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"Grey Album" mastermind hits it big with Gnarls Barkley |
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Written by By Jonathan Takiff, MCT
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Friday, 18 August 2006 |
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Copping his stage name from a favorite cartoon character and taking artistic inspiration from distinctive filmmaker Woody Allen, the artist known as Danger Mouse has become one of the most controversial and celebrated DJ mixologists/musicians/producers of recent years.
Things are really popping just now for the Mouse (aka Brian Joseph Burton) as one half of the equally cartoony Gnarls Barkley, an old-'n'-new, psychedelic soul collaboration with Southern fried singer/composer Cee-Lo Green, of Goodie Mob fame.
For several weeks, Gnarls Barkley's poppin' fresh debut album, "St. Elsewhere," has been hovering at the top of the Billboard album chart. Internationally, they've broken big with the lead track "Crazy," a chillin' groove delight that suggests Al Green wailing on some mind-altering drug. Now a greatly expanded version of Gnarls Barkley is on tour.
"We didn't just want to stand up there with me triggering the samples heard on the album," Danger Mouse shared in a recent chat. "I built a lot of the music from bits of obscure European movie scores. The pull and push of the pieces against each other is very important. The only way to do it up live is to get a whole bunch of people — 13 in all — up on the stage.
"We've got string players, backing singers, guitars, bass, drums and two keyboard stations, with me working at one on organ, Moog synthesizer and other electronics. There are no turntables and no sampling going on. So it's a really heavy thing we're pulling off."
Oh, and they're all showing up in in appropriately zany costumes, too _ some nights looking like future shock characters out of "A Clockwork Orange," other times playing in their pajamas, "or whatever we feel like."
Internet music devotees have been wise to this superhero since 2004, when Danger Mouse's infamous "The Grey Album" was the year's most downloaded and legally challenged music collection, and he earned a rep as the "world's most famous bootlegger."
That's a title he now finds a bit distasteful. "I'd hate to be thought of that way. It's not like I'm getting up in the morning and thinking, 'Hmmm, what am I going to bootleg today?' People are throwing music at me all the time now. Everything I use is authorized."
Back then, his "only goals" were to have fun and earn some attention for his craft. Danger Mouse's concept was to lay Jay-Z's raps from "The Black Album" atop musical licks and beats lifted from the Beatles' "White Album" and, in the process, create a helter-skelter hip-pop revolution that perked up all the mother nature's sons.
Rolling Stone called it "the ultimate remix record." Entertainment Weekly ranked it as "best record of the year."
The project was lumped into the burgeoning category of "mashup" productions, "but mine was different," the DJ recalled. "Mashups are just mixing one album on top of the other and hearing how the combination sounds. This was more deconstruction and reconstruction, pulling those two albums apart and putting them back together in a new, dynamic way. It was really more of an art project, with a lot of trial and error. It's really amazing how those two records could come together and sound so good."
Danger Mouse had put out remix albums before without raising the ire of record labels, which usually look the other way at such unauthorized projects because they create street credibility for their artists. But after he boldly sent out 3,000 "Grey Album" promo copies to music-industry folk, and those Internet file sharers went nuts, the corporate owners of the Beatles' catalog hit hard with cease-and-desist orders.
But high-profile organizations like the Electronic Freedom Foundation rallied to Danger Mouse's defense. Eventually the case was dropped, and it became a bit harder (though not impossible) to find "The Grey Album" online.
"I wouldn't change anything about the way it went down," said the mix master. "I learned a lot about myself, the record industry and other people that would save me a lot of future headaches. It was never intended to land me in jail, and I got off with the result I was hoping for _ getting people to talk about me, getting me into the industry. I've been keeping busy ever since."
British popster Damon Albarn rang him up and asked the dude to produce the second album of his cartoon-imaged group Gorillaz, "Demon Days." Then Danger Mouse collaborated with rapper MF Doom on "The Mouse and the Mask," a light-hearted romp loosely about and for the Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim."
And, of course, he also brought to fruition that years-in-the-making collaboration with Cee-Lo Green, whom he first met and impressed as a show-opening student musician at the University of Georgia in 1998.
Together, said Danger Mouse, the duo's joint identity is becoming "much bigger than the sum of our parts." He doesn't deny that their name sounds a whole lot like basketball legend Charles Barkley. But neither will he acknowledge it as an overt tribute.
"It started with people making puns on names. This one sounded like it could be a group or a person. Gnarls Barkley is an idea that represents what we were trying to do. There's something familiar about it, but it's not necessarily a tribute to anyone, which is how the music is, too. We were thinking about a lot of '60s psychedelic music, but not trying to emulate the sound of particular records as much as the spirit of the records — the idea of experimentation mixed with really strong melodies." | Only registered users can write comments.
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