I've never liked nor enjoyed hip hop all that much, even though I recognized its social importance. But I reckon this Grey Album by DJ Danger Mouse is pretty good.

Link courtesy of William over at Abstract Dynamics.

The Grey Album is innovative remix music. Danger Mouse married vocals from Jay-Z's recent The Black Album with beats made from the Beatles' The White Album to create The Grey Album.

The record industry was not pleased with the postmodern, rip, mix and burn.

The record industry (Recording Industry Association of America) is using copy right law to attempt to closedown the rapidly developing P2P file-sharing network down. People are different ways. And they are doing so because buying a CD just isn't worth it anymore as a way to get music or as a way to support musicians. It's time to just walk away from the corporate music industry.

At issue is defending a free culture as the corporations plunder the public domain. It is proving very difficult to protect our commons in our market society from market closure by those who try to patent everything. That represents a theft of our common culture.

It is a fight since the RIAA is talking in terms of rights of the copyright owners to launch attacks on P2P machines--by using code that goes out there and tries to bring down P2P machines. The RIAA sees itself as fighting pirates and evil terrorists. But as Illegal art says:

"The laws governing "intellectual property" have grown so expansive in recent years that artists need legal experts to sort them all out. Borrowing from another artwork--as jazz musicians did in the 1930s and Looney Tunes illustrators did in 1940s--will now land you in court. If the current copyright laws had been in effect back in the day, whole genres such as collage, hiphop, and Pop Art might have never have existed.
The irony here couldn't be more stark. Rooted in the U.S. Constitution, copyright was originally intended to facilitate the exchange of ideas but is now being used to stifle it."

So go and listen to DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album It's pretty good. And remember Grey Tuesday

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