Grey Matter

It looks like DJ Danger Mouse’s remix album is stirring quite a bit of controversy. For those of you who don’t know, Mouse decided to remix Jay-Z’s Black Album with the Beatle’s White Album. I heard about this around the holidays and told myself I should check it out. This week, EMI Records, the owners of the Beatle’s catalogue (or something like that) issued cease-and-desist order to Mouse causing all sorts of hoopla. Naturally this piqued my interest again, so I downloaded the album last night. Overall it’s pretty good. There are some tracks where things seem forced, but for the most part it flows well. There is nothing schizophrenic about the tracks. Actually Jay-Z’s work is more prominent which is to be expected since it is a Jay-Z remix album. The track that stands out the most (after about 3 listens) is “Justify My Thug”. It makes me wonder what would happen if there was a remix album of this caliber in the rock world. For example, what would happen if Xiu Xiu’s Fabulous Muscles was mixed with Madonna’s Immaculate Collection? Something like that. 🙂