Black and White

No, I'm not talking about Michael Jackson. I'm talking about this:

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Forgive me if you're way hipper than I am and you already knew about this (it's about a year and a half old), but I just discovered it yesterday. A DJ well-known in underground hip-hop, Danger Mouse, took the a capella vocals from rapper Jay-Z's Black Album and remixed the songs exclusively using samples from the Beatles' famous White Album. I'm not really into Jay-Z--his lyrics usually seem kind of silly to me--and although I like the Beatles I can't say I'm a fanatic, but I think this is the coolest concept ever.

EMI and Sony--the people who own the rights to the Beatles' music--however, didn't agree. They threatened to sue Danger Mouse and anyone who carried his Grey Album on the internet (it never made it to an official release due to the legal conflicts, so it exists only as an electronic bootleg). But thankfully there exist organizations such as Stay Free!, who sponsor the Illegal Art exhibit, including a history and complete download of the album in order to protest laws that don't recognize the difference between stealing and sampling. I suspect that if Shakespeare were alive today, whoever wrote the original versions of Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo & Juliet would sue him. I mean, c'mon, people, this is art. Be flattered that someone used a few bars of your music to make something entirely different and move on.