Coffee, Tea, or Cee(Lo)?

Today we praise great singing

There are records that reach what the Beatles called the toppermost of the poppermost (that is, No. 1) and make the songwriter and the recording artist lots of money, and there are records that do not only those things. but also sweep away everything in their path into the sea. In my waning teens, the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” was such a record. Forty years later, Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” was another, and it was pretty nearly all about CeeLo Green’s jaw-droppingly soulful, virtuosic vocal, which I now learn was an unedited first take. The way he improvises those exquisite little musical curlicues at the ends of the verses! Not since Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman”, a year after “Satisfaction”, had a male pop vocal been as likely to stop you in your tracks and induce you to remark, “OMG!” I don’t listen to the radio much anymore, but I can’t imagine any male singer has exceeded CeeLo’s singing in the 20 years since “Crazy”.

Yes, you’re right. Crazy never actually made No. 1. Nelly Furtado’s “Promiscuous“ (featuring Timbaland), which I wouldn’t recognize if it sat down beside me on the Tube, kept it at No. 2 for eight weeks. But of course Phil Spector’s volcanic production of Tina Turner’s “River Deep, Mountain High” — which deserves comparison to Lorraine Ellison’s breathtaking “Stay With Me” among the greatest female vocals ever —got no higher than No. 88 in the USA, inspiring the rest of the world to wonder, “WTF?” decades before the American populace elected Donald fucking Trump president not just once, but twice.

It wasn’t just CeeLo Green’s singing that I loved about Gnarls Barkley. There was also their sense of humor, manifested magnificently in the fact that they just loved dressing up.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think a performing artist honors his or her audience by dressing up to perform them. Not for Johnny the Neil Young aesthetic, whereby one strives to look like someone who just wandered out of the hills to panhandle, or the Bryan Adams aesthetic, whereby, by wearing a white undershirt, one makes clear that’s all about the cake, man, and contemptuous of the frosting, or the grunge aesthetic, whereby one looks grungier than the roadies. Gnarls Barkley may not have dressed to kill, but they damned sure dressed to amuse, here as Star Wars, A Clockwork Orange, Big Lebowski, or Napoleon Dynamite characters, there as a restaurant kitchen brigade, astronauts, schoolchildren, or tennis players. When they appeared as a flight crew on Top of the Pops I very nearly swooned.

Was that hilarious and delightful? Bet on it! But it was more than that. It was about commitment to their art. Imagine how much it must have cost to rent costumes for a bass player, guitarist, and drummer, string section, and backing vocalists for every show. CeeLo and his implacably bored-seeming keyboardist partner in crime, Danger Mouse, put their money where their mouths were.

In closing, I will confess something. I enjoy telling people that I was once denied admission to a Renaissance Pleasure Faire (that e at the end of Fair tells you all you need to know) by dressing as an astronaut, but budget considerations kept me from actually living the dream. I likewise wasn’t turned away for dressing as a cowboy, much as I loved the idea of the ticket-taker, clad as one of Robin Hood’s merry men, telling me, “Thy attire doth cause offense, good sir,” in an attempt at an English accent that would have made Dick Van Dyke’s in Mary Poppins sound very credible in comparison. I, in response, would have combatively drawled, “Them’s fightin’ words where ah comes from, missy.”