The people’s music is defined by a series of contradictions that make for uneasy listening. Music is human but needs to work with instruments and machines. Its grooves, riffs and vernaculars belong to the people. But their recorded performances are largely owned by a few corporations that manufacture music as properties for sale. The copyrighted archives are sonic plantations to be harvested for the accumulation of capital. However, the elaborate media-industrial-technological infrastructure that sustains and networks the commerce in music offers plenty of opportunities for piracy and democratic communication. Consumers may share the gift of music, becoming distributors and even producers, thus bringing the separation of these categories into question.

Marked by another doubling or tension – that of repetition and rupture – popular music culture rewinds as it moves forward. Memories are burnished and mobilized. Echoes haunt us, traditions are cited and buried sounds exhumed. The back catalogue is plundered. The aural meeting of past and the present can be smooth and fluid. But it can also be cut by the friction of the crackle or glitch. Even when simulated, these noises remind us of the unbridgeable gap between then and now. But in the re-iteration of these pasts, new futures are dreamed and sculpted in music. In his Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1985), French economist Jacques Attali claimed that ‘Music is prophecy. Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things; it is not only the image of things, but the transcending of the everyday, the herald of the future.’

Attali’s compatriots Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari took this to the level of the microscopic in their philosophical treatise A Thousand Plateaus (1987). They suggest that ‘it may be that the sound molecules of pop music are at this very moment implanting here and there a people of a new type, singularly indifferent to the order of the radio, to computer safeguards, to the threat of the atomic bomb.’

In suggesting the power of music to produce a new kind of human subject, Deleuze and Guattari extend an emphasis on the micrological in many religions, philosophies, critical theories and aesthetics. Their development of concepts like the refrain (that marks out territory), the rhizome, the nomadic and the assemblage have made them influential for understandings of cultural processes in a networked world. Microscopic sounds encoded in mp3s are like viruses that reproduce, circulate and mutate. Technologies and copyright regimes regulate and police their presence. But digital images, sounds and words are received, tagged and sent onwards and across networks, legal and dubiously legal channels, to other desktops and mobile devices. Along the way different types of software enable a wide set of operations, a few of which are neatly captured by the robotic vocals and lyrics of ‘Technologic’ (2005), an electronic dance track by another French duo, Daft Punk:

Plug it, play it, burn it, rip it,
Drag it, drop it, zip, unzip it,
Lock it, fill it, call it, find it,
View it, code it, jam, unlock it,
Surf it, scroll it, pose it, click it,
Cross it, crack it, switch, update it

This is the culture of the loop and sample, the remix and re-edit, the nip and tuck. Audiovisual material is plastic putty for the creative playpen. As the zeroes and ones of digital code, the texture of music morphs and rematerializes as new and strangely familiar sounds, pumping out of computers and sound systems, phones and personal music players. Arguments continue to rage as to whether these tendencies make popular music hypermodern or postmodern. The principles of montage and synthetic hybridization are, after all, well established aesthetic strategies. The ability to radically remove and resituate sonic bodies and audio spaces tempts us with its promise to transgress boundaries, switch codes, reconstitute music canons and complicate identities. If the difference between black and white does not melt away, then at least the contrasts comes into relief.

The mash-up is a now ubiquitous musical form that embodies and intensifies these techno-cultural logics. It combines different elements of two or more recordings to create a new composition. That such pieces are often termed ‘bastard pop’ acknowledges the discomfort for some in accepting the illegitimate progeny of digital call and response. While pop has continually cannibalized its past, the designation ‘mash-up’ as a genre only appeared widely in the early 2000s. Music critic Simon Reynolds has described the mash-up’s appeal as ‘mild irreverence’, suggesting that ‘the punk attitude to the form is as a kind of retaliatory vomiting of force-fed pop’. But these mash ups usually display affection as well as irony in their re-organization of familiar musical elements. They also often juxtapose sounds from styles, genres, artists and historical periods regarded as incompatible or incongruous. Popular songs generate many mash-ups.

Such an example is Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album, released in 2004, by no means the first or the last mash-up album, but a significant and now canonized example of this aesthetic strategy. Danger Mouse is African-American DJ and music producer Brian Burton, now a member of the duo Gnarls Barkley and a producer of several successful recording artists. The Grey Album combines the voice of African-American hip-hop MC/rapper Jay-Z (Shawn Carter) from tracks on The Black Album (2003) with instrumental and vocal samples from The Beatles’ eponymous 1968 album, better known as The White Album due to the colour of its gatefold sleeve. An a cappella version of The Black Album had been released precisely to facilitate remixes and mash-ups of Jay-Z’s recordings. Danger Mouse set himself the discipline of bringing these two collections of songs into dialogue with one another within these parameters. Like many artists before him, he was crossing over, traversing one of the major fault lines in American popular music, that racialized division between black and white music, the rhythm ’n’ blues/soul/funk tradition and the rock (‘n’ roll) that appropriated and usurped it. If black vocals, rhythms and timbres had provided much of the backbone and backbeat for white artists at least since the Jazz Age, the virtual reality of The Grey Album made The Beatles the backing group and vocalists for Jay-Z, a role reversal reinforced by Justin Hampton’s drawn artwork for the release. The MC as a dark figure in the foreground stares head-on at us purposefully while four glum Beatles peer out from behind him in the greyness. The group was on the point of disintegrating several times during the recording of The White Album in London. The eclectic range of songs, many of which had been written during the group’s stay with the Maharishi in Rishikesh in 1967, were inspired by Caribbean idioms, English music hall and folk, American blues and country, psychedelia and proto-heavy metal; even avant-garde tape experiments that were precursors to the sampling techniques of hip-hop. The White Album has become one of those cultural events that now signposts the end of the 1960s, due in part to the break-up of The Beatles but also to Joan Didion’s book of essays The White Album (1979) and the association of the song ‘Helter Skelter’ with the murderous cult leader Charles Manson. The Black Album, meanwhile, demonstrates Jay-Z’s masterful lyrical flow over the beats of several of hip-hop’s major producers and command of his own myth as hustler and rap mogul. These elements make the blend with The Beatles in Danger Mouse’s sound design more impressive. Though The Grey Album was distributed online this critically lauded rapprochement between black and white on a number of levels was deemed illegal by EMI, who issued a ‘cease and desist’ letter as owners of the copyrights for these Beatles recordings. The Grey Album then became the focus for copyright activists who decided to make it available for download from several websites on Grey Tuesday, 24th February 2004. Ironically, one of the most emblematic recordings of the new millennium continues to be an illegal download. The law seeks to be black and white, while truth, justice and art are grey.

Dr. Nabeel Zuberi is a senior lecturer in the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies at the University of Auckland. He is the author of the book Sounds English: Transnational Popular Music (2001) and the forthcoming Understanding Popular Music.

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