M.A.S.H. I.T. U.P.
Music Publishers Claim That The Grey Album Hurts The Music Industry. Now, More Than One Million Downloads Later, DJ Danger Mouse Wants To Save It

By Brian O’Connor
Photos by Rahav Segev
Published in the August 2004 issue of DJ Times Magazine
Volume 17 - Number 8

      Danger Mouse doesn’t want to talk about it—truth is, he can’t talk about it. But we can talk around it, “retroactively,” he says.
“It,” the big white elephant in the corner of the room is, of course, more like a big grey elephant—The Grey Album. Danger Mouse’s precocious fusion of Jay-Z’s [a cappella] Black Album with The Beatles self-titled 1968 [White] album—aside from being a forehead-slapping, “Why-didn’t-I-think-of-that” idea—is an outgrowth of exclusively DJ-oriented mediums: the mash-up and the remix.
Although The Grey Album isn’t a straight mash-up—where one record plays atop another seemingly incongruous record (see sidebar) to produce a truly post-modern, chocolate-in-your-peanut-butter experience, Danger Mouse (aka Brian Burton) did use straight mash-ups to get his foot in the music-business door. He mashed Audio Two with Air and sent it to the folks at Warp Records in London. Their subsidiary, Lex Records, were intrigued, and asked if he had any beats. He did. They signed Danger Mouse to a deal, and Ghetto Pop Life, with MC Jemini, was the result.
      Of course, a story is incomplete without tension, and The Beatles’ music publishers EMI have provided that aplenty. After hearing about the record (Danger Mouse had pressed up 3,000 CDs), they issued a cease-and-desist, and have threatened a lawsuit. Which brings us back to, “I can’t really talk about it.”
      So if you haven’t already, download The Grey Album, and see what a DJ, with Cool Edit or Sound Forge, can do with two pop music icons—the bassline in “Helter Skelter” alongside “99 Problems”; or “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” with “What More Can I Say?” We’re sure millions of Jay-Z fans have never heard of The Beatles, and vice-versa, which in the end, can’t be a bad thing at all.
We caught up with Danger Mouse, and asked him how The Grey Album experience has benefited his career

DJ Times: Let’s get it out there...The Grey Album. Good idea?
Danger Mouse: Well, I didn’t see any money out of it. I pressed up like a few hundred copies on CD, handed them out to my friends and DJs, and then got a call from EMI, saying that I had to stop.

DJ Times: So no money, despite it being the most downloaded album of all time?
Danger Mouse: Yup. More than one million downloads. I was always a huge fan of classic rock, and I had always done mash-ups, and I had sent mash-ups to the guys at Warp Records, which helped me get a record deal. It was always something that I did. So [the idea] made sense.

DJ Times: There’s been positive feedback because of it?
Danger Mouse: It’s hard to tell right now, but Zero 7 hired me to do a remix in the wake of the album, so that’s positive, and obviously people know who I am now. It’s not something I regret. There’s nothing wrong with people knowing who you are.

DJ Times: What were some other mash-ups you’ve done?
Danger Mouse: I did one with Jefferson Airplane and Wu-Tang’s “C.R.E.A.M.” I took the intro bassline to “White Rabbit,” because that’s the most recognizable part of it, and then I did a drum beat, found a loop and matched it up with “White Rabbit” and made a bed for “C.R.E.A.M.,” and then just used some pitch control to match up the bed with the Wu-Tang sample. Then I took the a cappella from that and stuck it on top of it and then just added some guitar from the Airplane to give it some dynamic feel. That’s more like re-producing, though, as opposed to playing two records over each other, a straight mash, which is just hard to do. It has to be perfect. Straight mashes don’t usually work. Like once, I tried to do a straight mash of “Planet Rock” with Outkast’s “Whole World.” I knew that was going to work, but it didn’t. I could have re-produced it and then it would have worked, but it didn’t sound as interesting as I thought it would. With mash-ups, it’s a lot of trial and error.

DJ Times: What are you using to make your mash-ups?
Danger Mouse: The stuff that I’m using now is costing in the hundreds, extremely cheap. I always thought, “If I only had such and such a piece of gear, I could really get some cool sounds together.” But that isn’t the case. I use [Sonic Foundry’s] ACID here and there, but it’s very basic. My monitors are computer speakers, believe it or not, and the computer I use is real old. I’m using the same equipment that I used when I first started. I only started using computers two years ago, and I only use [Digidesign’s] Pro Tools to mix. I’ve tried constructing things in Pro Tools and it’s a joke. I can’t do it. It’s just not set up for the way I work. I’m using the first computer program I ever used. I was always opposed to using computers—not morally, but they just crash too much. Before that, I’d record onto an 8-track and then mixed them down to a MiniDisc, mastered them off MiniDisc. I had no idea what I was doing. But the computer thing has been cool, because now I can do more beats in the same amount of time.

DJ Times: Where do the beats start?  
Danger Mouse: I deconstruct and re-construct. A lot of my beats start in my head and I have to work them out visually. I don’t too much percussive stuff any more. I used to, but a lot of my percussive instincts are very normal. They’re very much what a lot of other people’s would be, and it’s tough to change your instincts—they are what they are. So once I realized that I started working more visually, it just changes the way I would normally do something.

DJ Times: Are the beats better?
Danger Mouse: Definitely. It’s not as predictable, and the swing and the feel are not always the same. And I have a lot more happy mistakes when I do it this way. It’s a lot more fun, too, because I never know how it’s going to turn out. A mistake is usually the only way I can get to something that nobody else has before. I’m shopping for vinyl for sounds, not necessarily beats, because I can re-construct them visually. I can lay a bunch of hi-hats in a row, and throw my kicks and snares wherever I want them. I’m just not hitting them with my hands. I use loops, because I like the way they feel, and I’ll use them for the feel or for the way the drummer was playing. I’ve tried my hands at drums and I’m not good at all. I can either learn how to play them, but then all my drum sounds are going to sound like whatever kit I’m using. I’d rather use drum sounds from all over the world that I can find on record. A lot of time I replace sounds within the loop, too.

DJ Times: What sections are you shopping in?
Danger Mouse: The only section in the record store I stay out of is the jazz and funk sections. They’re too predictable, and I’m not really a digger, so those are two genres that I really don’t know enough about. So I go for sections where there are no experts—which I’m not going to get into because I don’t want to give away my secrets.

DJ Times: You think you’re the only one looking through “Folk Songs of the Himalayas”?
Danger Mouse: Well, it’s surprising how many records are out there, I’ll tell you that much. I have such a backlog of records right now, but when I’m on the road, it’s usually too expensive to ship records back, so I tend not to shop on the road.

DJ Times: You’re logging some serious miles as a DJ on tour this summer for Coachella and Lollapalooza, in addition to the Ghetto Pop Life remix project.
Danger Mouse: I’ll come out for the first half of the show, bring the audience through a little journey, and then bring my man Jemini out and we’ll do some stuff from the album, and some stuff that’ll be a little different than your average hip-hop show. I’m more of a studio person, so I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to go live with it, and so far as I can tell the two Pioneer CDJ-1000s and two Technics are the way to do it. I don’t want to use computers live. I’m just so afraid of getting locked up on stage. For me, that would ruin it. I’m so young in terms of performing in front of people.

DJ Times: Why so little DJing?
Danger Mouse: I stopped DJing a lot recently because of my ears. After Coachella, I had to cancel a show because my ears were so bad. After about 90 minutes of DJing, when I go to cue up a record, it’s all mid-range and I can barely make out the tune. It’s not full-blown tinnitus, but I’ve had a whole day of ringing. I’ve been in L.A. for a year and a half, and the Coachella tour was the second time I’d DJed.

DJ Times: Where’d the hearing loss come from?
Danger Mouse: I think it came from racing go-karts, competitively, in upstate New York, and I was young—maybe 10 or 11 years old—and ears are pretty sensitive then. That’s the only thing I can think of. I can’t even go to rock shows with earplugs sometimes, because after 20 minutes it gets all mid-rangy. Cuts right through.

DJ Times: Any hearing problems in the studio?
Danger Mouse: My ears have an addiction for noise. You want it louder, as loud as you can take it. When I mix records, I get headaches like crazy. When I mixed the Ghetto Pop Life record, I did it for two-and-a-half weeks. When I’m testing out a new record and a new song, that’s when it’s loudest.

DJ Times: Big competitive go-kart scene in New York, eh?
Danger Mouse: I’m from Rockland County, Westchester. I was a little suburban kid, lived in Spring Valley. We moved to Atlanta and that’s where I got most of my musical inspiration. I was in Athens, at University of Georgia, for six years. Georgia had this free scholarship thing, and my parents were like, “If the shit’s free, you gotta go there.” A very big blessing in disguise; I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing right now. There’s no way. I started making music there.

DJ Times: You’d never made any music before college?
Danger Mouse: I always wanted to DJ or play guitar when I was younger, but I was into sports and art, visual art—comic books. I think a lot of producers used to be comic-book artists, and I’m not sure if it’s a coincidence. That’s what I was going to do—be a comic-book artist. But then I became convinced that I didn’t want to be a broke, starving artist, I wanted to go to college and maybe make some money. I figured I might do good in business, so I did what I was supposed to do. But then when I got to Athens, I got into films, and that made me want to get into making soundtracks. The first stuff I did, on Pelican City, was instrumental, downtempo—I guess people called it trip hop back then. By the time I started making music, hip hop was a huge influence, but not an updated influence in any way. The newer influences were coming from a lot of places, like rock bands and movie soundtracks and stuff like that.

DJ Times: Was it the local Athens rock scene that turned you on to rock?
Danger Mouse: Eventually, not at first, but eventually. That got me into doing my own stuff. Neutral Milk Hotel, Olivia Tremor Control, Elf Power, those were the main bands. But at first I was listening to Portishead, Radiohead, and Pink Floyd, The Beatles, The Doors, and Hendrix was probably the biggest influence of all. And when I was 18, and I first got to University of Georgia, I couldn’t name one Doors, Hendrix, Pink Floyd or Beatles song. I was such a hip-hop head. When I was much younger, it was ’80s pop and hair metal. But my older sister liked hip hop and it sunk in without me knowing in.

DJ Times: What were the earliest hip-hop influences?
Danger Mouse: First off, it was mainly Miami Bass, Magic Mike, Poison Clan and then Eightball and MJG; then Wu-Tang and rediscovering Rakim and Marley Marl. I became a full-fledged East Coast hip hopper by the time I was 18. I was gravitating toward Prince Paul’s style.

DJ Times: Was there a hip-hop scene at University of Georgia when you got there?
Danger Mouse: Well, DJ Chrisis was the only one making that happen. I bought a drum machine, and the next year I bought a sampler. When I got there, The Roots played at the student center and maybe 50 people were there, and 20 of those people I brought there. The Pharcyde played our spring thing and so did The Fugees, but nobody came. I think Atlanta folk just didn’t like East Coast hip hop.

DJ Times: How did you get turned on to the rock music?
Danger Mouse: I worked with one of the guys from Olivia Tremor Control in a record store in Athens, where I was the hip-hop buyer. It got to the point where it was influencing me musically as much as the hip hop was. At that point, I was making slowed-down, chilled-out stuff. I wanted someone to be singing over it, not rapping over it. I look back on it, and the stuff was so basic. I had a little Roland phrase sampler. It was like $300, which was a fortune for me then. And I’d record onto tape, and that would be my only copy of it—I still have some of them.

DJ Times: Eventually, you wanted to go where the trip hop was….
Danger Mouse: In 2001, I moved to London. It was all the influences that I had. It was a very big fantasy place for me. I wanted to be in a place where the stuff I was doing wasn’t so different, where the competition was higher. In Athens what I did, everybody was like, “Oh, that’s different.” And that wasn’t good enough for me. I wanted to throw myself in the fire and see what happens. I didn’t know anybody there, I just went, and I didn’t know what I was doing. I figured I could be broke anywhere. And I was very much broke. But I went over there first, for a week, and stayed in a hostel, looking for a place to live and for a job. Eventually, I met a guy who was running a club, and his brother gave me a job working at a small pub called The Rose, as a bartender, which was great, because it was a shot-and-beer sort of place, and I never had to pour anything more complicated than a Jack and Coke. It wasn’t very hard, pints the whole time.

DJ Times: And you were making beats?
Danger Mouse: I did a straight-up hip-hop thing, despite the fact that I went over there to lay down trip-hop beats, and I gave it to Warp Records. Prefuse 73’s DJ Ryan, who I knew from Athens, went by there a couple times on tour, and he told Warp about me. When I got there, I put together a couple mash-ups and I put them out on vinyl, and sent them to some folks at Warp, and they got back in touch with me.

DJ Times: What mash-ups did you send to Warp?
Danger Mouse: Air with Audio Two, and then Nas with Portishead—I play those live. They sent me an e-mail saying thanks for sending these over, and then I e-mailed them back. I told them that I had some original stuff, and they said send it over. It was some hip-hop beats that I made. I’m glad I e-mailed them back—I almost didn’t.

DJ Times: That’s the secret of networking, harassment.
Danger Mouse: I was also doing production for the Cartoon Network. They were based in Atlanta, and they’d heard my Pelican City stuff. By this time I was going to clubs in London, and passing out CDs, making beats, making mash-ups. I wasn’t DJing very much at all over there.

DJ Times: And from London to L.A.?
Danger Mouse: I was in London for two years, and then I went straight to L.A. I basically came out here to record with the Pharcyde and Tha Alkoholiks. And I fell in love with the place. I was here for two weeks, and it was so laid back, and I missed being in suburbia with a car. It’s way better than grim London.

DJ Times: How did you get The Pharcyde to record with you?
Danger Mouse: I harassed them, too, to get them on a record. Same with Tha Alkoholiks, and now we share managers.

DJ Times: How are you making most of your money?
Danger Mouse: Live stuff here and there. I have a record deal now, and I’m still doing stuff for the Cartoon Network. There’s no huge cash cow, but it’s doing O.K. After the Danger Mouse and Jemini album, Lex Records and Warp were glad it did well, so they re-signed me for more albums—another four albums. So it’s pretty long-term. I can’t complain.