Music
by Roy Kasten
Playing Wednesday, 17th at Gaylord with Red Hot Chili Peppers
St. John of the Cross, a 16th century Spanish mystic, described “the dark night of the soul,” the necessary descent on the way to salvation. His visions in the abyss of self-reflection were weird, beautiful and (in hindsight) all the redemption he needed.
Fast forward to late 2003: Brian Burton—a.k.a. DJ Danger Mouse—suffers through panic attacks while chopping, screwing and mashing together The Beatles’ White Album and Jay-Z’s The Black Album. Around the same time, he and Thomas Callaway—a.k.a. Cee-Lo Green—complete “Crazy,” a song of exquisite psychological torment that has become one of the most ubiquitous hits of the 21st century. The duo don a variety of guises (tennis players, super heroes, astronauts, scientists) and name themselves Gnarls Barkley.
Marketing campaigns included leaking the single early, and occluding their identities in ads that ask, “Who is Gnarls Barkley?” In the end, their conscious exploitation of visionary madness turns out to be more fun and profitable than either could have guessed: “Crazy” has dominated U.S. and U.K. charts and the duo have been nominated for four Grammys.
St. Elsewhere, Gnarls Barkley’s debut, is a carefully constructed concept record of psychological disintegration and funk recombination. Danger Mouse builds tracks from a head-spinning range of soundtrack samples and live grooves, while Cee-Lo sings macabre, introspective lyrics that recall Sly Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On. His high-on-soul vocals are pushed further by Danger Mouse’s brainy aesthetic.
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“I’ve never met anyone quite like Danger Mouse,” Cee-Lo says. “He is a walking iPod of music. At the same time, he’s a very regular guy. People wonder, how could a regular guy write ‘Crazy’? You’d think that would fall out of the sky. Danger Mouse is a very meat-and-potatoes guy, very intense, very meticulous. I need that. He’s the picket fence around my garden of wild flowers.”
Danger Mouse’s slashing and crashing approach to grooves coalesces fully on “Crazy,” a late-’70s Curtis Mayfield soul throwback that turns tension into a beautiful catharsis. “There was something so pleasant about that place,” Cee-Lo sings with a raspy ease. “Even your emotions had an echo in so much space.” The song doesn’t chill or thrill because it’s paranoid, but because it makes paranoia sound so delicious.
“You wouldn’t be able to see yourself in it if it was completely dark,” Cee-Lo says. “It’s like a starry night. Something dimly lit, moody or melancholy would be more suiting. Completely dark and detached? I disagree. So many people found it relevant, you know what I’m saying. Striking, yes. Honest, yes. The music is symbolic of a truth that we’re in denial of. It becomes even darker when you’re confronted with what you deny in your own life. It represents those thoughts and notions that we have to ignore so that we’re not bound by them.”
St. Elsewhere is bound by very little. From confessions of suicidal thoughts to munchkin voices whispering in the shadows, to medleys of Willie Dixon and the Violent Femmes, to heavily synthesized necrophilia to Katrina and the Waves—even the Wham! bounce and Galaga gaming whirrs of the album’s second single, “Smiley Faces.”
“We didn’t do it consciously,” Cee-Lo says of these echoes. “And not to imitate, but to revel in the same spirit. A lot of my private and unspoken inspiration is that era in music, which was colorblind, unbiased. It received and embraced everyone. The Eurythmics and Culture Club, the Talking Heads and Duran Duran. We all knew these records. We aspired to music of such broadness and diversity.”
Cee-Lo had already demonstrated his intuitive feel for reworking gospel, both in sound and vision, but on St. Elsewhere, even over chaotic pastiches such as “Storm Coming,” that revision is pushed as far as possible. And without ever invoking them directly, the album is an homage to his deceased parents, both ministers in Atlanta, and to his own enduring pain over losing them in his youth.
“Gospel is synonymous with praise,” he says. “I’m humble before my maker when I sing. I’m praising him not due to what the song is about, but in the motivation, somewhere in my mind, the memory of some pain, something tragic or traumatic, like when I lost my mother. It may not be in the actual song, but it’s always there in the way I am grounded and in what has driven me to art.”
St. Elsewhere’s greatest strength lies in its inversion of one of hip-hop’s greatest strengths: the album barely recognizes popular culture or draws political or aesthetic power from it. Instead, the songs tunnel inside private experience via a scrambled dystopia of funk and brittle rock. There’s a glimmer of salvation at the end of the journey, but only after facing your own truths—even if that means confessing, as Cee-Lo does on “Just a Thought,” that he’d just as soon check out.
“ ‘Just a Thought’ is exactly what it is,” he says. “You cannot be held in contempt for something that crosses your mind. I’m alive and well, and here to testify, that I myself have been that person, have been up against that wall. But obviously I’m here, I have endured and overcome.
“So the record is triumphant,” he concludes. “There’s a silver lining to all of it. Even the last line of that song is ‘I’m fine.’ ”