The Grey Album

During today's lecture on morphing, Nabeel showed for a moment the cover to the DJ Dangermouse's The Grey Album; up till this point I had never seen a cover for it, but heard it many times. Seeing the cover rather than listening to the music inspired me with very different thoughts on what kind of an exercise this album was - I had previously thought of it as a kind of gimmicky toy for DJs and mash-up enthusiasts, an exercise that was kind of playful and tongue-in-cheek regarding attitudes to music in its various forms.
Seeing the album reminded me a lot more of the original artists involved and I started to think about what kind of statement this juxtaposition made. Here were the Beatles, as far as I know a previously clean-cut introduce-to-your-mum pop band, the biggest in the world of its kind, who ever girl on the street can't stop whistling along to. All of a sudden they start taking acid and enter the super-psychedelic phase of their career, where new techniques and ways of making music was being experimented with in the studio to produce clever, self-referential, funny, creative and mind-bending psychedelia. The band have seen the world and are now exploring different territories, opening conceptions of what pop music can be.
At the same time in the centre of the picture you have Jay Z, having advanced from dealing snow-flakes by the OZ, a smooth-as-they-come lyricist dishing out incredible rhymes at the drop of a hat, littered with double entendres, sly pop culture references, a healthy sense of machismo and fractured street philosophy. Jay Z suddenly announces the self-imposed end his recording career for a different role within the industry, and more time with his girl Beyonce.
The image invites a narrative of cross-cultural collision, where the two individual discourses of pop and rap are thrust together, creating a powerful statement. I wonder if Dangermouse had the idea of the album as an example of assimilation of ideas and ideals between disparate urban niches of sound-image-ideology relations. The album and its associated artwork borrows cleverly from the means of music and image production from both genre to create some truly interesting food for thought on the politics and means of representation
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