Stop the music

For record producer Danger Mouse, it was perfectly natural to combine the vocals from rapper Jay-Z’s “The Black Album” with the music of the Beatles’ “White Album.” The result, naturally, was “The Grey Album,” and it has become an underground sensation since it surfaced in late January.

For the giant record label EMI Music, it was equally natural to send a cease-and-desist order to the L.A.-based artist and to outlets that were selling the work. Last week’s action put a lid on the record’s limited “street release,” but in the age of file sharing and CD burning, it’s not likely to stop the spread of “The Grey Album.”

This high-profile skirmish in the pop-music wars is an intriguing collision of the newest technology and musical styles and themes as old as artistic obsession and property rights. Among the issues it raises: Is a record-maker justified in using unauthorized materials if that’s the only way to fulfill a vision? And does calling a record “an experiment” and declining to make money from it excuse the appropriation of protected material?

Ironically, the unexpected attention accorded “The Grey Album” probably contributed to its suppression. After all, mouse-wielding producers have been creating “mash-ups” -- a mix of one record’s vocals with another’s instrumentals -- for at least a decade on an underground level. These records are played in clubs and passed around on the Internet and as bootleg CDs. No clearances, low profile, no problem.

Danger Mouse, whose real name is Brian Burton, tried to keep things similarly unassuming with “The Grey Album,” pressing only a few thousand CD’s and giving most of them away. He did sell some in an unsuccessful effort to cover his costs.

But when “The Grey Album” got written up not just in record-geek chat rooms but also on CNN and MTV, the game was up.

A representative of EMI, which controls the Beatles’ recordings, said that company policy prohibited comment on legal matters. But a source at the label confirmed that a cease-and-desist order was sent to Burton and to some retailers and EBay resellers.

“We do that as a matter of course,” the source said. “It’s automatic as we protect the works of our artists.... Sampling has become a real creative element in music today, and the music industry has a process to clear those things. It’s allowed when permission is granted and parties have been notified.”

But Burton knew that the Beatles never authorize samples of their music, and here he was burning up to use 45 minutes of one of their most revered albums.

(He figured that Jay-Z, whose vinyl release of an a cappella “Black Album” was widely seen as a tacit endorsement of creative mashing, has no problem with his work, though he hasn’t heard anything directly.)

“The Beatles just don’t do it, they don’t grant clearances for anything,” Burton, 26, said this week, sitting on a couch in the living room of his Mt. Washington home and studio. “That’s what I was told by enough people on the inside, so I didn’t chase it up.

“The whole idea of it being legal or not -- can you see how I couldn’t think about that? What? Was I supposed to not do that whole thing just because I’m not supposed to?

“I took it into my own hands and I just did it. I’m not trying to do it with malice, I’m not trying to take sales away from anybody. In fact, I think it’s getting a lot of people into both of these [acts] that might not normally do it.”

At the center of this fuss is an audacious tour de force that ingeniously weds the biggest rock band of all time with one of today’s biggest stars. At first listening, it sounds a little like a stunt, but before long the mix of Jay-Z’s raps with the sounds of “The White Album” -- painstakingly deconstructed and reassembled into altered forms of the familiar strains -- becomes a merger of equals, Brooklyn boasts and Liverpool lilt forming a bond that’s entirely, well, natural.

“I was cleaning up my room one day looking for something and I was listening to ‘The White Album’ and it just popped into my head,” Burton said. “It just hit me, boom, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is gonna work, this is gonna work.’ I don’t know how or why, I just knew it was gonna work, and I started right then and there, and for 2 1/2 weeks I didn’t leave my room -- well, I did once or twice, but generally, 10, 12 hours a day, till it was done.

“It sounds cheesy, but it’s for the love. That’s why I did it. It was so gratifying. When I was finished, it was the biggest sense of accomplishment I’ve had over anything.”

This isn’t the first time Burton matched hip-hop with the Beatles. When he was attending the University of Georgia in the indie-rock mecca of Athens, he would mash rappers and rock bands and make copies to sell in stores or at his DJ shows.

Burton was used to unlikely blends. He grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in New York City listening to ‘80s pop and hair bands, as well as his sister’s hip-hop and his parents’ R&B.; He got heavily into hip-hop when the family moved to Georgia, then deliberately diversified during his college years.

He made a couple of instrumental albums under the name Pelican City that found some success at college radio, then moved to London and signed with Warp Records. “Ghetto Pop Life,” a 2003 teaming with rapper Jemini, earned high acclaim, and the two are almost finished with the follow-up. Burton has also been added to the bill of the Coachella Festival in May.

“The melding of everything, that’s how it comes to me doing this record,” said Burton, who moved to Los Angeles last March. “It makes so much sense to me.... I wanted it to be a catalyst for people putting different genres together. What I hate is when you have a rock section of reviews and then a hip-hop section. It’s so disrespectful.”

His pride in his product makes its fate hard to swallow, but he’s looking on the bright side.

“The cease and desist was bound to happen; I’m just lucky that it took so long and a lot of people have heard this now. People are still gonna be able to find it. It’ll be hard, but this is just gonna make the demand even higher.

“Every morning when I wake up, I get like 50 e-mails from people -- ‘Can I get it?’, ‘Where can I get it?’ I can’t tell them anything. I’ve even got e-mails from VP’s at EMI saying, ‘This is amazing, I heard it in my friend’s car, I’ve got to get a copy.’ ”