Early 2004 was a more innocent time in 'Murica. The Iraq war had just
begun; we all naively thought it couldn't possibly get any worse than
GWB. Mainstream Internet usage had yet to hit a full decade; YouTube
didn't yet exist; social media, for all intents and purposes, barely
existed, and certainly hadn't been algorithmically honed to a
weapons-grade point against us 99.9-percenter plebes. Jay-Z had said he
was retiring from music with the release of The Black Album, and
somehow we believed him. Public Bittorrent was enjoying its golden age.
Some guy named Danger Mouse got a hold of the Black Album a
capellas on Bittorrent and mixed it with the Beatles' so-called White
Album to create The Grey Album, which was actually pretty
interesting, and propelled him to much more lucrative production
work.
But then, the ugly side: the next thing you knew, in an
early Bittorrent-driven version of clickbaiting, random white people
everywhere were enjoying making entry-hobbyist-level digital
juxtapositions of The Black Album with something else famous with
a color-related name or identifier made by other white people
(Metallica's so-called Black Album, Weezer's so-called Blue Album,
etc.). Most of these things were truly just bad and basically
unlistenable, but still got lots of downloads and Internet attention
because white people.
In the spirit of self-aware intra-cultural
commentary ("hey guys y'know this is all a pretty bad idea"), I made a
couple of quick beats out of of songs from Pavement's Slanted and
Enchanted-- the ownership of which on CD is perhaps the ultimate
cultural marker of obliviously privileged 90s whiteness-- and laid those
beats under Black Album vocal tracks as a joke, purely intending
to make fun of how out-of-control the white-amateur Black Album
mashup craze had become. This strategy for biting social parody seemed
to have predictably backfired when these tracks racked up tens of
thousands of downloads and the extraordinarily-white Pitchfork Media
started emailing for interviews.
Now working under the
unbelievably stupid one-off monicker dj n-wee ("ennui"; I totally knew how
awful it was at the time too), I then proceeded to quickly complete
a full-length project continuing the Jay-Z rhymes + Pavement-based beats
formula, matching each respective track on the 14-song Slanted and Enchanted with
the vocals from the same ordinal track on the 14-song Black
Album. While full of its share of what the kids used to call
"bugouts" (there were definitely finite limits to semi-trad hip-hop
beat-making out of Pavement samples), there are also some tracks here
that work decently, especially on side two.
Not really a
"mashup" in the normally-accepted sense so much as a beat-making
experiment trying to find out whether it is in fact possible to make
bangers from just about anything (and the answer is "ehhhh sometimes"),
The Slack Album is still probably my most widely-heard work by
several orders of magnitude. It could be worse, though; Squid Int'l
could have somehow topped the charts.
(For cut-by-cut sample
notes, click here, though this little inventory was written
a long time ago on a random night when I was in a really grouchy mood
and it's admittedly pretty annoying in tone.)
-RB