I remember the first time I came across Danger Mouse. I was editing a shortlived music magazine called Rip & Burn (posthumously renamed Crash & Burn) and keeping my ear to the blogs. One morning, they were alive with news of long-playing mash-up of Jay-Z’s Black Album and the Beatles White Album. The web was already awash with mashups, most of them teeth-grindingly lame, so I was sceptical about this high-concept bootleg. Until I heard it.
Five years later, the Grey Album stills stands up. In particular, the inspired combination of Julia and Dirt Off Your Shoulder was enough to make me begin exploring Jay-Z’s back catalogue. For a short while. Turns out it was the chopped up Beatles I really admired.
And, of course, the man doing the chopping: Brian Joseph Burton, aka Danger Mouse – named after my second-favourite 80s animation. (Which also happened to be David Jason’s finest moment. In me humble.)
Since then Danger Mouse has created some stone-cold pop classics as one half of Gnarls Barkley, produced Beck’s best album in ages (Modern Guilt) and the brilliant Demon Days by Gorrilaz.
Dark Night of the Soul album cover - but where's the album?
So I was excited to hear about Danger Mouse’s new collaboration – with David Lynch and heroes of low-fi, Sparklehorse. (I’m ashamed to admit I only really knew Sparklehorse because main man Mark Linkous was wheelchair bound for many monts after falling unconscious and restricting the bloodflow to his legs while on tour with Radiohead. Fortunately he recovered, and I discovered Sparklehorse’s wonderful cover version of Go on the Late Great Daniel Johnston compilation.)
Sadly, You can’t buy Dark Night of the Soul on CD, or as a download, due to a dispute between Danger Mouse and everyone’s favourite former weapons manufacturer, EMI. The nature of the dispute is unclear – EMI released the previous collaboration between Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse, but this time round if you head over to the DNotS store and try to buy the album you’ll be paying $50 for a book of David Lynch pictures and a blank CD:
“Due to an ongoing dispute with EMI, Danger Mouse is unable to include music on the CD without fear of legal entanglement. Therefore, he has included a blank CD-R as an artifact to use however you see fit.”
Which is a bit of a shame, because the album sounds rather good (you can judge for yourself by listening to the stream over at NPR). Plus Danger Mouse did EMI a favour by exposing the White Album to a generation of hip-hop fans. I hope the disagreement is settled, because it’s been a long time since I felt the need to open Limewire – and I don’t think I can deal with the inevitable updates and spam files.
