Album problematizes some fundamental issues about populism espoused by many mashup artists and fans.26 As musical composition in the twenty-first century: like the cartoon Simon Reynolds puts it, musicians who sample are “framed in “mashup” between the Far Side and Dennis the Menace,itraises punk-like terms (rebellious, iconoclastic) . . . and the whole area the question of who did what. The Beatles wrote all of the music of property rights, including copyright, [is seen as] intrinsically but none of the lyrics. Jay-Z wrote all of the lyrics but none of the conservative, aligned with corporations and land-owners.”27 music.AndDangerMouse,whoproducedthealbum,wroteno Although mashups do have a resistive quality (see my discussion lyrics or music. Thus, the question at the title of this article: In of “99 Problems” below), McLeod may be overstating the case. creating The Grey Album,whatexactlydidDangerMousedo? 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 élite pop-culture pan- The answer to this question seems straightforward: Danger theon that McLeod vilifies. But he is correct that audiences, Mouse was a composer creating a composition, albeit an unortho- especially those who style themselves “indie” or “underground,” dox one pieced together from existing sources. But the procedure rejoice in the perceived dismantling of the highbrow pop- by which the album took shape, and the way in which it differs fi ’

culture edi ce, whether intentional or not. from other mashups, cast it in a much different light. Burton s Downloaded from Toward the end of 2003, the producer Brian Burton, who process was described in some detail by MTV’s Corey Moss: goes by the name Danger Mouse, created what has become the fi 29 The rst thing the producer did was listen to The Black Album a most famous mashup to date. He combined the lyrics from The cappella and measure the amount of beats per minute for each “ Black Album (2003) by rapper Jay-Z with music from the White track. . . . Next, he scoured all 30 songs on the “White Album,” ”

Album (1968), the common name for the self-titled album by listening for every strike of a drum or cymbal when no other http://mts.oxfordjournals.org/ the Beatles, to form The Grey Album. The Grey Album contains no instruments or voices were in the mix. Most were single sounds, original sounds by Burton; all of the lyrics are by Jay-Z and all of which he would later put together to make beats. . . . After the music is by the Beatles. The songs on The Grey Album are not pulling every possible Ringo Starr part from the “White Album,” traditional A + B mashups in the model of “Smells like Booty,” in Burton repeated the process for guitar and bass samples. Once he felt there was a workable amount of sounds banked, he started which two songs are played simultaneously. Rather, The Grey 31 Album disassembles and reassembles parts of various Beatles with a Jay-Z vocal track and built the music around it. songs into a new beat, while leaving Jay-Z’s lyrics untouched.30 Having produced and distributed around 3,000 copies of the

album, Burton was issued a cease and desist letter by EMI by guest on September 23, 2015 “  See Boone (2013, §12.3). records, which owns the master recordings to the White ”32  Sinnreich (2010) goes to great lengths to deconstruct the concept of “some Album. Burton complied, but online distribution of the kid in his bedroom,” noting the high levels of artistry and professionalism album was already out of his control, and fans were download- among configurable-music practitioners as described by the practitioners ing copies by the thousands (as of this writing, the album— themselves (see Chapter 5). Nevertheless, in the documentary mentioned and, naturally, an “unauthorized” remastering of it—is still “ above (n. 24), Girl Talk (Greg Gillis) is portrayed as just such a bedroom available for download from any number of websites). As a composer,” with the filmmaker positioning Gillis on the couch creating a result, The Grey Album is probably the only officially nonexistent mashup, his girlfriend sleeping beside him (Gaylor [2009], 9:03–11:06).  Reynolds (2011, 314). album to get positive reviews from the New Yorker, the Village  Elsewhere, McLeod (2005,86–87) himself notes that this is not uncom- Voice, the Boston Globe, Rolling Stone, and Entertainment mon. Record labels themselves have tried to profit from mashups, either by Weekly, with the latter characterizing it as the best album of hiring producers to release “official” mashups (a practice also described by 2004.33 As it stands, however, the album remains illegal. Frere-Jones [2013]), or by creating a “lawyer’s mashup,” when two cover bands are brought in to record the mashup components together. other paintings” (Lessig [2008], quoted in Boone [2013, §8.1]). I agree  In this article, when discussing the artist as author or producer, I will typi- with this characterization, but view The Grey Album as a subcategory of cally use his/her real name; thus, this article sometimes refers to “Brian “A+B” mashups, in that it combines two works, albeit albums rather than Burton,” the producer who created The Grey Album, and sometimes to individual songs. Thus, I will treat it as such. “Danger Mouse,” the pseudonym under which Burton distributed it. I  Moss (2004, §12–16). refer to “Jay-Z” rather than “Shawn Carter” in discussing the lyrics from  This reaction against The Grey Album parallels the suppression of John The Black Album, since they are performed by Jay-Z, Carter’s alter ego and Oswald’s Plunderphonics album by the Canadian Recording Industry Asso- stage name. I refer to “the Beatles” to avoid having to list the names of each ciation fifteen years earlier, as described by Holm-Hudson (1997, 21). band member.  The most significant event in the history of this album occurred on 24 Feb-  For this reason, Boone (2013) classifies The Grey Album as a “paint palette” ruary 2004, when the activist website downhillbattle.org organized Grey mashup (§8.1), a term coined by Lessig (2008, 70), although he uses it to Tuesday, a self-described “day of coordinated electronic civil disobedience” describe the music of Girl Talk, which Boone classifies in her “megamix in which the organizers encouraged as many websites as possible to make mashup” category. The “paint palette” mashup is distinguished from a the album available for free download in protest of the music industry. typical A + B mashup in that it employs more than two songs, and uses Even before Grey Tuesday, however, Greenman (2004) describes the sound “like paint on a palette, [b]ut [whose] paint has been scratched off public’s anticipation of the release of the album as “hysteria” (see §5–6).     ?          

Burton’s creative process can help situate The Grey Album in sung by popular musicians of the day—is the point of the relation to other traditions of musical borrowing. The use of mashup, just as the third movement of Berio’s Sinfonia repre- borrowed material to create new musical works has a centuries- sents the composer’s own voice as partly expressed through the old history, stretching back through Charles Ives and J. S. Bach works of Mahler, Ravel, and others. Likewise, Gillis, while not to fourteenth-century macaronic motets and medieval engaging in the creation of a new text, strives to compress as organum. What changed in the twentieth century was the use many samples as possible into a single track—his 2008 album of recordings themselves to create derivative works.34 To Feed the Animals contains, by one count, 322 samples in 14 varying degrees, Aram Sinnreich, Theodore Gracyk, and Albin tracks. Like Roseman’s mashups, the point of Gillis’s work is Zak locate the ultimate origins of configurable music practices the new composition arising from the collage of samples. in the musique concrète experiments of postwar avant-garde com- Gillis’s samples function like the individual pictures in a photo- posers, Pierre Schaeffer in particular.35 At first blush, The Grey mosaic: while listeners may enjoy recognizing and identifying Album would seem to be part of this tradition of musical col- individual ones, such identification is not necessary for enjoying lages, like John Lennon’sown“Revolution 9” that opens the the overall work, or appreciating the considerable skill that went final side of the “White Album,” or those of Berio, Rochberg, into its creation. The value of the samples, like the photomosaic and Zimmermann, recently discussed in this journal by Cather- pictures, lies in the new artwork they can produce when com- ine Losada.36 But there is a crucial difference: most collages, bined and perceived in just the right way. Had Gillis’s samples

musical or visual, either depend on or contain some original been performed live in a studio, they would no doubt have lost Downloaded from input by their creators. The musical collages of Ives, for some of the excitement generated from hearing their original example, are composed against a backdrop of original music; timbres, but the value of Gillis’s creative act—the recognition discussing these, Jennifer Iverson notes that the preexisting, that all the disparate samples could combine into a unified track structurally coherent work underlying the collage functions —would remain intact. Gillis and Roseman, like Ives and Berio, “

somewhat like a canvas, while the added tunes and fragments are composers creating compositions; what distinguishes their http://mts.oxfordjournals.org/ function like the found objects.”37 Among the configurable- work from traditional musical composition is the use of recycled music descendants of Ives’s collage works are the “Lessons” of material. Double Dee and Steinski (1983) or the various “Mega Mixx” An A + B mashup is different. The tracks on The Grey tracks from 2 Live Crew, in which a continuous beat forms a Album, just like “Smells like Booty” and “Oops! . . . The Real backdrop for a collage of other musical and vocal samples. As Slim Shady Did It Again,” depend on the timbres of the origi- with a visual collage, choices about the size and shape of this nal artists to produce the types of commentary described above. musical canvas will directly impact the form, and audience per- The value of these mashups is in the emergent meaning arising fi 39 “ ception, of the nal product. All these collages therefore bear from their juxtapositions. As Sinnreich argues, the true fore- by guest on September 23, 2015 the unmistakable stamp of the composers who created them; ground of a mash-up isn’tAorBorevenC,it’s the relation- their musical meaning, like that of most Western music, lies in ship and recontextualization between the constituent elements their musical content. that identifies a work and makes it memorable—in other words, On the other hand, mashups by DJ Earworm (Jordan the juxtaposition itself functions as the foreground.”40 In “Smells Roseman) and Girl Talk (Greg Gillis), while not containing like Booty,” nothing new is created from Nirvana’s music; in any original material, chop up their musical sources into such fact, the only modification to it is that the vocals have been small fragments that the cleverness and intricacy of their combi- removed. For “Bootylicious,” the vocals remain largely intact nation become the locus of creativity in the composition. while the music is removed. The mashup “works” to the extent Roseman, for example, delights in stringing together vocal that the listener identifies and responds to the timbres of both fragments from multiple musical sources into a new textual source tracks (not just their pitches and rhythms), understands narrative.38 This narrative—the words of Roseman himself as the cultural underpinnings of each one, and appreciates the humor behind the violation of aesthetic codes that the mashup  It is worth noting here that the differences between sound recordings and represents. An A + B mashup is thus a communicative vehicle — musical compositions and the fact that different copyrights are held for for its creator, whose voice is not a composer’s, but an interpret- each—led to the numerous lawsuits over digital sampling in hip-hop, of er’s. A + B mashup artists do not speak through the borrowed which Bridgeport Music vs. Dimension Films is perhaps the most significant. See Cronin (n.d.) and McLeod and Dicola (2011, 139–47) for a descrip- material; they speak about the borrowed material. tion of the case and some of its ramifications. The compositional process of The Grey Album distinguishes  See Sinnreich (2010), Gracyk (1996), and Zak (2001). In the popular- it even further from a standard A + B mashup (and accounts for music sphere, Spicer (2009, 351) cites the Beatles as the first pop/rock group “to employ bricolage as a consistent feature of their compositional practice.” the words “text” and “textual” literally, to refer only to the words in a  See Losada (2009). song.)  Iverson (2011, §6).  Throughout this article, I will often refer to these juxtapositions as “recon-  DJ Earworm is best known for his annual “United States of Pop” mashups, textualizations,” meaning the placement of lyrics or music (or both) into a in which he rearranges pieces of the top twenty-five songs from a given year different affective context than was originally intended. into a text that describes that year’s zeitgeist. (Incidentally, I am here using  Sinnreich (2010, 163; italics in the original).      ()

Boone’s classification of it as a “paint palette” mashup). While version of “99 Problems” contains none of the humorous or Burton did limit himself to two musical sources, he did not, as ironic gestures for which mashup artists typically strive. Intense, noted above, use any of the “White Album” tracks in their angry lyrics have been refitted with different intense, angry entirety; instead, he cut them into pieces, created new beats, music. So why create this mashup at all? and looped those to create a new groove for each track. If The One answer lies in the production of the original song. The Grey Album has a direct antecedent, it is the Plunderphonic Black Album version of “99 Problems” was produced by Rick album of John Oswald (1989), in which, to use Simon Rey- Rubin, a legendary name in popular music, and the first pro- nolds’s characterization, Oswald “put a famous song . . . ducer to self-consciously combine rap music with rock and roll through the digital mincer and then surgically reconstruct[ed] it (in the 1986 hit “Walk this Way,” by Run-D.M.C. and Aero- into a convulsive and grotesquely misshapen doppelganger of smith).44 The mashup of “99 Problems” can thus be seen as a itself.”41 “Dab,” for example, chops up and reassembles regicidal act, a throwing down of the gauntlet in which Brian Michael Jackson’s “Bad,” using only enough of Jackson’s voice Burton claims that he can beat Rubin at his own crossover at the beginning to ensure the original song’s recognizability game. Such an interpretation of “99 Problems” posits the but otherwise pulverizing the song into a sputtering jumble of mashup as a kind of twenty-first-century cutting contest. sound. This type of manipulation of the musical material sug- Cutting contests were informal competitions held between jazz gests that Plunderphonic and The Grey Album occupy a different musicians in the early- to mid-1940s, in which competitors “ ” fi

aesthetic niche than mashups like Smells like Booty or strove to play tunes faster, or with more guration, or in more Downloaded from “Oops! . . . The Real Slim Shady Did It Again,” whose ironic remote keys than their peers.45 This practice already has several humor was made possible only because the producers main- descendants in modern rap music, most notably in turntable tained the structural integrity of each track. Nevertheless, what battles, rap battles, and the more informal “cypher,” or street- all these mashups have in common is that their producers corner freestyle rap competition. As Reginald Thomas put it, “ ‘

express themselves through manipulation of preexisting music. just as the jazz artist improvises, so does the rap artist free- http://mts.oxfordjournals.org/ As Kevin Holm-Hudson has said about Plunderphonic, “the style.’”46 Mashups, too, can be seen as direct descendants of context of a quotation can impose a form of commentary upon jazz practices: a preexisting “tune” (in this case, an entire song the original.”42 Thus, in “Dab,” the voice that emerges is by a different artist) is subjected to all sorts of modifications in unmistakably Oswald’s, not Jackson’s; the track functions as a order to demonstrate the technical skill of the individual pro- commentary on Jackson’s music. Similarly, Burton’s fragmen- ducing it. Just as early jazz musicians would bend a tune to their tation of the “White Album” to create new beats injects his per- will in order to showcase their own musical abilities, Burton has sonal voice into the mashup, as the following three analyses will taken Jay-Z’s “tune” and bent it to his will in order to stake his

show. claim in the world of hip-hop production. In the process, he by guest on September 23, 2015 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 “99 Problems” is the best-known song from Jay-Z’s Black underground credibility and those that engender mainstream Album. The song deals with the difficulties faced by young success. The making of The Grey Album has the character of a black men in the late twentieth century, a standard topic in rap performative utterance, following the original definition by music of the time. For The Grey Album, Burton set Jay-Z’s J. L. Austin as an utterance about which “we should say lyrics to “Helter Skelter,” recognizing that its insistent, that [its author] is doing something rather than merely saying forward-thrusting bass line and potent drum sounds would effectively complement Jay-Z’sdefiant lyrics, even for listeners unfamiliar with either of the original songs.43 This affective cor- respondence between the two tracks raises the question of why the Grey Album version is necessary, since neither Jay-Z’s lyrics  Typical of the critics’ responses to Rubin’s work is MTV’s dubbing him nor the Beatles’ music has been recontextualized. The new “the most important producer of the last 20 years” (Moss 2004b, §4).  See Giddins and Deveaux (2009), who describe some of the common prac-  Reynolds (2011, 317). tices of cutting contests: performers could “count off a tune at a ridiculously  Holm-Hudson (1997, 18). fast tempo or play it in an unfamiliar key. Sometimes tunes would modulate  The song can be heard at http://www.youtube.com/watch? up a half step with every chorus. . . . Favorite tunes like ‘I Got Rhythm’ v=DtfEYuZhDjo. Given my own lack of familiarity with the “White would be recast with blisteringly different harmonic substitutions” (297). Album” before hearing The Grey Album, I disagree with Kembrew  Thomas (2001, 166). McLeod’s statement that mashups “depend on the recognizability of the  A prime example of this one-upmanship: at 3:43 in “99 Problems,” Jay-Z original” (2005, 86). Recognition of the original tracks certainly enhances exclaims to Rubin, “You’re crazy for this one, Rick!” In the original enjoyment of a mashup, and is probably necessary to enjoy mashups like version, this sounds like nothing more than a celebration of the track and “Smells like Booty,” but is not a universal requirement for the appreciation its production; but in The Grey Album version, the words seem to offer of mashups. Rubin a self-satisfied nose-thumbing on Burton’s behalf.     ?          

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 The preceding discussion extrapolated characteristics of existed, “in an age when multinational corporations can get the Burton’s work in order to generalize about the performative American Congress to consider a new tax on blank cassette nature of The Grey Album, through its blatant challenge to the tapes to compensate them for copyright payments lost in home esteemed production values of Rick Rubin and its defiance of taping, home taping takes on a resistive air.”50 The very act of the recording industry as a whole. But many of the same claims reproducing the work of another artist, let alone reshaping and have been made about mashups and mashup culture in general reconfiguring it, can be seen as a form of resistance against (recall McLeod’s characterization of mashups quoted earlier). those who control the original artwork, especially when “those Danger Mouse vaulted himself to stardom and secured his rep- in control” are perceived not to be the artists who created it, but utation by mashing up music with more cultural significance the faceless corporations that claim ownership over it: if “99 than most mashups, and by doing so more creatively than many Problems” is an act of friendly competition against Rick Rubin, other mashup artists do; but at heart, “99 Problems” is simply it is also an act of resistance against EMI. By combining the an extreme example of the kind of statement that any A + B most iconic albums from the Beatles and Jay-Z, and by doing mashup is capable of making. so with skill and finesse, Burton was not only staking a claim in By contrast, “What More Can I Say?” bears a much more

the world of music production, but also publicly asserting his personal imprint. In this case, the affect of the mashup differs Downloaded from own authority over musical material and his willingness to radically from that of the Black Album version. In a style closer to disregard conventions of copyright and ownership in service of that of a traditional A + B mashup, Burton has used the Beatles’ his art. music to reinterpret the lyrics according to his own emotional One can only imagine that Burton knew, or at least hoped, reaction to them, regardless of Jay-Z’s original intentions.51 The 52

such a successful and high-quality mashup would attract the original opening of the song is presented as Example 1. http://mts.oxfordjournals.org/ attention of the very same record labels that the album chal- The original beat, produced by the Buchanans, interprets the lenged. And indeed, The Grey Album is often credited with title as a boast.53 The song opens with a monologue from the providing Danger Mouse his entry into mainstream music 2000 movie Gladiator, after which the music enters with a flour- production. He also had to have been well aware of the conse- ish. The simultaneous entrance of all the musical layers and the quences of distributing the album online, and free: the album rapper gives the song a forceful, emphatic quality, and the would naturally reach the four corners of the earth before unified rhythm in the first half-bar of the beat allows it to EMI could take any action; furthermore, this dissemination aggressively assert its identity as an equal participant in the ’ would ensure that he could graciously comply with said action track, rather than as accompaniment to Jay-Z s lyrics. The by guest on September 23, 2015 and avoid legal problems. Thus, in producing and distributing sampled brass and strings evoke images of 1970s-era Las Vegas, his work, Burton was able to gain an enormous amount of and one can imagine the rapper in the middle of a boxing ring, subcultural capital—by mashing up two classic albums and arms held out to the sides in the classic pose of both victory and making the result available to anyone who wanted it—while at challenge.54 The rhetorical meaning of “What More Can I the same time showing superficial deference to the record Say?” in this context therefore seems to be its implication that label whose catalogue he had plundered. In that sense, The nothing more needs to be said, as if the rapper is bragging, Iam Grey Album is a performative act of resistance without any the greatest. What more can I say? negative consequences; it established Danger Mouse’s credi- The Grey Album version of the song is strikingly different.55 bility in both the “underground” and “mainstream” communi- The opening of this version is presented as Example 2.56 ties simultaneously. Burton chose to set the same lyrics to the Beatles’ poignant and

 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 popular-  See Austin (1962, 222). Austin’s classic example of a performative utter- song performance: “Authorial intentions guide but do not necessarily limit ance is “I now pronounce you man and wife.” His notion of performativity the pragmatic meanings associated with a song’s incarnations as a struc- has been most famously expanded by Judith Butler (1993 and 1997) in her ture-in-use, namely, its performances” (30). work on gender studies and politics.  The original song can be heard at http://www.youtube.com/watch?  It has almost become a cliché of popular culture that musicians, especially v=UIJjK3IV3E0. rappers and rock musicians, adopt poses of personal rebellion against  My use of the word “beat” here follows standard hip-hop practice, where “mainstream” culture while simultaneously enjoying the benefits of major- the term encompasses all of the nonvocal layers; it is synonymous with label distribution. This phenomenon is discussed at length throughout “accompaniment.” Gracyk (1996), especially in Chapter 7, “Romanticizing Rock Music,”  The sampled music in this version was taken from MFSB’s 1973 song where he notes that “rock musicians have always had crass commercial “Something for Nothing.” motives, playing dance music to mostly teen audiences. Their lyrics  The song can be heard at http://www.youtube.com/watch? featured . . . little in the way of overt rebellion and, prior to 1965, almost v=O3VVykEt37c. nothing in the way of personal expression” (193).  For simplicity’s sake, my transcription omits the barely audible strummed  Gracyk (1996, 210). acoustic guitar.      () Downloaded from

 . “What More Can I Say?” (from The Black Album), 0:31–37. http://mts.oxfordjournals.org/

introspective “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” This version different versions of the ending are presented as Example 3.In does not begin with the simultaneous entrance of the rapper the original version (Example 3[a]), the harmonic progression and six instrumental layers, but rather with a gentler build-up of underlying the hook, from E minor to A major, is open-ended. instruments and voice.57 The lyrics enter in the middle of an It could be interpreted as i–IV in E minor or E Dorian, both of eight-bar piano solo, so that the rapper begins in medias res, which are common enough in popular music, but either way,

rather than presenting himself triumphantly with the entrance the harmony sounds as though it begins on tonic and moves by guest on September 23, 2015 of the instruments as he did on The Black Album. Moreover, the away, leaving the listener to mentally finish the progression. The beat is much more expansive; instead of a fanfare-like flourish sung hook is identical to most of the musical layers in both pitch that repeats every two bars, this version uses a lament-type bass and rhythm, a feature that infuses it with their triumphant line and an eight-bar basic beat, four times as long as that of the quality. This is consistent with the boastful affect of the original: original. Although the tempo remains the same, the increased at the end, the music smugly invites the listener to imagine what length of the sample in the Grey Album version, along with its more could be said, while remaining confident that any voices slower harmonic rhythm, has a decelerating effect on the song, challenging Jay-Z’s authority have been rendered mute. The allowing the lyrics to occupy a larger expressive space. The Grey Album version (Example 3[b]), by contrast, has an air of doleful beat of this version interprets the title question as a vale- finality. The vocal melody, untethered from its instrumental diction, a statement meaning not that nothing more needs to be support, hovers around upper and lower neighbors to A, unques- said, but that nothing more can be said. If you haven’t understood tionably the tonic in this version, before finally coming to rest on me by now, the rapper seems to ask, what more can I say?58 it, after which the Beatles’ music gradually fades out. The com- The differences between the two versions are especially plete lack of musical support for the melody in this version pointed at the end of the song. As the final verse ends, the throws into relief the fact that it has no melodic or rhythmic rela- rapper finishes his last line and can be heard walking out of the tionship to any of the sampled music. This, too, is consistent studio, the door closing behind him. Immediately after he fin- with the affect of this version of the song, as the ending music ishes, there is one more iteration of the song’s hook. The two settles into a kind of soft resignation that anything the rapper might say has already been said, as though he is asking himself,  The entrances in this version are therefore akin to the accumulative pro- not the audience, the title question. cesses 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, Renée 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 The Grey Album’s version of “Change Clothes” carries the most church bells marking the end of a glorious era” (§9). appropriate title, in that it differs the most markedly from the     ?           Downloaded from http://mts.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on September 23, 2015

 . “What More Can I Say?” (from The Grey Album), 0:00–20.

original and thus demands quite a different interpretive Clothes’ is kinda the same way.”60 Indeed, the harpsichord, approach. In “99 Problems,” Burton remixed the song with a used sardonically in “Piggies,” now takes on a brashly exuberant similar type of music to showcase his own production skill, and character quite different from the original. The basic beat for in “What More Can I Say?” he used music with a strikingly dif- the Grey Album’s version is given as Example 4(b).61 ferent affect to reinterpret the title question. But “Change One common feature of “Change Clothes” and “What Clothes” represents a reinterpretation of both Jay-Z’s lyrics and More Can I Say?” is the effect of the new accompaniment on the Beatles’ music. The beat from Jay-Z’s Black Album,pro- the pitched parts of the song. Jay-Z, like most contemporary duced by The Neptunes and given here as Example 4(a),isa rap artists, tends to incorporate a great deal of singing into his slow R & B-style groove, featuring a measure of dominant music, and “Change Clothes” includes a hook and a few other falling to a measure of tonic with each repetition.59 fragments sung by Pharell Williams. One consequence of the The Grey Album’s version of “Change Clothes” could hardly use of so much pitched material is that Burton needed to be more different. For the mashup, Burton used music from the choose samples that would complement the existing pitches, or Beatles’“Piggies,” in which a harpsichord satirizes upper- alter the samples to do so. In “What More Can I Say?” this was middle-class British life. Regarding his choice of sample, not an issue, since the sung hook already fit into the A-minor Burton said that “‘Piggies’ is a silly song to me, and ‘Change tonality of the Beatles sample. “Change Clothes,” however,

 Moss (2004, §24).  This song, and its official video, are available at http://www.youtube.com/  The song can be heard at http://www.youtube.com/watch? watch?v=j6G1uwe20wg. v=TRRuxtAchFE.      () Downloaded from

 (a). “What More Can I Say?” (from The Black Album), ending. http://mts.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on September 23, 2015

 (b). “What More Can I Say?” (from The Grey Album), ending.

required Burton to transpose the “Piggies” sample up by a tone, The reharmonizations in “Change Clothes” have much and even then, the transposed version is in B♭-major, not the stronger repercussions than those in “What More Can I Say?” F-major tonality of the original beat. This change in tonality In The Black Album, the hook (line 1 in the example) proceeds reconfigures aspects of tension and release in the pitched parts from an extended “soul dominant” to a tonic F-major-ninth of the song. Example 5 gives the three most prominent sung parts of “Change Clothes” along with a reduced version of the basic beat for each song. I have presented the vocal parts on top of one another so that they might all be easily compared to the hook), but since it was the last music heard, the B♭-major tonality is 62 instrumental parts, although they occur at different times. assumed to still be present for the listener while the hook is being sung. Also, when the hook is repeated, the rhythm and words are different  My transcription has changed two features of the beat. In the version from (“exchange numbers and go”), but I have not indicated this since the The Grey Album, the harpsichord is not actually playing during line 1 (the pitches remain the same.     ?          

 (a). Basic beat of “Change Clothes” (from The Black Album), 0:00–08. Downloaded from http://mts.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on September 23, 2015

 (b). Basic beat of “Change Clothes” (from The Grey Album), 0:18–36.

chord, so that the overall feel is one of relaxation.63 By contrast, becomes less so. Line 3 in both versions anticipates the in the Grey Album’s version, this line starts with an accented harmony of the following bar (i.e., the first bar), but in the orig- upper neighbor to the tonic B♭, and descends to a dissonant E♮. inal it leads to the more energetic dominant harmony, while in The words, which have the character of a pleasant suggestion in the mashup it confirms the return to tonic. In this line as well, the original, now take on an air of uncertainty. Line 2 in the then, the tension/relaxation relationship of the Grey Album’s original song contains a decorated F that changes from the elev- version is the opposite of what it was in the original. enth of the dominant chord to the root of the tonic chord. Its Earlier, I noted that A + B mashups often humorously change in status from dissonance to consonance propels the imagine the result of a collaboration between two very dissimilar music forward into the second bar of the groove. The same Fs artists. “Change Clothes” is different: it does unite two dissimi- in the Grey Album’s version are consonant with both the tonic lar artists, but not in order to equalize them. Rather, the whole and dominant chords, giving this line a sense of easygoing con- becomes something completely unlike the sum of its parts. The fidence actually more appropriate to the words than it was in the point of the mashup is not that “Change Clothes” and original version. Thus, in the mashed-up version, line 1, which “Piggies” are interchangeable, but that their synthesis produces was sweetly relaxing in the original, becomes more charged with a new artwork, which reinterprets many of the salient musical tension, and line 2, originally vested with forward motion, features of each of the original sources. Recall that Burton char- acterized both of the original songs as silly. This does not reflect  I have borrowed the term “soul dominant” from Spicer (2014), who ’ fi “ the intention of either of the original artists; Jay-Z s track is de nes it as a close position IV chord over scale degree 5 in the bass, ’ fl lighthearted and fun, and the Beatles is mocking and caustic. hence con ating subdominant and dominant functions . . . [which] is par- ’ ticularly prevalent within the lush, extended harmonic language of 1970s Burton s juxtaposition of the songs thus injects his own inter- soul music, hence its nickname” (2). The chord in “Change Clothes” uses pretation into each of them. The Beatles’ satirical harpsichord, IV7, rather than IV, but is functionally the same. transplanted into Jay-Z’s ode to modern fashion, seems      () Downloaded from http://mts.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on September 23, 2015

 . Sung parts of “Change Clothes,” from The Black Album (top) and The Grey Album. laughably out of place, as the lyrics celebrate an aspect of the Jay-Z’slyricswastransformed,buttheBeatles’ music retained its same high society that “Piggies” originally mocked. Conversely, original expressive content, such retention being critical to Jay-Z’s voice heard over the harpsichord sound invites the lis- Burton’s ability to use the music for interpretive purposes. This is tener to imagine the rapper “changing clothes” into the stereo- an important distinction: in traditional “A+B” mashups like typical stockings and wig that are usually associated with high “Smells like Booty”—as in “What More Can I Say?”—one track fashion in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. By fusing typically functions as a commentary on the other while remaining these two tracks, Burton created more than a joke or a social com- itself unchanged (“Smells like Booty” is a humorous commentary mentary. He interpreted each song for the listener, synthesizing on Nirvana, not Destiny’sChild).With“Change Clothes,” two tracks with disparate styles into a single track that illuminates however, Burton reveals one ability that mashup artists have that his own analysis of each one. Thus, “Change Clothes,” although has traditionally been outside the purview of performers—namely, containing no original sounds by Burton, bears his personal the ability to interpret two different works simultaneously. Burton stamp more than those of either of the original artists. has forced Jay-Z’s lyrics and the Beatles’ music each to undergo a “Change Clothes,” in fact, represents an extension of the inter- transformation at the hands of the other. pretive strategies that mashup artists typically employ. Regarding the other two mashups examined in this article: in “99 Problems,” neither the Beatles’ music nor Jay-Z’s lyrics underwent a change      in affective state; instead, as noted earlier, rebellious, defiant lyrics were intensified with the substitution of rebellious, defiant music. The brief analyses presented above serve as a marshaling of evi- In “What More Can I Say?” the emotional state represented by dence in support of my answer to the titular question of this     ?          

article. What did Danger Mouse do? He recorded his own per- communicate his interpretation of The Black Album. In this formance of Jay-Z’s Black Album. context, I conceive of The Grey Album as a performance. In each To lay the groundwork for this conception of The Grey of the three tracks discussed in the previous section, Burton Album, let us engage in a thought experiment: suppose that uses the Beatles’ music to comment on and express Jay-Z’s Brian Burton did want to perform Jay-Z’s Black Album. lyrics as he (Brian Burton) experienced them, and in one case Leaving aside practical issues such as the quality of Burton’s (“Change Clothes”) he also simultaneously comments on the voice, the availability of some music-minus-one type version of Beatles’ music. His re-creations of the songs more closely paral- the album, and so forth, the very idea poses significant aesthetic lel the sorts of manipulations of existing material traditionally challenges with regard to hip-hop culture. Chief among these is undertaken by performers than the ideas of creation ex nihilo the enormous value that rappers and producers place on origi- that are usually associated with musical composition. nality.64 Unlike rock music, rap does not have a tradition of I have used “perform” and “interpret” more or less inter- cover artists and cover bands, let alone covers of entire albums. changeably, with the implication that one of the goals of The very few rap covers that exist have substantially altered musical performance, if not the primary goal, is (re)interpreta- lyrics, as Blackstar’s cover of Slick Rick’s “Children’s Story,” tion. As Gracyk might be the first to argue, this has not neces- which retains the rhyme scheme of the original but little else; or sarily been the case with rock music, in which live performance, Snoop Lion’s (né Dogg) cover of Eric B. and Rakim’s “Paid in whether given by the original artist or by a cover band, more ” “ ’

Full, which likewise has new lyrics and a new title ( Paper d often strove to recapture the sound of the recording than to Downloaded from Up”). By and large, rap artists are extremely reluctant to interpret the work anew. In that sense, I would argue that an perform the work of others, as doing so violates one of rap’s A + B mashup like The Grey Album has more in common with most important ethical codes. the performance of Western art music than with other forms of Beyond questions of originality, though, lie questions of popular music. Just as connoisseurs of classical music cherish ’

interpretation. If Burton wanted to perform Jay-Z s album, the Artur Schnabel or Richard Goode interpretations of Bee- http://mts.oxfordjournals.org/ what sorts of interpretive tools could he use?65 Surely, they thoven piano sonatas, so aficionados of rap music appreciate The would not be the same as those available to interpreters of Grey Album as an interpretation of The Black Album, delighting Western art music. He could not add extensive melismatic in the unique, personal spin that Danger Mouse has put on Jay- ornamentation to the melody, in the way that contestants on Z’s lyrics.68 shows like American Idol do, for the obvious reason that Jay-Z’s My thought experiment above almost certainly does not lyrics were not sung in the first place. He also would not employ explain why The Grey Album was created, nor is it a convincing the same sorts of alterations that classical performers do (rubato, argument, insofar as it assumes the very thing I set out to dem- “ changes in dynamics and articulation, and so forth), as these are onstrate. But framing the question this way ( what would a by guest on September 23, 2015 typically not used by popular-music performers. Besides, audi- cover performance of a hip-hop album consist of?”) points to ences might feel that Jay-Z’s quite personal lyrics on this album some of the ways in which rethinking the way we conceptualize are best heard in the rapper’s own voice. Albin Zak points out composition and performance can help us understand The Grey that in the context of rock recordings, the “linguistic meaning Album as an instance of the latter. In particular, there are three [of song words] is associated with the affective sense of the per- fundamental lines of thinking that are problematized by config- formance that embodies them—its timbre, intonation, and urable culture, the re-evaluation of which can open up a concep- expressive qualities.”66 Zak later notes that “the sound of a par- tual space in which The Grey Album belongs to a performance ticular voice in a particular performance carries a sort of phe- genre. These are: the idea of a “performance of nothing,” the nomenological meaning that completes the sense of the distinction between materials and tools, and the distinction song.”67 In the absence of melody, the voice of the rapper between composition and performance itself. I will discuss each embodies the song itself even more so than it does in rock of these in turn. music. Perhaps another part of the reason that rappers and hip- The idea that a recorded performance can be an atemporal hop artists are so hesitant to cover others’ tracks is that to do so cobbling together of bits and pieces of source material—a “per- intrinsically alters or distorts the song’s meaning. formance of nothing”—rather than a linear realization of some Thus, wanting to perform Jay-Z’s lyrics, Burton would find sort of notated representation, contradicts many Western per- himself in the unusual position of being unable or unwilling to formance traditions, particularly those that existed before alter them in any way. It seems natural, then, that he would turn recording technology. The same classical traditions also pose an to the beat as a parameter that he might manipulate in order to obstacle to understanding a mashup like The Grey Album as a performance: if it is a performance, what is it a performance of?  Compare the extended discussion in Schloss (2004, 105–09) of the “no biting” principle, the unspoken prohibition against appropriating another producer’s samples.  This idea of The Grey Album as an interpretation also explains the point,  The following discussion hints at the crucial distinction between materials made earlier, that the name of the “composer” of an A + B mashup is typi- and tools outlined by Sinnreich (2010, 170–80), to be discussed below. cally given as “A vs. B,” not the mashup artist who created it, just as classi-  Zak (2001, 43). cal music albums are often labeled with the name of the composer and  Ibid. (108). work, with the performer being given secondary credit.      ()

Both source tracks, after all, were already performances in their entirely of material created by and plundered from others. There own right. Furthermore, it would have been impossible for is, strictly speaking, nothing original or authentic in the material Burton himself to realize this performance in real time. of a mashup. Everything—every note, every sound, every word— Popular-music audiences like to maintain the fiction that even is derived and taken from another source. The resulting remix if rock and pop musicians typically do not record actual studio might comprise an impressive number of samples . . . but none of it can be considered original in the usual sense of the word. performances, at least they are capable of performing their own For this reason, a mashup cannot be credited as the unique works from beginning to end when the situation warrants it. fi expression of an individual author/genius who creates something But this idea is often just that: a ction. Gracyk observes that out of nothing, but is a derivative and parasitic practice situated many of the most celebrated bands found themselves incapable in the recorded material of others.72 of reproducing on stage what they had created in the studio; he notes that this was the reason the Beatles stopped touring, and Although I disagree with his negatively charged characteriza- the reason that R.E.M. and Nirvana brought additional musi- tions, Gunkel is exactly right in his claim that mashups, more cians with them on tour.69 than probably any other popular genre, challenge the idea of Moreover, Zak repeatedly emphasizes that rock recordings single authorship that we have come to associate with musical have always come about as a result of collecting and stringing composition. Yet even if we acknowledge the highly collabora- together small units of recorded sound; as he puts it, “present- tive nature of typical pop/rock recordings and the indispensable

ing a transparent representation of some natural acoustic reality contributions of producers and engineers (who may not be Downloaded from was never the point.”70 He quotes Evan Eisenberg, who argues involved in the physical creation of sounds), it still makes intui- that “studio recordings . . . record nothing. Pieced together tive sense to think of all these individuals as joint composers of from bits of actual events, they construct an ideal event,” but a track, many of whom also perform it. In that context, one takes Eisenberg’s argument a step further: might envision a mashup artist as a kind of impresario, uniting

The often fragmentary instances of music making that are col- disparate artists across time and space in a recording for which http://mts.oxfordjournals.org/ lected throughout the recording are not “bits of actual he/she has provided the creative impulse. But I argue that the events”. . . they are complete events in themselves, stages in a crucial difference with The Grey Album, as with other A + B process. . . . Once recorded, they become ingredients of a work in mashups, is that Jay-Z’s lyrics are unaltered. In creating the progress. Each overdub is a step in the making—indeed, the dis- album, Burton may have been following standard practice in covery—of a work that does not yet exist, and therefore that the popular-music production, but in leaving Jay-Z’s work intact, recorded moment cannot claim to represent even in part.71 he recast himself as a performer of that work. To continue the In other words, according to Zak, studio musicians do not nor- comparison with standard practice in popular music: it is true mally begin with a conception of “the song,” recording parts of that a song does not properly exist until it is put together from by guest on September 23, 2015 it until there are enough bankable sounds to create whatever the various studio overdubs that it eventually comprises. But ’ once the song has been recorded, any realization of that song idealized version exists in its composers minds. Rather, the “ ” song takes shape through the overdubs that Zak describes, from beginning to end becomes a performance of the song, a which themselves determine the sound of the final product. linear re-enactment of the events that created it, along with any The idea that a rock recording represents a performance that interpretive additions by the performer(s). Thus it is with The Grey Album: even though Danger Mouse did not re-record Jay- has never taken place live, and some cases could never take place ’ live, is in fact more the rule than the exception (and is the Z s lyrics, or speak them himself, he still provided a new com- “ plete instantiation of each track from The Black Album, using reason why I stated above that Danger Mouse recorded a per- ’ formance” of The Black Album, rather than stating that he “per- the Beatles music as his interpretive tool. formed” The Black Album). Given that the material pieced My characterization of a recording as an interpretive tool together to form The Grey Album was extracted from existing brings up the next area of re-evaluation: the distinction between “ ” materials and tools. Sinnreich includes this as one of six binary recordings, rather than from takes of live musicians playing fi “ instruments, it might represent one further level of abstraction oppositions that de ne what he calls the modern discursive ” 73 from typical studio recording techniques. But the procedure by framework about music. As he observes, the materials/tools distinction is problematized by configurable culture in relation which it was created is the same. “ David Gunkel, no fan of mashups himself, situates the genre to Western traditions: Within the modern framework, discus- in relation to this standard modus operandi for popular-music sions of the Western classical tradition (which tends to empha- recordings: size composition over performance) treat the more abstract elements (e.g., notes and styles) as materials for the composer to In reworking the recorded material of others, the mashup chal- lenges the usual assumptions of authorship and moves away from  Gunkel (2012, 83). the romantic notion of artistic genius. [M]ashups are composed  In addition to the materials/tools distinction, and the composition/perfor- mance distinction (which will be discussed below), Sinnreich’s framework  Gracyk (1996,89–90). includes “an art as opposed to a craft; an artist as opposed to an audience;  Zak (2001, 14). an original as opposed to a copy[;] . . . [and] a figure as opposed to a  Ibid. (130). ground” (2010, 43).     ?          

work with. Discussions of popular and folk music traditions materials and tools simultaneously is much more consistent if (which place more of an emphasis on performative interpreta- one conceives of his role as a performer than as a composer. tion) often refer to the songs themselves as “material” for the Both of the preceding discussions, of course, can only take performer to work with.”74 The traditions arising from nine- place if one is willing to reevaluate the very distinction between teenth-century Western art music maintain a fairly clear divi- composer and performer, a distinction that both mirrors and sion between the materials of musical composition and the tools depends upon the materials/tools distinction just discussed. As that performers use to realize it. I enumerated a few of those Sinnreich puts it: tools above; they typically include the musical instruments used to produce sound, the physical actions needed to play those The distinction between performance and composition has become increasingly ambiguous in the age of configurable music. instruments (usually classified as “technique”), and modifica- Can composition precede expression when a DJ is juggling beats tions in volume and timing for expressive purposes. But the cre- between two vinyl platters, or dropping samples and effects into ation and notation of musical material have traditionally been Ableton Live or another software program? Does a sequencer assigned to, or credited to, composers. One does not typically constitute a score, or an instrument? What would it mean for one think of the creation of song accompaniment as being the prov- configurable musician to “cover” or “perform” the work of enance of performers. The dividing line between composition another? These concepts . . . become elusive and slippery when and performance has traditionally existed at precisely the point we try to apply them to sample-based musical practices.76

where those possessing the materials of music handed them Downloaded from fi over to those possessing the tools to realize it. Given that so much of the technology involved in con gurable Jazz was probably the first twentieth-century musical genre music can function as either material or tool, it follows that the to problematize this distinction, as performers began to appro- person employing the technology can be either composer or priate compositional materials as performative tools, via impro- performer. In fact, it would seem that some of the greatest barri- ers to reevaluating the composition/performance binary come

visatory solos. Rock music, in turn, added new items to both the http://mts.oxfordjournals.org/ set of materials and the set of tools: microphones, amplifiers, from the ways in which popular-music performance is normally and even acoustic spaces could be placed into either category. In described. In discussing whether to classify a given practice as fi configurable music, this blurring of the materials/tools distinc- composition or performance, many of the con gurable-music tion has become complete. Sinnreich frames the issue thus: practitioners that Sinnreich interviewed fell back on traditional indicators like the presence of an audience and the employment A digital file may be raw material (as a source for sampling), or a of technical virtuosity, both of which were cited as indicators of 77 tool for production (as in the case of a sample bank), or a finished performance. But even these characteristics, which many product (as a CD or MP3 sold in a store). Similarly, a computer would agree on, have their problems. Regarding the audience, by guest on September 23, 2015 itself may be used to quarry for material, to tool that material, and Sinnreich notes that a solo classical musician making a record- to distribute the finished product to a listener.75 ing in a studio is still a performer, not a composer, regardless of the fact that he/she may be one of only a handful of individuals Given this ambiguity between digital materials and tools, only present. Conversely, live “performances” of mashups by Girl context can decide which role a given piece of technology plays Talk, for example, often consist of little more than the artist in the process. Sinnreich notes that this has long been the case beginning playback of a preexisting track, then dancing, in the visual arts, relating a humorous anecdote about an art col- miming, and so forth. The presence of an audience does not lector who tried to import Brancusi’s Bird in Space and was automatically mean that that audience is witnessing anything forced to convince the authorities of the work’s status as art, like a traditional performance, nor does the lack of an audience rather than raw material, in order to avoid paying a steep import mean that a performance is not taking place. duty. The Grey Album problematizes the distinction even further Likewise, the idea that a performance necessarily involves a by using two different digital files in opposite roles simultane- great deal of technical virtuosity does not necessarily hold, ously. In most of its tracks, as in most A + B mashups in although some mashup artists characterize themselves as “com- general, one source file is musical material and the other is an posers” rather than turntablist “performers,” based on the fact interpretive tool: this is certainly the case in “What More Can I that turntablists employ empty technical virtuosity. Sinnreich Say?” where Jay-Z’s lyrics are reinterpreted through the Beatles’ quotes Mysterious D as saying “turntablists are less interested in music. The added wrinkle of “Change Clothes” is that each of composition [than mash-up producers],” and DJ Adrian as the source tracks occupies both roles. Regardless, the ability to complaining that “Z-Trip [a well-known turntablist] works my manipulate musical materials via one’s choice of interpretive nerve, because he’s erroneously comparing what he does, which tools—whether those tools comprise modifications to the mate- is turntablism, and comparing it to mash-ups.”78 Both of these rial or the addition of new material (like a jazz solo or a digital statements contradict my argument that a mashup like The Grey file)—has traditionally been the provenance of performers, and Album is essentially a performance. But the primary flaw of understanding Burton as someone who employed both  Ibid. (149).  Sinnreich (2010, 58).  Ibid. (154ff.).  Ibid. (171).  Ibid. (195).      ()

these opinions lies in the focus on technical display as the defining characteristic of performance, and how this is exempli- primary facet of performance. It is true that in many turntable fied by The Grey Album. performances, virtuosity is the point of the performance, and I will pose one final question here: what are the criteria for performers like Z-Trip open themselves up to the same sorts of making value judgments about the songs on The Grey Album? charges that have been leveled at virtuosi since the nineteenth For the three analyses in this article, I have chosen songs that I century: showmanship without substance.79 But virtuosic show- felt “worked” particularly well, but in my opinion, there are manship is not the primary purpose of musical performance— others that do not. “Moment of Clarity,” for example, seems to interpretation is. As I have argued throughout this article, The be a jumble of expressively incompatible music. The gloomy Grey Album is at heart an act of interpretation, and its interpre- music that Burton extracted from the Beatles’“Happiness is a tive character tips the scales in favor of Danger Mouse as per- Warm Gun” seems ill suited to the thumping, bass-driven former. The album problematizes the distinction between drumbeat that he created; and neither one seems particularly composer and performer, in that, in the most literal sense, Brian appropriate for Jay-Z’s introspective lyrics. In a different vein, Burton “composed” the album by combining various bits of “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” is a fun, relaxed song cut from the prerecorded sound. As I emphasized in the materials/tools dis- same cloth as “Change Clothes.” Burton’s hyperactive, stutter- cussion, however, context and purpose are critical for under- ing drumbeat seems to directly contradict the laid-back mood standing the ontological status of any given activity in of Jay-Z’s lyrics, as does the puzzling use of John Lennon’s fi “ ” 81

con gurable-music production. In each of the three songs ana- touching Julia for the pitched part of the beat. The juxtapo- Downloaded from lyzed earlier—and, in fact, on all Grey Album tracks—the sitions and recontextualizations in these songs do not illuminate purpose of the composition was to perform Burton’s interpreta- previously unseen aspects of either the lyrics or the music, as tion; either through a performative utterance about music pro- they do in most of the other tracks. Instead, they are just confus- duction and the music industry (“99 Problems”), through ing. ’ “ ” fl

recontextualization of Jay-Z s lyrics ( What More Can I Say? ), The point of brie y critiquing those two songs is not to http://mts.oxfordjournals.org/ or by synthesizing Jay-Z’s lyrics and the Beatles’ music into a claim the final word on the success or failure of a mashup; song with a new expressive affect (“Change Clothes”). If his whether readers agree with me or not is beside the point. My performances had no preexisting physical representation, if he argument is that, because Burton left Jay-Z’s lyrics intact, value used what are normally musical materials and recast them as judgments about the songs on The Grey Album will necessarily tools, if the very act of creating the album seemed to violate hinge on the expressive compatibility of the specific Beatles some boundary between composer and performer, these are song(s) that Burton chose for the beat. Put differently, The Grey standard practices within configurable-music culture. The fact Album songs can best—if not only—be evaluated in light of

remains that just as a jazz musician interpreting a standard is how well they interpret, or reinterpret, the lyrics. This criterion by guest on September 23, 2015 considered a performer, no matter how much original material for evaluation is most closely related to one of the primary ways he/she might inject into the song, so too is Danger Mouse a in which we judge musical performances: how well does the performer, interpreting Jay-Z’s classic Black Album through the given performance communicate the expressive intent of its injection of new material created by recycling the music of the musical material? In other types of mashups, as in other types of Beatles. musical collages in general, where new material is made from pieces of existing material (and is sometimes layered on to other  new material), the product can be judged by its success as a composition. In a Girl Talk mashup, for instance, one enjoys “ the attractiveness and cleverness of the entire track as an assem- Theodore Gracyk has said that words alone do not generate a blage of borrowed material; one does not evaluate how twenty- song’s meaning.”80 Nowhere is this more obvious than in a fi two of the musical snippets in one track serve to interpret the mashup. My concluding statements here will offer some nal twenty-third. In The Grey Album, by contrast, one part of the thoughts on how the use of musical tools to interpret lyrics is a composition is fixed from beginning to end; it serves as a refer- ent for anything that Danger Mouse might add to it. The  Sinnreich notes that among the musicians he interviewed, heavy-metal album thus stands or falls as a new interpretation of Jay-Z: it is guitar virtuoso Yngwie Malmsteen was usually singled out as the stereotype a cover performance by Danger Mouse, a type of performance of this sort of performer. Walser (1992) agrees, describing the ways that unique to configurable culture in the twenty-first century. Malmsteen’s “valorisation of balance, planning, and originality, [and] con- Simon Reynolds has claimed of the mashup, “this is a barren servatory-style fetishisation of technique . . . have made [him] unloved by genre—nothing will come from it.”82 Compositionally speak- his peers in the guitar world” (297–98). He goes on to note that although ing, Reynolds is right. Mashups are a dead end, or perhaps a the school of guitarists who emulate Malmsteen’s style “have developed a virtuosic technique that is . . . beyond the pioneering achievements of Eddie Van Halen, few are able to deploy their skills with comparable rhe-  “Moment of Clarity” is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch? torical success” (299). Walser thus recognizes, as do the many fans and v=VXhRs5nspxc, and “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” at http://www.youtube. critics he cites, that virtuosity alone does not define performance. com/watch?v=obksjtagvLY.  Gracyk (2001, 228).  Reynolds (2011, 360).     ?           recursive loop: the only thing one can “do” with mashups is Frere-Jones, Sasha. 2013. “‘1+1+1=1’: The New Math of make more mashups. Viewed as compositions, any innovations Mashups.” In The Rock History Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. Theo in the mashup genre would only be possible as by-products of Cateforis. 339–42. New York: Routledge. innovations in other compositional genres. This is one of the Gaylor, Brett. 2009. Rip! A Remix Manifesto. EyeSteel Film/ reasons why we can use virtually the same language to describe National Film Board of Canada, DVD. mashups throughout their decades-long history—from All Day Giddins, Gary, and Scott Deveaux. 2009. Jazz. New York: by Girl Talk (2010) back to The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash Norton. on the Wheels of Steel (1981)—even though we might continue to Gracyk, Theodore. 1996. Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of develop new language to describe minute differences among a Rock. Durham [NC]: Duke University Press. group of sonata-form movements from the early 1820s. ———. 2001. I Wanna Be Me: Rock Music and the Politics of But if we imagine applying Reynolds’s characterization to a Identity. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. performance genre, it becomes clear how far he misses the ———. 2013. “Meanings of Songs and Meanings of Song Per- mark. Viewed as acts of musical interpretation, mashups present formances.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71: 23–32. endless possibilities for individual creativity, just as perfor- Graham, Renée. 2004. “Jay-Z, the Beatles Meet in ‘Grey’ mances of Beethoven piano sonatas do. We would not call such Area.” Boston Globe,10February.http://www.boston.com/ performances “barren genres,” because we instinctively recog- news/globe/living/articles/2004/02/10/jay_z_the_beatles_meet_

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Music Theory Spectrum, Vol. 37, Issue 1, pp. 7-24, ISSN 0195-6167, electronic ISSN 1533-8339. © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Music Theory. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]. DOI: 10.1093/mts/mtv004