"For me, it was an obvious thing to do," Danger Mouse said. Over two and a half weeks in December, Danger Mouse engineered new beats culled from the sounds of The White Album, cribbing drum hits, plundering piano loops and stealing guitar riffs before meshing them into recognizable but recontextualized riffs. Like most good ideas, it's deceptively simple: take Jay-Z's The Black Album and layer its vocals over one of rock's most ambitious musical masterpieces, the Beatles' The White Album. Of all the remixes, the most talked about lately and one of the most interesting in concept is The Grey Album, from Los Angeles producer Danger Mouse.
Dan Presents The Black Album Remixes: Back to Basics, uses famous instrumentals by Brooklyn hip-hop acts such as Black Moon and Masta Ace. I think more major labels should do that."Īnother notable reworking, DJ Lt. They're talking about the original but also talking about these remixes. People may be still talking about it in some other form. Releasing an a cappella version of The Black Album, all you're doing is extending a buzz. "I wanted to re-create the whole album and give one mood to the album," he explained. Kno used beats he already had in the stash for half the album, and for the other half he devised new soundscapes. "Like, 'OK, where am I gonna drop the beat out? Where am I gonna add a changeup?' It's pretty much just paying attention to the lyrics and getting their vibe across." "You have to really listen to the lyrics and get a gist of what the person was trying to get across," Kno said. Hov: The White Album, he said it was just a matter of opening his ears before he hit the beat machine. When Kno of the Atlanta rap troupe CunninLynguists crafted his rhythmically abstract Kno vs. I still couldn't make the hook fit exactly, so I ended up the hook on it." I had to make another beat with a more on-point time signature. "There's not a lot of swing to his beat, so the first beat I had for 'Dirt Off Your Shoulder' didn't fit with his vocals. The beat has to be in tune."īrown's hardest undertaking was the Timbaland-produced "Dirt Off Your Shoulder." "Timbaland is pretty straight-ahead," Brown said.
JAY Z THE BLACK ALBUM ACAPELLA PLUS
"I was just gonna take whatever old beats I had, but once I got into it, I was like, 'If I'm gonna do it, I'mma do it for real.' Plus with The Black Album, a lot of his hooks have melodies, so you can't just throw whatever beat you have lying around underneath it.
Eventually, though, friends convinced Brown to try his hand at it. He was leery because he knew other producers and DJs would be making their own remixes and he was a fan of the original.
"To tell the truth, I really wasn't going to do it," Brown said. Guru said Jay then told him he wanted to break with the Roc's tradition of not releasing a cappella 12-inches, so producers could "remix the hell out of it."įormer A Touch of Jazz producer Kevin Brown was one of the first to do so, crafting the jazz- and funk-infused The Brown Album. Then he asked me to play it a cappella and he looked around the room and everybody got it. When we were doing album listening for The Black Album, he was playing a song and he looked around the room and only a couple of people got. "From Jay's perspective, he was real conscious of it. "I think it's real good," Young Guru, who engineers most of Jay's recordings, said of the trend. Last month the Roc released The Black Album on vinyl with no beats underneath Jay's bravura lyrics, spurring producers and DJs to rework his farewell disc into creations such as The Brown Album and even The Grey Album, which combines Jay's words with music from the Beatles' The White Album. Thanks to the talents of enterprising remixers, Jay-Z's The Black Album is available in a lot more versions than just clean or explicit.