rockaction
Footballguy
I'm here to argue that Danger Mouse's accomplishment of mashing up the Beatles' White Album with Jay-Z's Black Album into the underground sensation known as The Grey Album might be the foremost achievement of what was to be done with music at the end of our logical and experiential universe of pop music.
What I mean by that is that, quite simply, the boomers had taken pop culture as far as it could go with typical pop songs. The Beatles aspired to seriousness with what had once been dance music (rhythm and blues), The Who aspired to operas with it, the more technically inclined had veered into classical through prog. It seems that other than but for dance, pop had ceased to be growing, to be anything but turning inward, genteel in delivery, sentimental in lyric. Stripped back acoustics, a leisurely sound, emotive lyrics became the norm. Those advanced in pyrotechnical pop matters simply fused pop with other longings, creating a new synthesis of sounds. Composition didn't advance, but went sideways. The main improvements were not in composition, it seems, but performance. Other than varying beats and using differing percussion approaches to enhance rock and rhythm and blues into disco and funk and dance, not much was happening.
So what of this dance music as the next outgrowth of music writ large? Well, differing uses of percussion and horns brought us funk and disco, but those, too, proved a bit limited and quickly became formulaic. But there was a reprieve for those who would seek to carry forward progressive thoughts about music and composition and performance, even. At the end of the enhancements to pop in composition came new enhancements to technology and sound recordings. The manipulation of these recordings by "new" artists like DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, and others like Afrika Bambaataa brought a new potential to sound recordings that had ceased to have experimental territories within, at least compositionally. Manipulation of prior recordings was an advance over the recordings themselves, and this manipulation became an art. Beat matching and making sure records flowed so that people at block parties could dance as was once originally intended with pop music became central to the listener and compositional experience. It took a curator's ear mixed with a performative aspect at technologically advanced mixing boards, turning previous sound recordings into something else. Taking a drum loop or a segment of a song and repeating it, all while allowing for emcees to talk to the block parties on the receiving end of the music became an art unto itself, and it would become the dominant art form in the early aughts in the forms of hip hop and rap and/or electronica.
So if the boomers left the middlebrow culture with nowhere original to go within pop music but attempting the syntheses of different genres, and technology and sampling improved to the point where derivative culture became the culture, then Danger Mouse's achievement is one that towers above the rest. Taking the most serious of pop artists, The Bealtes, and combining them with arguably the most talented front man (or at least most popular to the masses) of rap/hip-hop, Jay-Z, Danger Mouse showed a way forward with music. Mashing up, or integrating both "What More Can I Say?" with "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" took a genius that took two fundamentally different musical works and made them flow nearly perfectly in sonics, meter, and time. He took the beauty of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and made it a dance track, updated and reimagined. Additional tracks would continue the album's foray into this kind of experimental synthesis.
At first blush, it sounds like the two albums were made for each other, complementing and moving in time together. As the album progresses, even the most baroque elements of the White Album sound at home with Jay-Z's lyrical stylings. It's an impressive feat, thirty years in the making, twenty years ahead of its time.
Ladies and gentlemen: The Grey Album
What I mean by that is that, quite simply, the boomers had taken pop culture as far as it could go with typical pop songs. The Beatles aspired to seriousness with what had once been dance music (rhythm and blues), The Who aspired to operas with it, the more technically inclined had veered into classical through prog. It seems that other than but for dance, pop had ceased to be growing, to be anything but turning inward, genteel in delivery, sentimental in lyric. Stripped back acoustics, a leisurely sound, emotive lyrics became the norm. Those advanced in pyrotechnical pop matters simply fused pop with other longings, creating a new synthesis of sounds. Composition didn't advance, but went sideways. The main improvements were not in composition, it seems, but performance. Other than varying beats and using differing percussion approaches to enhance rock and rhythm and blues into disco and funk and dance, not much was happening.
So what of this dance music as the next outgrowth of music writ large? Well, differing uses of percussion and horns brought us funk and disco, but those, too, proved a bit limited and quickly became formulaic. But there was a reprieve for those who would seek to carry forward progressive thoughts about music and composition and performance, even. At the end of the enhancements to pop in composition came new enhancements to technology and sound recordings. The manipulation of these recordings by "new" artists like DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, and others like Afrika Bambaataa brought a new potential to sound recordings that had ceased to have experimental territories within, at least compositionally. Manipulation of prior recordings was an advance over the recordings themselves, and this manipulation became an art. Beat matching and making sure records flowed so that people at block parties could dance as was once originally intended with pop music became central to the listener and compositional experience. It took a curator's ear mixed with a performative aspect at technologically advanced mixing boards, turning previous sound recordings into something else. Taking a drum loop or a segment of a song and repeating it, all while allowing for emcees to talk to the block parties on the receiving end of the music became an art unto itself, and it would become the dominant art form in the early aughts in the forms of hip hop and rap and/or electronica.
So if the boomers left the middlebrow culture with nowhere original to go within pop music but attempting the syntheses of different genres, and technology and sampling improved to the point where derivative culture became the culture, then Danger Mouse's achievement is one that towers above the rest. Taking the most serious of pop artists, The Bealtes, and combining them with arguably the most talented front man (or at least most popular to the masses) of rap/hip-hop, Jay-Z, Danger Mouse showed a way forward with music. Mashing up, or integrating both "What More Can I Say?" with "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" took a genius that took two fundamentally different musical works and made them flow nearly perfectly in sonics, meter, and time. He took the beauty of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and made it a dance track, updated and reimagined. Additional tracks would continue the album's foray into this kind of experimental synthesis.
At first blush, it sounds like the two albums were made for each other, complementing and moving in time together. As the album progresses, even the most baroque elements of the White Album sound at home with Jay-Z's lyrical stylings. It's an impressive feat, thirty years in the making, twenty years ahead of its time.
Ladies and gentlemen: The Grey Album
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