![]() In 2016, it would rack up a few million Spotify plays, sure, but it wouldn’t be a cultural force still ubiquitous enough that it remains in the rotation of coffee shops and would-be hip retailers. With how fractionalized music has gotten, it’s hard to picture that kind of record reaching such a wide swath of listeners. The incredible success of “Crazy” is something that seems impossible today. “ My heroes had the heart, to the lose their lives out on a limb/ And all I remember is thinking I want to be like them,” Cee Lo reflects at the start of the third verse, an explanation for his own eccentric, try-anything-once career. Cee Lo’s words are brutally honest, at times fatalistic, and Danger Mouse’s beat, which bounces between plucky, bass-centric Motown soul on the verses and string-heavy melodrama on the hook, is flawless. “Crazy” still sounds fresh today, probably because no artist has come close to mirroring it lyrically or sonically. Of course, some of the album’s highest highs come when Cee Lo exists in his natural state, free to belt in his signature tenor. He reorients to rap on the sleek, high fashion “Feng Shui” and stretches his delivery to play the light-footed lothario on “The Last Time.” The twitchy “Transformer” is the most obvious example – it’s the song’s whole shtick – but it also works in “Online,” where Cee Lo evokes a raspy, bassy growl that sounds like he could be narrating a ‘70s cop flick. Elsewhere and how Danger Mouse uses them to craft tracks that sound so markedly different from one another. With how iconic his voice became after 2010’s “Fuck You,” it really is amazing how malleable Cee Lo’s vocals are on St. Just look at the cover, a mushroom cloud of mock utopianism, violence, cheap sex and, for good measure, a neon purple tiger. Its commitment to a left field, melancholic state of mind makes its success only more remarkable. garage rock, trip-hop, psychedelia and just about everything you could possibly imagine, Cee Lo Green and Danger Mouse’s first spin as a duo still stands as one of the most unique debut albums in recent memory. The genre of R&B has been pulled in a million different directions over the past decade, but no one has been able to replicate what Gnarls Barkley did on St.
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