Everybody's Brother

by CeeLo Green

  The Pussycat Dolls doing “Don’t Cha” didn’t exactly make me a star, but it sure as hell helped make me solvent again. This surprising brush with the big time meant that my family and I were able to eat a little better, and trust me, it was great news when I really needed some. At the time, I remember saying to myself, maybe I’ve finally got myself something here. Maybe I will just write and produce the rest of my life and forget about all the frustrating craziness and maddening mystery of being an artist myself. But just like other lovable crime figures before me, every time that I think that I’m done, something or someone drags me right back in.

  Suddenly out of nowhere—well, almost out of nowhere—my life went “Crazy” in the best possible way, and that craziness took me to some unexpected places.

  The true story of Gnarls Barkley is the unlikely tale of two complete weirdos who somehow completed one another—at least for a little while. I am proud to say that I am one of those weirdos, and the other is the international man of mystery who would be Danger Mouse.

  I first met Brian Joseph Burton—who named himself Danger Mouse after his favorite British cartoon series—back when I was with Goodie Mob. At the time, Brian was living in Athens, Georgia, studying telecommunications. He and some friends competed in a talent contest and won the chance to open up for OutKast and our Mob at a gig we did at the University of Georgia.

  For better or worse, love me or loathe me, I do tend to make a big impression on people one way or another, and something about my winning personality must have made a big impression on Danger Mouse. But Danger Mouse later told me that something I had said in an interview he read really spoke to him. He explained that he was strongly attracted to the idea of working with me because he read that I loved Portishead, a very cool British trip-hop group that he just happened to love too. He thought any black man who says he likes Portishead had to be his kind of guy. He had a point too—because Portishead was everything that I wanted my music to be too—dark, moody, hip-hop, and cool on its own terms. Their sound was eerie and inventive and beautiful—all things that I look for and treasure in music and in life too.

  Backstage after the University of Georgia show, Danger Mouse handed me this instrumental demo tape to check out. Something about the darkness in the music spoke to me because, let’s be real—as you have already noticed, a lot of my life has been dark. But it was the last we really saw of each other until around 2004 or 2005, when I laid down some vocals on Danger Doom, a freaky album Brian was producing with MF Doom. That was when we picked up the conversation where it had left off, and in a serious way.

  By any standard, Danger Mouse and I were a truly odd musical couple—with me in the role of a much less pale Oscar Madison to Danger Mouse’s Felix Unger. Thank God the two of us never tried to share an apartment. Personally speaking, we were really night and day, or at least dusk and dawn. For instance, Brian is quite slight and, as you may have noticed, I’m a slightly larger target. Back in the day, Brian was so shy that he dressed up in a mouse outfit so that he could meekly hide in plain sight. Lord knows I have been accused of many things in my life, some of those charges coming from the authorities, but being shy has never been one of them. But for all of our differences, Danger Mouse and I connected through music and found, at least temporarily, some very fertile common ground to toil on together.

  By the time we started to created the gorgeous global monster that became Gnarls Barkley, Danger Mouse had begun to make his own oddly cool name thanks in large part to The Grey Album, an amazing and utterly unauthorized piece of work that combined the vocals from The Black Album by Jay-Z with the musical performances from The White Album by the Beatles. Originally put together for the art of it and the shits and giggles of friends, The Grey Album soon became one of our world’s first great viral hits. Like all things viral now, the music spread like wildfire over the Internet and eventually became one of the most talked about and argued over albums of the twenty-first century. The illegally impressive and wildly cool Grey Album made Danger Mouse a global star, a digital outlaw, and a world-class troublemaker—all clearly very good things in my book—namely, this book.

  So how did people react in the secret hidden chambers of the music industry when Danger Mouse and I started to work together? The answer is: I don’t know, because we didn’t give one damn about what people said. We signed with an independent label, Downtown Records, that was run out of someone’s Manhattan apartment. Like LaFace, Downtown was a joint venture with a big label, in this case Atlantic, so we had a lot of backup firepower if we took off. And then we did precisely what great artists have always done so well—we just got busy creating our own shared reality and then tried that crazy quilt we made together on for size. There was no other way of knowing if this unlikely partnership would work. After all, we were not two of a kind but a couple of crazy mutants who met in the dark and created a spark of something bigger than both of us.

  In retrospect, I can see clearly why we didn’t call our new musical partnership CeeLo Green and Danger Mouse—or Danger Mouse and CeeLo Green, for that matter. Which one of our names would have come first anyway? Trust me, that subject alone is something we could have argued over for hours if we had wanted to. Instead, we just got down to what was most important—the music—and the name came second. From what I’ve heard, while Brian was tossing around names with some of his friends, he almost called the group Bob Gnarley, but he liked the sound of Gnarls Barkley better. For my money, Gnarls Barkley is as absurd as any other memorable rock and roll name, from the Goo Goo Dolls to Oingo Bongo to Kajagoogoo. Yes, our name sounded weird, but it’s also immediately unforgettable. With all due respect to Charles Barkley, I didn’t immediately like our name when Danger Mouse first mentioned it. Honestly, I immediately hated it. Okay, for the record, I still don’t like it. But however goofy it may be, the name Gnarls Barkley is pure quirk, and I have found that quirk works—at least it works for me. Although for a long time after our albums came out, people walked up and called me Mr. Barkley. A lot of them still didn’t get that we were a group.

  Now with a little distance and time I can say that Gnarls Barkley—the beautiful mutant musical love child of Danger Mouse and myself—is one of the great left-field success stories of all time. My solo career taught me the hard way that try as you might, you simply cannot be all things to all people. Too often, if you try, you end up being nothing to nobody. Before Gnarls Barkley brought my voice to the world, I was going nowhere as a solo artist because I had tried so hard to go absolutely everywhere. Somehow working with Danger Mouse gave me a kind of focus that I needed to show the world what I could do.

  I’ve described Danger Mouse as the picket fence around my wildflowers, and for me at least that just about says it all. Danger Mouse is many things to many people, but somehow when we worked together, his process kept me inside some boundaries and, in the end, that framing made me look even better than I do on my own. Working with Danger Mouse was the first time someone took me and actually tried to truly produce me. And in retrospect, that made Brian look like a genius because either he was very, very strong or no one bothered to notice that I could be very submissive too. Truthfully, I think that it was a balance of the two because it isn’t like Brian is all that aggressive a dude, and I sure as hell ain’t soft. I may not be a criminal anymore, but I still won’t let anyone else ever steal my treasured sense of self.

  Something in Danger Mouse’s music did resemble the wonderfully odd eternal rhythm that exists somewhere inside of me, so in a way it was easy to write words for him. To my ears, the music that the world has come to know as Gnarls Barkley sounded like the score of my soul—the wild combination of words and music and texture and sound captured a kind of controlled chaos.

  But like a lot of odd couples, Danger Mouse and I also have a way of rubbing each other the wrong way. I can only guess what he would say about me, but I would describe Danger Mouse as neurotic and narcissistic. He’s clean and neat, but also very meat and
potatoes. In fact, all I that have ever seen him eat is hamburgers and pizza. Every time we stood together it was like a great game of compare and contrast. It’s the age-old shtick of tall and short, fat and skinny, light and dark, serious and silly. We were just two sort of polar opposites—two bookends between which came some very interesting reading. He is extreme in his own right, but it’s natural and normal to him. And I’m the same way, only with different extremes. Working together can be tough because we’re both pretty set in our ways, yet somehow there’s still a straight line that connects us. In my mind at least, Danger Mouse and I were two ships on our own seas that were somehow hearing the same exact signal in the distance on a lower frequency. Because deep down we shared directions, we didn’t need to scream to be heard by one another.

  Of course, sometimes Brian and I screamed anyway. For instance, we argued when I wanted to change the name of our group to Scarlet Fever because I liked the idea that we were these two very different characters who shared a rare sickness. I tried to get at the specific nature of our shared craziness in the song “Who Cares?” on the first Gnarls Barkley album, St. Elsewhere.

  Basically, I’m complicated

  I have a hard time taking the easy way

  I wouldn’t call it schizophrenia

  But I’ll be at least two people today

  Anyone who’s ever spent any time with me recognizes a lot of truth right there. At the time they were written, I thought those lyrics was just clever, but now they strikes me as downright poignant.

  Still, while we were making that first album, “Crazy” was the one song that struck me hardest. We thought that it was the closest thing to a single we had. As the legend goes, I did my vocal for “Crazy” in one take. But I’m sure that many of the best and most important records of all time were done in one take. I’d bet Iggy Pop just had to sing “I Wanna Be Your Dog” one time.

  “Crazy” wasn’t just the title of our first and biggest hit—it was also our musical calling card to an entire universe of freaks and fellow travelers. Let me say this in case no one else ever does—the music of Gnarls Barkley was insanely strange and thus oddly universal. The song “Crazy” was a kind international declaration of the basic human right to be weird—a right I have been exercising religiously my whole life. But is it crazier to internalize whatever makes you different or insane or to be able to hogtie it and articulate it so that the whole world can sing and dance along with you?

  People think that I’m crazy because I can talk about the utter insanity of the human condition and artfully explore that insanity for fun and profit. So there’s a very thin line between being completely crazy and just being incredibly convinced and convincing too. That’s what makes me a diehard and always has—whatever cause I was dying for at the time.

  Essentially, succeeding in this world all comes down to being a very faithful person and I believe I’ve taken a quantum leap of faith—that’s how I got here and that’s how I’ve stayed here. I don’t want to bore people with the math—I’d rather charm their pants off with the poetry of it all. If any of this sounds crazy to you, then good, I’ve done my job.

  In the music business, it’s feast or famine. “Crazy” became a moveable feast that sent me and Danger Mouse on a trip around the world. It took us to the Grammys together and just about everywhere music can go. I remember reading that “Crazy” was voted the biggest hit of the past decade. It was an anthem for outsiders everywhere that, at least for a time, made Danger Mouse and me insiders everywhere in the world we went.

  Still, the way that song was written and structured defied radio logic. The hook wasn’t the same each time. It just appears the same, but it poses three different sets of circumstances. You should also notice that the only time I call myself crazy in the song is when I’m trying to call someone else crazy but acknowledging that I’m in no position to judge and criticize. We are all in no position to criticize because we’re all trying to figure this life out with varying degrees of success. So I say, “You’re crazy, just like me.” What I’m trying to say there is “Let me take a little of the blame and we’ll share it together”—that is, unless you don’t want to be with me, because I’m on some whole other level. But I don’t think we’re on different levels because I’m standing here talking to you. You feel me? Maybe not, but that’s my way of thinking.

  When Danger Mouse later worked with Damon Albarn from Blur and the Gorillaz on their project The Good, the Bad & the Queen, Damon asked Danger Mouse, “So this song that you have with this guy CeeLo, who is he? I want to see him. What’s he look like?” So Danger Mouse showed him a picture of me, and Damon said, “Oh damn, he’s the real thing.” Because he could immediately tell there was nothing pretty or pretentious about me. These eyes, they don’t lie—and I’m not here on Earth to lie. I’m here to tell my truths. Everyone’s been called crazy or felt crazy. And everyone has wanted to tell someone “Fuck You” a time or two.

  Having a universal hit like “Crazy” opened a lot of doors for me, and it made me a very recognizable figure. And that’s how I got to meet my childhood idol, Prince. I was hanging out with some friends in a club in Las Vegas. All of a sudden “Erotic City” started playing on the system—they must have cued it up when they saw Prince coming—then this beautiful woman walked in all alone, wearing a tight pencil skirt, horn-rimmed glasses, looking like a sexy stenographer. Just stunning, to say the least. Like some mermaid out of water. Then Prince walked in after her. He has this confident, swaggerish walk, and he blew right past us with the girl and his security guard. I saw he was looking at us, with a little smirk on his face, as they led him to this roped-off area. Next thing I knew, his security guard came over to say Prince wants to see me. So I went over there and sat down for a while. Out of everything he said, what I remembered the most was that he had listened to St. Elsewhere.

  “Great album,” he said. “It scared me, though.”

  I was like, “Well, shiiiiit… I don’t know! Let me tell you how much you scared me when I was a kid!” So I told him about how when my mother was in that Pentecostal church they had a seminar warning us that Prince was up to demonic mischief when he released “Darling Nikki.” Not only did the lyrics scare the hell out of us, but the backward part at the end of the song sounded like the devil himself. Actually, when you play the backward part forward, there was a positive message, and he was just being sly. But it didn’t make no difference. “We were just terrified of you!” I told him. He laughed when I said that. We exchanged numbers and he ended up calling me, to say that he had been loving “Crazy.” Years later I opened for him at Madison Square Garden and he played “Crazy” with me, one of the great moments of my life. If I could choose anyone to collaborate with on a musical project, Prince would be on top of my list.

  I think Prince is the kind of weird we would all love to be. You could go crazy with that much talent in that little body. I don’t even know what he’s talking about half the time, but all of it means something to me. Prince is so cool. So calm and calming. So unlike some of my other collaborators.

  As you can tell by now, Danger Mouse is dark—dark enough even to scare Prince. From my point of view, he’s still in his dark night of the soul—or whatever he thinks he is doing. Seasons change and to me if you’re just seeing the darkness, that means you’re perpetuating that darkness. The world is always going to look dark if you’re sitting in your room with all the shades down. Perpetuating the darkness is purposed. That’s no mistake. That’s a choice.

  As time went on, I came to feel like I wanted to tell Danger Mouse, “You are not going to perpetuate the darkness on me, especially when the sun is out and I can see and feel it.” See, I’m dark at night when the darkness feels right, but when the sun comes up, I see it and I get up and work and earn the day. That’s how I feel about life—I earn the day and appreciate the opportunity that comes with it. That’s me—I’m balanced just like the dusk and dawn, dawn and dusk. I felt I might lose that balance if I
let Danger Mouse steer me into the underworld too often. And so I started leaning into the light and away from my dark companion.

  By now there should be no confusion why we called our second Gnarls Barkley album The Odd Couple. In my opinion, our second album was better than the first, but you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. And any way you looked at it, we had made a very big first impression. St. Elsewhere was one of those albums that entered the stratosphere and has never really left. The second album hit a kind of sophomore jinx because it was so close in terms of proximity to the original release. To me, Gnarls Barkley’s second album is clearly just all-around better than the first album in every conceivable way, and probably in a few inconceivable ways too. The Odd Couple would be a killer coming out now, but like a lot of art and people I love, it was ahead of its time.