DJ Danger Mouse speaks out on the 'Grey Album,' his improbable rise to fame, and drawing anger from an industry. What happens when you mix The Beatles' "The White Album" with rapper Jay-Z's "The Black Album"? Well, you get a "Grey Album." And you also stir up a whole heap of controversy over copyright. The "Grey Album" is the product of DJ and music producer Brian Burton, aka DJ Danger Mouse. Burton landed smack in the middle of a huge gray area between sampling, mixing, and copyright law with his creation -- something Burton calls simple artistic creation. The Grey Tuesday protest, a mass act of virtual civil disobedience, took place Feb. 24 on nearly 200 websites, and was organized to fight record label EMI's effort to block Burton's "Grey Album" from ever being heard. EMI claims the copyright to The Beatles' classic 1968 album, and has called Burton's effort simple music theft. Jeanne Meyer, EMI's senior vice president for corporate communications, told TechTV Burton simply never got permission to use The Beatles' material. "He never, ever approached us to ask us for permission to use 'The White Album,'" she said. "He made an unauthorized use of it, and we asked him to stop." Sampling isn't new to music, especially for hip-hop artists. But in this case, Burton remixed two entire albums: the instrumentation from the "White Album" and the vocal tracks from Jay-Z's "The Black Album" -- Jay-Z's a cappella tracks that were released separately by Roc-a-Fella Records specifically for DJs and remixing. With sampling and borrowing music encouraged in hip-hop circles, Roc-a-Fella doesn't have a beef with Burton. But even with hip-hop albums, producers are supposed to get permission from copyright holders before sampling tracks on albums. Often, they have to pay to get permission. "I'm a huge Jay-Z fan, and I'm a huge Beatles fan," Burton said as he told TechTV of creating his controversial album from his studio, known as The Women's Room, because of its women's restroom sign on the front, red door. Burton took a damn-the-consequences approach to making the record, and even acknowledged that it's notoriously difficult to get permission to use Beatles' samples. He said he doesn't have the answers to the predicament he's landed in, but that he just wanted to make the record, and it became an obsession. "I had to tell myself, right from the jump, 'Do not even have discussions with anybody about the legal ramifications of it. Don't think about it,' 'cause it would drive me nuts. I wanted to do this project and if I thought that kind of thing while I was doing it, it would have driven me crazy," Burton said. If Burton had created the album and left it on his PC, he probably never would have been noticed. It's what Burton did next that got people's attention, including EMI's. He burned 3,000 CDs and gave them away because he wanted to share the album. And now, though no numbers are available yet, the album is said to be one of the hottest properties circulating on Internet file-swapping networks. According to Frank Lee at Waxploitation, Burton's management company, the CDs made their way to radio stations, records stores, and the Internet via the hip-hop underground. "People can't have it," Burton said of the album. "And people want what they can't have, and now it's a big buzz thing, and a lot of people want it." EMI did its best to keep the album out of anyone's hands. Earlier in February, the record label sent Burton a cease and desist letter telling him to stop. Burton said he did stop -- he stopped distributing the record, and stopped using The Beatles' tracks to create new works. Now, the cease and desist letters are being sent to the websites that originally hosted Burton's album. Most of the Grey Tuesday sites have since pulled down the controversial tracks. Still, it's widely available on file-swapping services. Burton said he can sample just about anything and make a hip-hop record out of it, but became obsessed with The Beatles' album and thought parts of it would sound great with Jay-Z's vocals. "I started deconstructing the record," he recalled. "I went through and took every guitar stab, every drum kick hit -- anything in between the singing because I wanted to use just the instruments. And I'd use some of their vocal stuff for percussive stuff here and there, but generally speaking, I just had to go in between all the grooves and take it all out." I think it turned out pretty cool," he said of his creation. "I'm surprised that so many people like it the way they do, cause it's kinda dirty and grimy... the way I made it for myself and friends and people who like this experiment kinda thing." Burton said he's now fielding questions and offers from various labels about potentially releasing the album in full. He said he thinks the album received so much attention simply because he took "the biggest band in the world, and mixed them with the current biggest rapper out right now. So yeah, you're gonna get a big reaction if you do that." Brian recently performed at a show this week in Las Vegas in partnership with Roc-a-Fella at the Rain nightclub at the Palms Resort. Burton said he was open and honest about his project from the start. He said he put information about the album up on his website, announcing that he was using the songs. Burton said he was also paranoid someone else would think of the idea to mix the two albums, and he spent hundreds of hours on the project. "I knew it was going to raise these questions after the fact once people started catching on to it," he said. "But I didn't know it was going to be on such a wide scale." Burton said he's flattered about the Grey Tuesday protests, and added that he didn't create the album to be a poster boy for any copyright battle. "I don't know what this means for the future," he said. "I don't know if someone were to take one of my legitimate records and take it and twist it all up and then put it out there and all these people were doing something with it, what I would think of it." Burton's not making any money off his "Grey Album." In fact, he says he lost thousands of dollars because of work he was unable to do while making the album. But if EMI wanted to release his now critically acclaimed work? "Sure let's go," he said. "I tried to look at it as if music is art and not a product. It's like, do you pay every time you look at a painting? Once it's in the air, it's a very hard question. But then, I make my living as a musician. I like getting paid for music that I do." Source: TechTV