I kind of got ahead of myself the other day by offering a fairly non-comital link to the Grey Tuesday website, but not explaining what it was all about. Well, sit yourself down and let Uncle Phil tell you all about it.



As you may be aware Jay-Z has recently 'retired' from hip-hop leaving behind a truly great (in my opinion anyway) album called The Black Album, at the same time he quitely released an acapella version of this album - pretty much inviting remixes.



You may also be aware of a group called The Beatles, they released something called The White album - apparenlty it did quite well, according to this article it sold almost 10 million copies.



Now enter DJ Dangermouse, taking The Beatles White album as a source for beats and loops, and adding Jay-Z's vocals from the Black album he's produced... wait for it! The Grey Album. A fantastic piece of production which despite the wide difference between the two sources works well - avid fans of each group may not completely approve of the result, but I think it's very respectful to both The Beatles and Jay-Z, the vocals and backing tracks are both treated with equal care and attention to detail.



The Grey Album was released in limited quantities, found it's way onto file-sharing networks for forward-thinking music fans to enjoy, and everyone was happy.



Now enter EMI, or as I prefer to refer to them: that bunch of twats EMI. They start slapping down record shops and forcing websites to remove the album for what seems to be no other reason than they can - dumb at the least, vindictive and wrong would be a more accurate description.



To completely deny access to a work of art (yes, I know thats a bit melodramatic, but technically that is what The Grey Album is) is one of the most ugly forms of cenorship there is. Also, from a business point of view this makes no sense: Beatles fan's and Jay-Z fans are likely to exist at opposite ends of the music purchasing spectrum, an album like this could serve to draw hip-hop fans into the Beatles music and people who normally like traditional Rock music into the world of hip-hop. If anything this could provide an increase in music sales - which is all the big record companies care about, they obviously don't care about the music...



Anyway, as I hope I've made clear, this album deserves the chance to be listened to. This is where Grey Tuesday comes in, to quote from there website:



Tuesday, February 24 will be a day of coordinated civil disobedience: websites will post Danger Mouse's Grey Album on their site for 24 hours in protest of EMI's attempts to censor this work.



So, if you get chance head off over there and they should be able to point you in the direction of where it can be downloaded from...



/end rant