Grey Tuesday

Check it out:

Tuesday, February 24 will be a day of coordinated civil
disobedience: websites will post Danger Mouse's Grey Album on their
site for 24 hours in protest of EMI's attempts to censor this work.
DJ Danger Mouse created a remix of Jay-Z's the Black Album and the
Beatles White Album, and called it the Grey Album. Jay-Z's record
label, Roc-A-Fella, released an a capella version of his Black Album
specifically to encourage remixes like this one. But despite praise
from music fans and major media outlets like Rolling Stone ("an
ingenious hip-hop record that sounds oddly ahead of its time") and the
Boston Globe (which called it the "most creatively captivating" album
of the year), EMI has sent cease and desist letters demanding that
stores destroy their copies of the album and websites remove them from
their site. EMI claims copyright control of the Beatles 1968 White
Album. Danger Mouse�s album is one of the most "respectful" and
undeniably positive examples of sampling; it honors both the Beatles
and Jay-Z. Yet the lawyers and bureaucrats at EMI have shown zero
flexibility and not a glimmer of interest in the artistic significance
of this work. And without a clearly defined right to sample (e.g.
compulsory licensing), the five major record labels will continue to
use copyright in a reactionary and narrowly self-interested manner that
limits and erodes creativity. Their actions are also self-defeating:
good new music is being created that people want to buy, but the major
labels are so obsessed with hoarding their copyrights that they are
literally turning customers away. This first-of-its-kind protest
signals a refusal to let major label lawyers control what musicians can
create and what the public can hear. The Grey Album is only one of the
thousands of legitimate and valuable efforts that have been stifled by
the record industry-- not to mention the ones that were never even
attempted because of the current legal climate. We cannot allow these
corporations to continue censoring art; we need common-sense reforms to
copyright law that can make sampling legal and practical for artists.

Click here for a list of servers hosting the Grey Album.

UPDATE: This album is fucking sick. Get it while you can.

Posted by flow Frazao on February 24, 2004 at 06:33 PM | Permalink