Maybe pop music success just boils down to naming your song “Crazy.” The title’s history is a good one. There’s Patsy Cline’s woozy, weepy ballad; Seal’s cool ’90s hit; Aerosmith’s… Now Gnarls Barkley has taken it to the top of the British charts and it’s starting to make an impression here.
You couldn’t ask for a better single than “Crazy.” Its stuttering, opening line grabs you right away — “I remember when — I remember, I remember when I lost my mind/There was something so pleasant about that place…” — and you’re hooked into the momentum of a song punctuated by ghostly oooooh background vocals and the funk-soul wail of the chorus.
Gnarls Barkley is not a person, but rather a collaboration, between rapper/vocalist Cee-Lo Green and DJ Danger Mouse. The latter is known for The Grey Album, his mash-up of the Beatles’ White Album and Jay-Z’s Black Album. Cee-Lo was a member of the Atlanta hip-hop group Goodie Mob.
To hear Cee-Lo sing on St. Elsewhere is to wonder why he ever bothered to do anything else. I remember hearing the Timbaland-produced song “I’ll Be Around,” from 2004’s Cee-Lo Green… Is the Soul Machine on the radio, but it wasn’t that song that made me add his solo album to my wish list — it was “Crazy.” Green is relentlessly on point — screeching, crooning and harmonizing over himself in a way that recalls Terence Trent D’Arby, and even sometimes Erykah Badu. He can go from sounding like he’s moaning an old spiritual to sounding like he’s a newfangled preacher.
The cover of St. Elsewhere looks a lot like it feels, and the mentally-unstable theme pervades more than the hit single. With its eerie organ accompaniments and low, lamenting choruses, it sometimes feels like an episode of Scooby Doo crossed with a Motown reunion.