Skip to Content
Uncategorized

Grey Tuesday

A clever bit of homespun sampling has triggered a wave of controversy across the Internet. Brian Burton, a.k.a. DJ Danger Mouse, a 26-year-old studio whiz in Los Angeles, mixed music from the Beatles’ classic White Album with vocal tracks from…
February 26, 2004

A clever bit of homespun sampling has triggered a wave of controversy across the Internet. Brian Burton, a.k.a. DJ Danger Mouse, a 26-year-old studio whiz in Los Angeles, mixed music from the Beatles’ classic White Album with vocal tracks from rapper Jay Z’s recent release, the Black Album, to produce – voila - the Grey Album. It’s two great albums that sound uniquely great together. And it’s ticking a lot of people off.

EMI, the company that owns the rights to the White Album, fired off cease-and-desist letters to the legions of sites (and stores) that were trafficking Burton’s hit mash-up. This Tuesday, in response, a coalition of webmasters, crying foul over what they perceive to be a reactionary blast against postmodern art, declared the day “Grey Tuesday,” making Burton’s songs readily available for 24 hours (though many of the tracks still remain online).

Since Burton wasn’t selling the Grey Album, it certainly seems like an overreaction to pull his tracks down. Mash-ups are sonic collages, pure and simple, and, in a certain sense, very good for the labels’ business. After all, there are probably plenty of Beatles fans out there who would never appreciate Jay Z - and vice versa - if it wasn’t for Danger Mouse’s spin.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language

A neural network trained on the experiences of a single young child managed to learn one of the core components of language: how to match words to the objects they represent.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.