
The Danger Mouse Seal of Approval, Don’t Listen Without It!
May 28, 2008This is Danger Mouse.
No, not the British cartoon hero, the enigmatic music producer.
It occurred to me recently that Danger Mouse’s name is practically a golden seal of approval. He’s been behind some of the best music of this first decade of the 21st Century and I’ve enjoyed just about every album he’s produced.
Danger Mouse, real name Brian Burton, comes from White Plains, New York and spent the late nineties making demo tapes of his instrumental, trip-hop inspired music. He did an album with rapper Jemini in 2003, but found sudden fame when The Grey Album dropped on the Internet like a bomb in 2004.
The Grey Album was a brilliant concept: Danger Mouse took the commercially released a capella version of Jay-Z’s seminal Black Album and mixed it with The Beatles’ seminal White Album. Every time I tell people about this for the first time, they’re utterly bewildered. They roll their eyes and assume that the album is just Jay-Z played over a bunch of Beatles songs. It’s much more than that. Danger Mouse set out to prove that oft-criticized practice of “sampling” was not stealing music, but cutting it apart and pasting it into wonderful new pieces of art, like the musical equivalent of a collage. The Grey Album chops and transforms Beatles songs into strange new configurations, while still preserving their original tone and matching them quite perceptively with Jay-Z’s vocals.
Copyright issues kept The Grey Album from every being officially released, but a group called Downhill Battle staged “Grey Tuesday” on February 24, 2004, hosting the full album on hundreds of sites across the internet. Sites were of course forced to take the album down by Beatles label EMI, but the damage had been done and it’s currently pretty easy to get your ears on a copy. The Grey Album launched the admirable “mashup” craze, as well as Danger Mouse’s career.
Former Blur frontman Damon Albarn contacted Danger Mouse and got him to produce the second Gorillaz album, Demon Days, and DM delivered another modern pop masterpiece. His efforts on the album got him a well-deserved Grammy. Up next he did The Mask and the Mouse with MF DOOM and teamed up with Cee-Lo to form Gnarls Barkley. Their first album, St. Elsewhere spawned the popular but ultimately overexposed hit “Crazy”, and a plethora of excellent tunes. The recent follow-up to St. Elsewhere, The Odd Couple, came after he produced The Good, The Bad, and The Queen for Damon Albarn’s unnamed British super-group, which I reviewed in detail a few months back.
This year Danger Mouse has produced albums for The Black Keys and Martina Topley-Bird and is working on Beck’s soon-to-be-released next album.
Rather than going into much greater detail about the golden touch of this be-afroed prodigy, I’ll let the music speak for itself. (Brought to you by YouTube, because I can’t figure out how to fucking upload mp3s here.)
“Encore”, from The Grey Album. A mash-up of the Jay-Z track of the same name and the Beatles songs “Glass Onion” and “Savoy Truffle”. This video, a fan creation dubbed “The Grey Video”, is pretty excellent.
“Kids with Guns”, by Gorillaz, from Demon Days.
“Smiley Faces”, by Gnarls Barkley, from St. Elsewhere.
“Nature Springs”, from The Good, The Bad, and the Queen.
- Sean, somehow DJ DangerFerret doesn’t sound as appealing.
MAY 2008







