The Grey Video

Posted by Andy Baio

The Grey Video is the brilliant Jay-Z/Beatles music video mashup of DJ Dangermouse’s “Encore” off the infamous Grey Album.

The official site is down, likely a result of popularity or legality, and I don’t know if it’s coming back. Until then, I’m going to mirror the high-quality Quicktime version.

Download: grey_video.mov (Quicktime, 22 MB)

BitTorrent: grey.torrent (thanks, Kyle!)

Also, Matt Haughey is mirroring it.

Comments

    You’d think being the master mix artists they are that they could get more than one sample of a woman screaming to repeat over and over again. Annoying.

    Is there any legal way for the author of the video to perhaps sell it on DVD, I would definitely pay for a high quality copy, albeit not much more than 5-7$.

    Hmm, can’t say the screaming was done well. However, definately an impressive video. And cd for that matter.

    Good Day 🙂

    Maybe the screaming was looped like the footage was looped and sampled over and over like the music was sampled

    “You’d think being the master mix artists they are that they could get more than one sample of a woman screaming to repeat over and over again. Annoying.”

    What are you proud of? – Kim Peek

    yes, it’s genius… and proof that good art is more powerful than bad law. how uptight do you have to be to think that this kind of media manipulation is harmful to the original artists? the beatles’s lawyers + publishers have already shit their drawers. anybody know if jay-z has any objections to this? i bet not.

    thank god for the internet, where good ideas can’t be killed.

    Bah, the torrent seems to be down… Many thanks for the mirror, I tried to get this before failed.

    The site that I set the torrent up at (lokitorrent.com) is down–hopefully it will be live again shortly.

    The true spirit of freedom of expression, and a first class video, shame about the repetitiveness of the background but I’m willing to look beyond that

    Torrent was great, i got 60kB/s on a standard 512 broadband modem

    notice the r+p on the screen at the end. the guys behind the video (antoine and gilles) go by the moniker ramon&pedro, and have signed with partizan productions – you can see some of their other (rather nice) work at their site http://www.ramonandpedro.com

    thanx for the tip-off, and long live new distribution…

    Excellent video-quite humorous. When the drum kip converts to a dj booth and Ringo flips a record; CLASSIC!

    Jay-z approves of this because he went on tour with danjermouse doing the grey album. Just proves that Jay-Z truly is a music lover as well as an artist… he was fucking impressed with the album as any music lover would be….

    OH MAN that was beautiful!

    I’m not even a hip hop fan and I love and respect the grey album. This is just one rung higher on the ladder of awesome.

    This video is a disgrace to The Beatles and relates their talent with the processed crap out today, and it’s disgusting.

    P.S. The screaming is looped because the scene is taken from a scene of Hard Days Night, and back in the sixties they cut corners whenever they could.

    Glad to find this still up today (and the high quality .mov link still working too!).

    There’s been quite a few developments, obviously, since then with Paul McCartney enthusing over this to Ringo, George and Giles Martin (Beatles producers) and the Grey Album ‘mash up’ concept informing their Beatles ‘Love’ project with Cirque de Soleil and the resulting hit album. McCartney has said that ‘Love’ was already underway but that his hearing ‘The Grey Album’ and passing it on to George Martin definitely influenced their progress with it.

    McCartney had already long been enthusiastic about the sampling of Wings and Beatles records by hip-hop producers (quite against the line of his various music publishers) and with his solo stuff has been granting samples on demand (witness the famous Eryka Badu ‘twitter’ clearance of a sample from his ‘Arrow Through Me’, done at less than 24 hours notice) and took part in the excellent ‘Beatles and Black Music’ radio programme which detailed a lot of Beatle-sampling in hip-hop and related it to The Beatles’ own history of ‘acknowledged plagiarism’ of Motown basslines, drumlines etc in their earliest records.

    Of course, there is also no doubt that ‘The Grey Album’ led to McCartney and Jay-Z meeting and collaborating at the Grammy Awards.

    So all in all ‘The Grey Album’ and ‘The Grey Video’ captures well the very easy-going white/black trade-off that The Beatles and their samplists have been running back and forth for 50 years now!

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