February 17, 2004
Illegal and Legal Music Notes
Gothamist is catching up on music lately. After the "illegality" of the work fuss, Gothamist downloaded DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album, the illegal bastard child of Jay-Z's Black Album and the Beatles' White Album. Who knows what will happen, but our verdict, like many others', is that it's awesome. Download it from Illegal Art.
In the legal music corner, we're finally getting around to listening to Dizzee Rascal's Boy In Da Corner, which is also great. Dizzee Rascal won the Mercury Prize and has hailed as the "best MC Britian's ever produced." But Gothamist is concerned with British rappers/artists trying to crossover to the U.S. For instance, The Streets, got a lot of critical attention, found himself in music hipsters' CD collections, but then that's it. Sasha Frere-Jones wrote a great piece about Dizzee Rascal that details Dizzee's talent which might be his downfall in America. Buy Boy In Da Corner from Amazon.
Both Jay Z's Black Album and Dizzee Rascal's In Da Corner made the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop List.
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It is a bloody shame that The Grey Album is not legal.
Orbital is one of my favorite techno acts and they have a live song that includes samples of Bon Jovi that they can not put in an album for legal reasons.
Man I wish EMI could work something out, this album is amazing and I'd love to get the instrumental version of this album, Danger Mouse did an awesome job with the remix of the White album. But knowing EMI this will never happen... what a shame...
re:jake...? really? but i have that album with the aforementioned track. in sides (2-cd), and the second disc has "halcyon (live)". or is there an exception to live performance tracks?
bon jovi + belinda carlisle = rock!
Speaking of legal downloads--this weekend I found a free mp3 of dimitris sgourus's rendition of chopin's andante spianato. It was posted on Amazon by the pianist himself on their music downloads section. Free!
The sound quality isn't great on the mp3--it seems to be from a live concert--but the playing is good.
Although you may not have heard of Sgourus, Artur Rubinstein once described him as "the best pianist I have ever heard, including myself". I heard him play this piece 20 years ago when he was only 14 at the time. I was younger then too!
veritech & Jake,
There is an exception to the rule, and Orbital nicely used the loophole to get the track out. Technically, the 2nd CD of In-Sides was a US-only Bonus disc, that you were not charged for on top of the regular In-Sides disc. Since they are (technically) not making money off of it's sale, copywrite does not apply. If you check the liner notes, you'll notice that they don't credit the samples anywhere, and that's because they don't have to. They gave it away. Danger Mouse may claim that he was not charging for The Grey Album, but 3000 copies is a huge independant run; i.e. not just for friends and relatives. He was planning on selling the thing to make some money on it. That's where EMI stepped in.
The "Rocky Raccoon" samples in "Justify My Thug" are downright hilarious.
It's also worth mentioning that Danger Mouse's production completely overpowers Jay-Z's lyrics, and that is unquestionably a good thing.
oddly, there was a huge piece on dizzee rascal last night on all things considered. and yes, halcyon is the most awesome song ever. and my brother was mortified when he played the song for me and i started singing along to heaven is a place on earth.
DJ Danger Mouse's experimentations with the Beatles and Jay-z (though they bare absolutely no connection beyond the names, which is evident in the new songs) are at times great (See Encore) and at times awful.
However, the *BEST* remix album of Jay-z is Kno of CunninLynguists.