The Grey Album

Jay-Z and the Beatles were on the same album and the same tracks didn’t you know? I sure didn’t know. Danger Mouse released The Grey Album in 2004. The entire album was a mashup of Jay-Z’s The Black Album and the Beatles’ The White Album. This week we were assigned to listen to The Grey Album in it’s entirety. Initially I thought it was going to be some awful mashups like you see on Glee where there is some major differences between where one song stops and other starts. That’s the only type of mashup I thought there was, so this album was quite the surprise to me.

I really enjoyed listening to this album, it had such a different sound but was still so familiar sounding. It almost turns Jay-Z into somewhat of a acoustic artist giving his music an entirely different sound. I had never listened to the Black or the White Albums individually but I had heard original songs from each. I must say I think I like the songs from the Gray Album more than I like the individual songs from the two albums it came from. The tracks themselves are hard to handle and try to decipher. It flows together so seamlessly that you can’t tell that this wasn’t the original version of the song.

This album defined the “mashup”. Take a listen to a song or two from the Grey Album and then listen to what I thought a good mashup was and then let me know what you think about mashups now, because my opinion of a mashup has now changed forever for the better. This album was flawless and fantastic. Makes the mashups I thought were good look like bogus kids bop garbage.