Beatles vs Hip Hop

A few years ago ‘Dangermouse’ broke onto the scene, the reason behind his sudden rise of fame was that he had taken samples from ‘The Beatles’ ‘White Album’ and mashed them up with an a capella ‘Jay-Z’ ‘Black Album’ to create the now infamous ‘Grey Album’. It was initially going to be released on a small run however what happened changed both the lives of ‘Dangermouse’ and the music scene. EMI intervened and tried to stop the music from getting out, but the cat was already out the bag. As a result they started to build a lawsuit against ‘Dangermouse’ should he release the album commercially (as ‘The Beatles’ hadn’t cleared any of the tracks on the album for use). This lead to Grey Tuesday in which a movement to try and restructure the music industry which lead to a large number of websites hosting the album on their page for free download, this along with the added coverage that the album had received through both EMI’s public outcry about using the Beatles music and the favorable reviews which they had started to receive from ‘The New Yorker’, ‘NME’, ‘Rolling Stone’ meant that it became one of the most celebrated releases of the year, it was named the best album of 2004 by ‘Entertainment Weekly’ and was hailed as the greatest success of the mashup as it mixed two very different genres together.

After that release the world started to see ‘The Beatles’ being mashed up with everyone from ‘Metallica’ through to ‘The Jonas Brothers’, most of these remixes are pretty horrific however it was clear that the mashup had been elevated to new lengths.



Cut to 2010; its been 6 years since we heard ‘Jay-Z’ vs ‘The Beatles’ ‘Grey Album’. It’s appeared on countless top 100 album’s of the decade lists and hasn’t been forgotten, however nobody has tried to take on the baton from ‘Dangermouse’s superb album. This was until I came across a new mashup album; at 26 tracks long it’s definitely a full length album which could took over 2 months to create as each track is superb. So, who did ‘Tom Caruana’ chose to remix against ‘The Beatles’? None other than the ‘Wu-Tang Clan’, in my opinion it actually works a lot better than the ‘Jay-Z’ mashup. He has taken tracks from all of the members of the Clan, not the huge anthems that you would have expected him to use, there is no ‘Gravel Pit’ seen on this album. Instead the 28 year old music teacher from Brighton has chosen to use tracks such as ‘Forget Me Not’ by ‘Inspectah Deck’ from his solo album that was released in 1999, this was the first track that I heard from the album and it completely blew me away, it uses ‘The Beatles’ track ‘You won’t see me’ the results are actually mind-blowing! What I love about ‘Tom Caruana’s mix is that he has audio samples of interviews within the tracks which breaks up the album and gives it an additional level which wasn’t found on ‘The Grey Album’.


Raekwon Tweeting about the album

I am not sure what will happen next, will ‘Tom Caruana’ become a household name over the next few years like ‘Dangermouse’ has? Maybe; who can really say? He has been interviewed by the New York Times and produced what would be a great end to the mashup genre; unfortunately I can’t see that being the case. However I would highly recommend you to download the album and give it a listen as ‘Enter the magical Mystery Chambers’ will blow you away! It is a true masterpiece.