In 2004, everyone was losing their minds over Danger Mouse's Grey Album. For the uninitiated, the Grey Album was a mash-up of the music from the Beatles' White Album and the vocals from Jay-Z's Black Album. The Grey Album was creative and rather well-done, but it got most of it's press because of the stern reaction from EMI and the Beatles' lawyers and their claims of copyright infringement. In retrospect, a lot of humor has come of these events in great part due to Paul McCartney's limited-release remix album as Twin Freaks and a Beatles-sanctioned remix album, Love. All this has happened while the Beatles' catalogue remains nearly impossible to sample if you don't pay exorbitant fees, and even then it may not be possible. As for Danger Mouse, real name Brian Burton, his career skyrocketed due to the fame granted because of the Grey Album, but despite doing production work for EMI related artists he still seems to suffer their lawyers' unexplainable wraths as evidenced with the non-release of the music portion of his collaboration with Sparklehorse, David Lynch and a who's-who cast of rock all-stars, Dark Night Of The Soul, of which no reason was ever made public for it's non-availability. All of this said though, Danger Mouse still sampled the Beatles without their permission and, contrary to popular belief, did attempt to sell copies of the Grey Album through his website. Copyright law may be rather draconian and difficult to maneuver around here in the US, but it is the law and if the copyright owner wants to fight for their properties and has the funds to fuel such a legal battle, such as the Beatles or EMI, you'd better be prepared for the worst.
Fifteen years before the Grey Album debacle, John Oswald, a musician and composer from Canada, produced what many consider his magnum-opus, an album named Plunderphonic. What happened to Oswald's album has many striking similarities to the events surrounding the Grey Album. In fact, by today's standards, his story would hit home harder than Danger Mouse's tale ever could have. In 1989, Oswald, after years of creating sample-based recordings, assembled his Plunderphonic album and, out of his own funds, had copies of the album mastered and mass-produced on compact disc. He proceeded to mail the copies to libraries, publications, artists and friends among others at no cost to them. In fact, he refused to charge anything for the album as he did not own the copyright for any of the tracks or artwork he sampled, but was still attacked by the CRIA, the Canadian equivalent of the RIAA, for copyright infringement. Their claim was that despite Oswald not making any profit from his album's release, he was still infringing on the copyright of the sampled authors and the remaining undistributed copies had to be destroyed. Of course, here in the US, people could have complained about his use of their works without their permission, but as there was no profit made or copyright requested for Oswald's work, the physical copies would most-likely remained in existence. Much has been said that the fight to destroy the Plunderphonic album may have been caused by CBS/Sony as they were angry about the sampling of Michael Jackson both on the album as well as the artwork. The artwork, in fact, is probably the origin of their distaste, as it features Jackson's head pasted to the body of a nude French model. It's pretty damn amusing to me, but I'm sure it wasn't for CBS.
Apart from their legal complications, comparing Danger Mouse and John Oswald's work is like comparing a house-cat to an African lion. The Grey Album was catchy and featured the then-popular vocals from Jay-Z's Black Album as well as classic Beatles tracks, whereas Plunderphonic was comprised of tracks from multiple artists, in multiple styles, none of which were particularly commercial sounding. Plunderphonic could be called rough, disjointed or even a test of one's patience, whereas the Grey Album met somewhere between pop and hip-hop. Most likely, if it were released today, Oswald's Plunderphonic would gain little public support, if any, for it's release or distribution and it would be treated as an artsy project only for those who liked noise and calamity. This is an unfair perspective of course, but you can't convince the majority to listen to abstract assemblies of music next to Top 40 radio favorites.
John Oswald continues to work today on various projects using his Plunderphonic sound concepts as the base. You'd do well to visit his excellent website as well as the one he's dedicated specifically to plunderphonics and projects of the sort. Much more information about the non-release of the Plunderphonic album can be found there as well as a link to download the album itself in MP3 format, but that link has been known to go offline from time to time so I'm posting it here as well. If you've got a mind for experimentation you should really download this album and give it a fair shake. It's definitely not an easy listening experience, but it's extremely rewarding. For every moment of inspired dementia, such as Oswald's reworking of Michael Jackson's Bad as dab, there are moments of utter beauty like rainbow, an extreme slowing of an orchestral rendition of Somewhere Over The Rainbow. We need more stuff like this, and we need more people bringing up questions about copyright. Copyright can be a great thing, but it's far too easy to be abused, especially when the so-called abuser is either doing no one any harm or the supposed harm caused is greatly overstated.
John Oswald - Plunderphonic
PS-I hope no one is offended by the album art. I've always thought it was hilarious.
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