After West Coast beat-master Danger Mouse melded the Beatles' White Album with Jay-Z's Black Album this year and called it the Grey Album, it was only a matter of time before other DJs got in on the action. Now, a piece of software has turned the Jay-Z mix album from a one-joke idea into a whole comedy routine.
The Jay-Z Construction Set is a free download created by two American twentysomethings trading as "Claire Chanel" and "Scary Sherman". Between them, they have deconstructed every beat, break and a cappella vocal on the Black Album, thrown in some simple audio editing software, and made the 649MB package available through next-generation file-sharing networks like BitTorrent. The idea is that participants will make their own remix album and then put the end product up for download on the same peer-to-peer networks.
Judging by weblogs run by fans of this 21st-century sport, the number of different remix albums available is topping 120. Some are conventional remixes, with new layers of beats and samples added to Jay-Z's rhymes, but many have opted for a track-by-track blend with another artist's album. The Black Album has been mixed with music by everyone from Pavement (the Slack Album) to Prince (the Purple Album), Metallica (the Double Black Album), Radiohead, the Grateful Dead, Isaac Hayes, Kenny G, Spinal Tap and the Soggy Bottom Boys - the "house band" from O Brother, Where Art Thou? There is even talk of a "Zack Album - Jay-Z Vs Saved by the Bell".
While the use of Beatles music on the Grey Album led to a wave of "cease and desist" letters from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the quasi-legal world of mix-albums looks set to stay on the legal side of the fence for the time being. None the less, the Black Album remains the centrepiece of an ongoing battle between the RIAA and campaigners against what is argued to be oppressive intellectual property legislation. But Jay-Z's label Roc-a-Fella has just released the Black Album A Cappellas on general sale, a move many believe to be a signal of approval from the record company, and one that will surely broaden the appeal of the mash-up even further.
Chanel predicts a future where "suburban kids [are] picking it up at Wal-Mart, mixing tracks on some free editor, and burning CD-Rs for their friends at school. This is the participatory experience that makes hip-hop the biggest subculture in the world."
