Every finger painting kindergartner knows that when you mix white and black, you end up with grey, but when DJ Danger Mouse mixed acappella tracks from Jay-Z’s “The Black Album” with beats and samples culled from the Beatle’s “White Album,” he ended up with a lot of red tape and left his mark on the hip-hop landscape.Not since veteran producer Phil Spector filled out the last Beatle’s album with lush orchestrations has pop music been rattled to its core. Danger Mouse (a.k.a. Brian Burton) came up with the idea after hearing Jay-Z’s acappella version of “The Black Album.” “I had seen that there were these acappella Jay-Z records,” Danger Mouse told Rolling Stone recently. “I was listening to the Beatles later that day, and it just hit me like a wave. I was like, ‘Wait a minute – I can do this’.”

What he did was set off a firestorm. EMI records, which holds the copyrights to all Beatle’s recordings, served him with a cease and desist order to discontinue distributing the album, but to no avail; the floodgates had opened. Now available as an Internet bootleg, “The Grey Album” has begun to rival artists such as Outkast in terms of most Internet downloads according to the consulting firm Big Champagne, which monitors file downloads on major peer-to-peer downloading services. The firm’s data shows that over 100,000 people have copies of “The Grey Album” on their hard drives.

Sampling has been a part of hip-hop music since The Sugar Hill Gang sampled Chic’s “Le Freak” for their hit “Rapper’s Delight,” but Danger Mouse did more than simply lift a hook. According to a recent MTV interview, using only his home computer, he scoured the 30 tracks on “The White Album,” listening for a drumbeat, a horn note or anything he could craft into beats to accompany Jay-Z’s lyrics. On the track “Dirt Off Your Shoulder,” Danger Mouse uses Lennon’s tribute to his mother, “Julia,” to craft a frenzied half-beat that accentuates the Jigga’s bragging.

For “What More Can I Say,” Jay-Z’s send off to the rap game (He swears “The Black Album” will be his last.), the underlying track is George Harrison’s “(While) My Guitar Gently Sleeps.” In my opinion, the fit is perfect, the guitar tracks acting as church bells heralding the end of a brilliant career.

Though not the best album of the still new year, it is definitely the most artistically challenging and creative.