Revisiting The Grey Album Over 20 Years Later

When Jay-Z released The Black Album in 2003, it was originally planned to be his retirement album. While Hov didn't stay retired for very long, the album still felt like the end of an era. An inflection point in Hip-Hop. While a lot of that had to do with conversations over Jay-Z's own position as a Rap mogul and who was going to step into the void he was leaving behind, a whole different scenario was about to pop off just a few months after The Black Album's November 2003 release.

Cut to February 2004, and 26 year old producer Brian Burton, going by the name Danger Mouse, had taken the commercially released a cappellas from Jay-Z's The Black Album and remixed them with music from The Beatles' The White Album to create what would be known as The Grey Album.

While this was originally supposed to be a kind of insider art project for friends and followers, a copy of The Grey Album quickly got released online and passed around. By the time The New Yorker was writing about the project that same month, it was a wrap. The album was out in the ether and being copied & downloaded by the hundreds of thousands.

While listening to The Grey Album in 2025 might make some folks question what all the fuss was about in 2004. It had less to do with the wall-to-wall strength of the project itself and more to do with the context of it existing at all.

In a vacuum, The Grey Album is good. Obviously the technical prowess of Danger Mouse as a producer is on full display and accounted for. He's simply one of the best for a reason and, in the wake of The Grey Album, deserved to work with Gorillaz, MF DOOM, Black Thought, Beck, Cee-lo, and the myriad of other top artists that would come calling for his services over the next 20 years.

But, while there are definitely a handful of standout tracks that strike a perfect balance of merging the world of Jay-Z with The Beatles (Encore, What More Can I Say, 99 Problems), most of the remaining album feels a little too ad-hoc. As if Danger Mouse were at a club remixing & DJing on the fly.

But again, it's almost unfair to look too critically at The Grey Album. It was only ever meant to be a fun experiment. Not some groundbreaking work. So what sent the hype for it over the top?

Almost immediately after it started spreading online, The Beatles' label, EMI, busted out the cease & desists and threats of lawsuits galore if the toothpaste wasn't put back in the tube. But what exactly would have been their plan had it come down to that? You're going to sue a guy who made a personal art project he's not making money on, just because other people took it and shared it online. To say nothing of the fact that both Jay-Z & Paul McCartney gave the project their approval. Also, those a cappellas Burton used were available because Jay-Z's camp released them specifically so people could remix them.

The Grey Album was a major turning point in remix & mash-up culture. It showed that, thanks to the internet, you could carve out your own space and get funky & creative with the media you enjoy. Many people using that either as a stepping stone to bigger, more complex and original projects or just for their own expression. It was all now on the same playing field.

This was around the same time as sites like Newgrounds and less than a year away from the birth of YouTube. Both sites that would break the doors wide open as vehicles for remixing and adding to the long tail of popular existing media.

Even The Grey Album itself wasn't immune to this treatment, as Swiss directing duo Ramon & Pedro created a music video for 'Encore' that featured The Beatles concert footage edited to do things like have Ringo Starr scratching vinyl & John Lennon breakdancing.

Your own mileage on The Grey Album in 2025 will vary. But what can't be denied is how influential it was in the bigger context of the album becoming popular, thanks to the caliber of artists being remixed, as well as the immediate fallout opening so many people's eyes at a time when the scope of what you could produce yourself and put online was opening wider than ever.

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