by CeeLo Green
There were many times growing up in the Dirty South when I wondered if the big mistake was not my father dying so young but me being born at all. My body was too short, my head was too big, I was strange and I dressed different, so I would get picked on. Sometimes I felt like I was just one big mistake. And there were people along the way who took one look at me and told me that I looked like a mistake too. For a long time, I didn’t know if I had any purpose for being here. I looked different and I felt different.
I was always trying to test the theory that I was a mistake of some sort. You know the RCA dog they called Nipper, how he cocked his head and gave that quizzical look. As I got older, I could see people giving me that Nipper look from every direction. I got used to that look. It wasn’t really hate—it was more like “he’s peculiar.” And I wasn’t dumb—I could feel confusion from people then. I can feel it now. And I’m still just as determined as I ever was. And I still in an instant would protect and defend my right to be exactly who I am.
I know now that I am not a mistake, that I have a purpose and a gift from the Creator. But that’s a big statement for me, and it took a long time for me to get there.
The truth is that just like the voices on the radio helped me find my voice, television taught me everything I ever really needed to know about the world. It gave me a vocabulary, it showed me how to talk to people. The way that I see it I have always been a bit like that strange, little blond girl staring at the TV set in Poltergeist. That little girl was me—and I look just like her too, don’t I? All kidding aside, growing up TV was my favorite teacher, and too often it was my best friend as well. Television was shelter, and security, and solace—all of it broadcast straight into my home in color—wherever my home was at the moment. For me, TV always seemed supernatural and extraordinary, yet it was accessible to anyone who paid enough attention. Trust me, I’ve always paid full attention to the TV—unlike I did to the poor teachers at school.
They say we are all created equal. Well, we may all be equal in opportunity but we are not in ability, and for some reason, I have always had this odd—sometimes very odd—ability to focus. I was never much for the skill sets in reading, writing, or arithmetic. Those studies somehow left me cold. Yet there is a skill set to focusing too, and it’s one I acquired early. First, I focused on those voices in my head. Next, I focused on how people acted on TV, and I tried to act and communicate like they did. I’ve always been a sponge—a big sponge soaking up everything that I’m exposed to and somehow making it my own in the process. There have been many times in my life when I have come across as rude to the people around me just because my focus can get so intense when I’m watching or listening to something. I don’t mean it that way. Please don’t blame me for it—it’s who I am. For better and for worse, I am a true product of pop culture.
In retrospect, I think a lot of people use television and the radio to shut life out, but as a child, I did precisely the opposite. For me, music and then television were my windows into what a better life could potentially sound or look like. Sometimes they were the only windows I could see through. I learned to speak well by watching the characters I loved on TV just as I learned how to sing from all the men on the radio. But what I learned from the songs I heard and the shows I watched went way beyond that. They taught me about walking and talking—the rhythm of life, which if you think about it is very percussive. Everything I heard on the radio and saw on TV became the music of my mind that I’m still listening to closely. I’m always thinking in circles and patterns, and cursive calligraphy. I always see these beautiful things in my mind—like my life is one long-running TV show with a fiercely moving theme song that I’m still writing.
I love great TV theme songs. I especially loved the Soap theme, and of course there were more famous theme songs like Sanford & Son’s, for which the all-time genius Quincy Jones was responsible. I just found out recently that Quincy did Ironside too—and I loved that one. Not long ago, I was talking about great TV shows with my country Voice buddy Blake Shelton and for some reason he asked me if I remembered Benson. I immediately began singing the theme song from memory because those old shows hit very deep with me. They weren’t just sitcoms to me—they were life; they were an escape and an alternate reality that seemed a little more predictable and stable than my own.
Big Gipp: I grew up in neighborhood where Jean Carne lived. She was one of the biggest seventies’ stars. In Atlanta in that time, you had Gladys Knight, Jean Carne, Peabo Bryson, all these soul stars of the seventies. They would shop at the mall on Saturdays with no bodyguards, not like today. We saw all the wrestling stars too. We never thought of it as “us” and “them.” It was “we,” all mixed together. It helped with building the scene at the time.
In the eighties there were only a few record labels, and most music was local. We didn’t really turn into a real music city until the nineties, when L.A. Reid and Babyface came to town. It changed the city, and the attitude of people who wanted to be in music. All of a sudden Whitney Houston showed up in Atlanta, and Bobby Brown was around. And now we were seeing actual stars and artists doing it—right now. So we felt like—hey, this is our time! We thought, we don’t have to make music for the locals anymore, let’s make music for everybody. All of us were coming up together—the girls in TLC lived down the street from me all their lives. Rico Wade stayed up the street. Dallas Austin was the first breakout star from Atlanta, leaving school at sixteen and moving to Los Angeles. It was like, Yo! We got actual people that we grew up with who are making actual waves in the music business! So it helped with us formulating who we wanted to be. Dallas came first, then came Jermaine Dupri. His father was a big rap promoter and brought Fresh Prince and some New York acts to Atlanta. So we saw the best. But because we were raised to think for ourselves, when our generation started making music, we never just followed what other artists were doing. I feel like it’s where we come from that makes us go to the studio thinking we can change somebody’s life.
My tastes in life and in music have always been unusually varied. In the beginning, I was introduced to music by the greats—by those soulful voices on the radio that became my first father figures. Then gradually, slowly but surely, I discovered the music of my own generation—all kinds of music. My uncle Ricky was an amateur DJ with a huge record collection. I would spend hours and hours over at his place, listening to the music and memorizing everything on the record labels and jackets—writers, producers, sidemen, everything. My knowledge became deep and encyclopedic—and ecumenical. Soon there were all sorts of other voices that spoke to me—like Prince, who blew my mind wide open then and still does every time I hear him. Or Michael Jackson, who worshipped Jackie Wilson and James Brown too, and had learned their lessons way before me and then created something all his own that will live forever. And don’t even get me started talking about the genius of Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Bobby Womack, and Sly Stone. Then there were all the rockier voices that spoke to me too, like Mick Jagger singing “Miss You” with the Rolling Stones. I loved singing along with “Miss You” so much that when I think back, I’m pretty sure I must have been missing someone pretty badly myself. I also loved Boy George and Culture Club and Duran Duran—and we should never forget Kiss.
Kiss scared the shit out of me growing up, and you have to study and examine what scares you because it means that on some level it connects with you. So I was frightened, but I was locked in, because you couldn’t miss them and you could never forget them. They created a sort of comic book version of rock and roll and that was right up my alley. I had a Kiss lunch box for a while. I also had a Bee Gees lunch box. I love the Bee Gees too. At the same exact time, I loved George Clinton too, and still do. I’ve always been drawn to artists who will go to extremes to spare your soul and blow the cobwebs out of your mind, the ones who change the game and redefine the rules. I am a student of that.
The first singles I ever acquired came into my hot little hands because my sister, Shedonna
, bought them for me. I will always be grateful to her for buying me the ABC single “Look of Love,” which came out in 1981. I really loved ABC—those were some funky British white boys making true “Lady Killer” music. Shedonna bought me “Wild Thing” by Tone Loc, and later “It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over” by Lenny Kravitz. I loved that song then and I still do now.
In the end, music helped save me, and Lord knows I was already needing some saving from an early age. Shedonna remembers how my lifelong passion for music led me to shoplift early on. “As a kid growing up, Lo would always head to the magazine section at the grocery store and take all the Right On! magazines, or the Jet magazines or whatever publication that had some about music inside it,” she remembers. “Anything that had to do with music, Lo wanted it, and he was going to get that magazine the best way he knew how, whether Mom was going to pay for it or not.”
If the magazine had anything to do with secular music, Mom was definitely not going to buy it for me. When I was around four years old, our mother started getting serious about her religion. Our grandmother is a Methodist, and we went to church with her when we were staying there. But Mom liked a more fiery style of preaching and a more Pentecostal relationship with the Spirit. First we started going to Grace Covenant Baptist Church, where Mom—never one to do anything halfway—got herself ordained as a minister. She sang in the choir and made announcements. Sometimes she’d call for the offering when we needed money to pay the bills. She became friends with the pastor and his family, who used to babysit us. Every Friday night they’d come over for a supper of salmon croquettes and biscuits.
I used to love watching Mom preach, which she did part time. But when she really got into the Spirit, it sometimes scared the mess out of me and Shedonna. We used to go to tent revivals, and Shedonna and I would huddle together when our mother got in the line for a special prayer. We were afraid she would catch the Holy Ghost and pass out. And then what would we do? She caught the Holy Ghost a lot at that Baptist Church. It scared me to see her flailing around like that, but it also gave me an opportunity for some mischief. Shedonna remembers at least two times when I’d fake the Holy Ghost and fall on the floor. My mother would not be amused.
A few years later we switched to a full gospel church called the Fellowship of Faith. They used to speak in tongues, which also scared the mess out of us. The first time we saw them gargling and jabbering and carrying on, Shedonna looked at me and said, “I mean, are these people crazy? What is this, voodoo?!” Whatever it was, we wanted no part of it, and we’d sneak out when we knew that part of the service was coming up. We’d sit in the car for a while then get back in place before church was over and Mom found us.
There were a lot of good things about church too. Most of it musical. Every Friday night we had to go to what’s called “family enrichment” and then go to church very early every Sunday morning. To make it more fun, I started singing in the choir and doing Bible raps for the congregation. We learned all the books of the Bible from something called “Bible Break,” which I quickly memorized. “Lo’s gospel raps became a phenomenon at our church,” Shedonna remembers. “So Lo could save souls even when his was in danger.”
It turns out that Shedonna understood me pretty well—maybe better than I understood myself at the time. She knew that while I was singing like an angel at church, bad things were starting to happen out on the street. The devil was sitting on my shoulder, and there was a battle going on inside me for my very soul.
CHAPTER TWO
Crime and Punishment,
or Chickenhead Goes to Military School
Born into these crooked ways
I never even ask to come so now
I’m living in the days
I struggle and fight to stay alive
Hoping that one day I’d earn the chance to die
Pallbearer to this one, pallbearer to that one
Can’t seem to get a grip ’cause, my palms is sweatin’…
—Goodie Mob, “I Didn’t Ask to Come”
SCHOOL DAYS
Here I am apparently doing some higher learning while a student at Riverside Academy, a place that had a big impact on my life in a short time.
People called me “Chickenhead.” Then they ran the other way.
Today, the world knows me as that sweet, soulful black guy on some hit TV show. But I haven’t come this far in my life to have to bullshit anybody. I come to speak the truth—my truth. I may look as if I’ve always been a pussycat, like Purrfect, that pretty white creature you may have seen me stroking so lovingly and gently on The Voice. Please trust me, I haven’t always been that way. Not even close. However you want to spell the word, I am rather far from perfect—and somewhere deep in the Atlanta police files, I no doubt have the juvenile record to prove it.
So here is a little taste of reality for you. Just like all the most interesting heroes in your finer comic books, the truth is that right from the beginning, I’ve always had a little villain deep inside me too. I’m kind of like Two-Face in reverse. Which is interesting, because I’m a Gemini, and two faces come naturally to me. Then and now, I try to embrace all sides of my own character, especially now that I seem to be living such a happy ending. They say that before you can get high, you’ve got to get low, and as a kid growing up in Atlanta, I got pretty low—and as you’ll see, eventually I got pretty damn high too.
So let us then get real. Back in the day, before I became the lovable, ready-for-prime-time character who I am today, I was a damned effective little criminal—with the emphasis on damned. If you wanted to give me the benefit of a few doubts, the best that you could say for me was that growing up, I was sort of half angel and half devil. I may have been doing Bible raps and singing in the choir, but as soon as I got out on the streets, my more devilish half was definitely getting his due. For better or worse—mostly worse, I’m sure—doing bad things felt like second nature to me.
So at an age when other kids might be out selling lemonade, I stole my ass off. Looking back at it now, I’m trying to think what was going through my head. I’m not trying to make excuses for my bad behavior here, but maybe I felt as if life had already ripped me off by stealing my father away from me before I even got a chance to know him. Whatever it was that had been stolen from me early on, I couldn’t wait to try to get myself a little payback.
I started out shoplifting, trying to be sophisticated, then regressed to just snatch and grab. I remember one time cutting school with friends—which we loved to do whenever possible—and taking the train to an Atlanta Braves game downtown. The mischief began with us just fooling around on the train and grabbing people’s hats. Mind you, I was a criminal with some conscience, so I didn’t bother old people, for instance. No, I liked to pick on people closer to my own age or a little older. Soon I moved on from grabbing hats to stealing starter jackets and shoes. It was a slightly more innocent time when all the rage was kids stealing Air Jordans. Truth be told, I’m not proud of this, but I made lots of people take off the shoes on their feet and hand them over. What I was accused of—and frankly, mostly guilty of—was what is sometimes called strong-arm robbery. I intimidated people into giving me whatever I wanted at that specific moment. These weren’t crimes of passion—more like crimes of convenience. I wanted things, so I took things. From sneakers, I moved on to jewelry and anything else shiny that caught my eye. Thinking back, I was sort of like a shorter, younger version of that character Deebo from the movie Friday that starred Ice Cube and Chris Tucker. Yet I wasn’t the star of any movie other than the one constantly running in my head. Instead, I was just some little neighborhood thug always making trouble in the streets.
In some strange way, I think a hero is really just a villain who’s had a change of heart. I’m trying to be honest here, and not too cavalier, because in the end, most of my crimes may have been petty, legally speaking, but not to the innocent people who got robbed. Those poor people were probably truly scared and paid an emotional price for
being threatened and taken advantage of by a street thug like me. For what it’s worth—which is probably not nearly enough—I am sorry.
In my own weak defense, I hardly ever stole at gunpoint. The thing is that I didn’t usually need a gun because people sensed somehow that I was not to be messed with. I guess I always came across like a bad kid who looked like he didn’t have a lot to lose. In a way, I felt like I didn’t.
Growing up the son of two preachers, I heard a lot about sin and salvation—and right away I was interested in the whole combo platter. The way I saw life, it was never as simple as good and bad—it was always good and evil in my world. I associate both good and evil with the Spirit, they seemed somehow Supreme to me. Growing up without a father figure, moving from place to place, being a highly impressionable child, I felt like I was an ideal dwelling for good and evil, so that both instincts kicked in powerfully at different times. I leaned more toward the evil back then. I’ve become measurably sweeter since then. But make no mistake, I still see the darkness and the light, and I understand both. It’s like Walt Whitman wrote in a great poem called “Song of Myself”: “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
I’ve often said I was a kleptomaniac, a pyromaniac, and just plain maniac. One time I almost burned our house down. Mom had moved us into a house in College Park but the heat wasn’t turned on yet, so I made a fire in the fireplace to keep warm. For some reason I decided it was a good idea to splash the fire with gasoline to keep it going, but then the flames jumped back into the gas can. I freaked out and threw the can into the fireplace, and the whole wall started going up. We got the fire put out, but the crazy thing was: I liked it. I liked watching that burst of flames, knowing I was the one who caused it.