But the backstage talent-show introductions that first got the still-Goodie Mob member and the still-obscure DJ to float some collaboration ideas first sprung up on a DM & Jemini release, 2003’s Twenty Six Inch EP. The specifics of how Danger Mouse and CeeLo first met are a little vague, in keeping with the air of mystery they wanted to maintain around the Gnarls Barkley project. (This time around, the answer to “what don’t you do” was “Fuck around!”) If the Gnarls Barkley partnership seems to make more sense in hindsight, it didn’t seem all that weird just going off what those two pivotal artists had done up to that point. Cee-Lo Green … Is the Soul Machine further solidified CeeLo’s rep as a do-anything sort of artist not simply content to coast off the genre-hopper smash success of fellow Dungeon Family member Andre 3000’s The Love Below, he made a point of streamlining his stylistic restlessness into a more classic hip-hop package that still let his weird side shine. Perfect Imperfections was ambitiously built to showcase CeeLo as a genre-defying eclecticist who could mess with R&B, gospel, rap, funk, psych, jazz, and even country naturally the album closes with a skit where he’s asked “Well damn, Lo, what don’t you do?” His response: “Bullshit! Hooo!“Ģ004 is where things really picked up: In the midst of the early-’00s mashup craze, Danger Mouse’s Beatles/Jay-Z fusion The Grey Album was a stunt-casting novelty that became famous off its premise and aged well off its execution ( of course “99 Problems” rips over beats sourced from “Helter Skelter”).
DM had just teamed up with longtime signed-and-dropped industry casualty Jemini The Gifted One, and dropped a 12″ of “ Take Care Of Business” which featured legendary shit-talker deluxe J-Zone and a beat that sounded like a kaleidoscopic dream-pop mutation of Slick Rick’s “Mona Lisa.” (An early sign of DM’s unconventional ear, he sourced that vibe from “ Poem Of Dead Song,” a 2000 deep cut from indie-psych greats Broadcast.) CeeLo, meanwhile, had just put out the modestly successful Cee-Lo Green And His Perfect Imperfections, his first solo record after splitting with crucial Atlanta rap icons Goodie Mob in the wake of World Party’s scattershot pop moves. The Lead-UpĪs 2002 came to a close, producer Danger Mouse and singer/MC CeeLo Green were in two different but increasingly adjacent spaces in hip-hop. Here it is from a few different points of view. The song, which was officially released on 3/13/06, may have been ubiquitous to the point of instant familiarity - hands up, who got it stuck in their heads partway through this first paragraph? - but the more angles you look at “Crazy” from, the weirder it gets that it’s had this much of an impact on pop music. But few acts of the aughts have that similar “where’d they come from”/”where’d they go” push-pull as Gnarls Barkley, whose “Crazy” made a one-hit wonder out of two artists you could hardly call that when separated. Tell somebody from the year 2006 that the song feels like a lucky yet brief radar blip in the midst of two wildly diverging musical careers, and they’d probably have the same reaction. Tell somebody from the year 2003 that the producer half of Lex Records cult-rap act DM & Jemini would team up with the recently solo Goodie Mob alumni CeeLo for one of the decade’s most definitive singles, and they’d think you were out of your mind.
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