When a producer from Atlanta released a collection of Beatles and Beastie Boys mashups in 2004 it set the remix music community on fire.
The self-made album from djBC, entitled The Beastles received both acclaim and controversy, with mashups including ‘Ladies Do Love Me’ a mashup from ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘Hey Ladies’, or ‘Tripper Trouble’ with ‘Day Tripper’, ‘Triple Trouble’ and ‘Three Is a Magic Number’ from Schoolhouse Rock, or ‘Mother Nature’s Rump’ with ‘Mother Nature’s Son’ and ‘Shake Your Rump’.
Not surprisingly the owners of all The Beatles’ intellectual property, Apple Corps, were none too amused by the mashup and sought to have it removed from the internet immediately. Undeterred, djBC released a follow up to 2004’s The Beastles, producing his second album named Let It Beast in 2006, with mashups such as ‘Belly Movin” mixing Beastie Boys ‘Body Movin” with ‘The Inner Light’ by The Beatles.
But the release of a second mashup album really set the copyright cat among the pigeons, ruffling the feathers at Apple Corps who oversaw the digital destruction of every copy of the album from the internet.
Both albums disappeared into the ether for close to a decade.Both albums disappeared into the ether for close to a decade, but the loss turned out to be only temporary. Deciding to take his chances, the mashup DJ re-posted both albums in full again last year, and announced that a third album is on the way.
This new album feature 20 tracks, one of which, “Ill Submarine,” has been released on YouTube with fun video art by Thriftshop XL. The song, which incorporates the Beasties’ “Alive” and the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine,” is another demonstartion that you can take two artists from across genres and create fun interesting music.
So where do The Beatles’ stand on all of this? We don’t really know. But we do know that John Lennon had a rather lax attitude towards copyright infringement.
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Responding to an article in the New York Times that accused the Beatles of “ripping off” certain black musicians who the band covered, Lennon argued that it “wasn’t a rip off, it was a love in”.
“It was only natural that we tried to do it as near to the record as we could,” Lennon said of ‘Money’, ‘Twist ‘n’ Shout’, and ‘You really got a hold on me’ which The Beatles used to sing in dancehalls around Britain.
“I always wished we could have done them even closer to the original. We didn’t sing our own songs in the early days – they weren’t good enough – the one thing we always did was to make it known that these were black originals, we loved the music and wanted to spread it in any way we could.”
“In the ’50s there were few people listening to blues – R + B – rock and roll, in America as well as Britain. Many kids were turned on to black music by us.”
Keep an eye on The Beastles website for the new album.
