In partial support of Grey Tuesday, here's something for you folks to listen to: DJ Danger Mouse's "Dirt off Your Shoulder."
The Grey Album isn't that great of an album. For starters, you have to be a big fan of Jay-Z's The Black Album, and while Hova's in very fine form in it, it's just not The Blueprint or Unplugged. This is basically his vocals on top of little snippets and cues from the Beatles' The Beatles, and non-hiphop fans probably won't find it intrinsically interesting.
Having written that, the samples DJ Danger Mouse utilizes are excellent: riffs from instrumental bridges, incidental background vocals -- fairly minute clips that are, on one level, completely recognizable but unfamiliar enough to be exciting. The beatjuggled guitar from "Julia" that underscores the already electrifying "Dirt off Your Shoulder" is a case in point. Danger Mouse makes the comparatively lackluster "Glass Onion" sound totally alive.
What all this oddly emphasizes is that the link between Stockhausen and pop probably wasn't truly forged in "Revolution #9" -- it's alive and well in hiphop, by way of On the Corner and later, Grandmaster Flash.
Posted by the wily filipino at February 24, 2004 09:27 AM