![]() ![]() ![]() The primitive, schlocky, mid-1960s garage-rock beloved of Lester Bangs and Stuckist Billy Childish informs The Boogie Monster. There's an oddly chilling electropop cover of the Violent Femmes' Gone Daddy Gone. The names dropped in the fake biog give some indication of what's on offer among the album's 14 admirably concise tracks. It echoes all kinds of apparently contradictory music - the exquisite misery of a southern soul ballad, the tempo and spacey euphoria of an old vocal house anthem, the clanking, unfunky bassline of a 1980s indie band - but the cumulative effect sounds like nothing else. Crazy simply wouldn't have sold in the quantities it has were it not an extraordinary, boundary-defying song, capable of both momentarily deposing Pete Doherty from the front page of the NME and attaining single of the week status on DJ Spoony's garage show on Radio 1. Quite what this is meant to tell us is a mystery, unless it's that Green - who could stand to lose a few pounds - looks a bit upsetting when dressed in a blond bob wig, eye make-up and a big nappy.Īnother thing has been missed in the rush to report the manner of Crazy's ascent: the quality of the music. They sport the bowler hats, eye make-up and glasses of milk familiar from Malcolm McDowell's portrayal of Alex in A Clockwork Orange, further accessorised with blond bob wigs and what look like enormous nappies. The people responsible for all this are rapper and vocalist Cee-Lo Green and hip-hop producer Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton, who do their best to keep their identities hidden in Gnarls Barkley's promotional photographs. He is also, apparently, the lover of Janet Jackson and Mariah Carey, Kraftwerk's English teacher and the broker of a meeting between the Wu-Tang Clan and Britain's Turner prize-baiting Stuckist art movement. That story has overshadowed his heroically outlandish biography, which claims that Barkley is the penpal not merely of Lester Bangs, the long-deceased rock critic responsible for appropriating the phrase punk rock, but also soul man Isaac Hayes and Gordon Gano, vocalist with ramshackle acoustic trio the Violent Femmes. He is responsible for Crazy, the first single ever to make it to number one in Britain on the strength of download sales alone. F or someone who doesn't actually exist, Gnarls Barkley has been remarkably omnipresent in the British media over the past few weeks. ![]()
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