The Grey Album: one part Beatles, one part Jay-Z

Grassroots protest supports critically acclaimed DJ mix

On Tuesday, Feb. 24, the World Wide Web went grey. Nearly 200 Web sites altered their home pages to appear grey in support of an online protest organized by Downhill Battle, a grassroots group of music industry activists. The sites joined forces to stage the event now known as Grey Tuesday.

It all started when a little-known DJ based in Los Angeles named Danger Mouse decided to mix black and white. The black was Jay-Z's farewell Black Album and the white was the self titled double LP better known as the White Album. He laid a capella Jay-Z lyrics over classic Beatles tracks and named it appropriately The Grey Album.

the big deal

No big deal right? This Danger Mouse mixes the British invasion with the king of New York and gives the record a clever album. Well, the big deal is the album is good, really good. Rolling Stone dubs it "the ultimate remix albumÖan ingenious hip-hop record that sounds oddly ahead of its time." The album is so good, it has become one of the most widely downloaded files on the Internet. Millions of copies of the entire album circulated, and it gained heavy exposure.

Just over a month into the frenzy Electric and Music Industries, better known as EMI, or the recording industry conglomerate which represents Yoko Ono, Olivia Harrison, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney's right to the Beatles music caught wind of The Grey Album. Of course EMI was not too pleased to hear that one half of this acclaimed album was actually the already critically acclaimed The Beatles (White Album.) EMI sent a cease-and-desist order to Danger Mouse and ordered him to pull his original copy of The Grey Album offline. Danger Mouse complied, and it seemed the mega music company would prevail.

the protest

But The Grey Album was more than just a great mix of two classics to the small organization of music industry activists. To the founders of Downhill Battle, 23-year- olds Nicolas Reville and Holmes Wilson, and 18-year-old Rebecca Laurie, The Grey Album represented all that was wrong with the music industry today. So the group that was born out of last year's file-sharing controversy took up a new cause.

"We started Downhill Battle because we felt like the file-sharing issue and the debate about the music industry had become completely one-sided. Major label record executives were trying to say that file-sharing was ruining music, when really it was our best chance to break the monopoly," Reville said in an MTV news interview.

Downhill Battle organized an unprecedented online protest that included nearly 200 Web sites. Sites were encouraged to provide The Grey Album to users free, and those who did not because they wanted to avoid the copyright issues were asked to change their Web site home pages to grey to show support. They called the protest Grey Tuesday, and it went off without a hitch.

More than 100,000 copies of the album were downloaded by roughly 150 sites that provided the album for users, and the sites included in the protest were ranked as the highest visited for the day by Web site traffic monitors like Blogdex and Popdex.

Again EMI issued cease-and-desist orders, this time to each of the sites participating in Grey Tuesday, but most of the damage had already been done. The Grey Album gained so much exposure that a four-part collector CD cover set was produced and the album popped up on E-bay for as much as $80.

the fallout

The protest is three weeks old now, and EMI has yet to bring down the hammer on Downhill Battle and the 170 or so participating Web sites that actually provided The Grey Album to downloaders. I fully expect the label to bring recourse, and when it does, Downhill Battle will probably be headed in the direction their name suggests. But regardless of the outcome, Grey Tuesday was a success with over 400 hundred sites all together having joined the cause as of March 11th. Grey Tuesday seems to have inspired other DJs as well. On March 4, Claire Chanel and Scary Sherman posted the Jay-Z construction set which provides users with Jay-Z's a capella album, hundreds of sample and break beats and even pictures for people to mix albums and create cover art on their own. On March 8, The New York Times reviewed 12 different album mixes of Jay-Z's black album, half of which incorporated the Beatles in some way. The Grey Album definitely made its mark and may go down in history as the most downloaded complete album ever. We'll have to stay tuned to see if Grey Tuesday will make a big a splash.

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