St. Elsewhere- Gnarls Barkley

One of my favorite recordings of this past year is Gnarls Barkley’s 2006 debut, St. Elsewhere. Gnarls is the collaborative effort of eccentric but introverted ‘hip-hop’ producer Brian Burton (known as Danger Mouse) and Atlanta rapper/singer Cee-Lo Green (named Thomas Calloway, and hardly an introvert himself). Danger Mouse became famous the new fashioned way, via the internet. He got the idea to attempt a mash up of an ‘a capella’ mix of Jay-Z’s Black Album with the historic Beatles’ LP commonly referred to as “the white album”. A purist at heart, Danger Mouse made certain every single sound in the album is sampled from the Beatles’ album. After discovering he made a pretty cool mashup of "Helter Skelter" and "99 Problems", he decided to see if he could pull off the whole thing. After successfully completing the project, he sent it to some friends and before you know it was all over the internet, popularly coined the Grey Album. Danger Mouse gained an overnight reputation as a sampling phenom. He finished an album with Jemini and teamed with M.F. Doom to produce the DangerDoom project “The Mouse and the Mask”.

While the range of his beat-making skill was being appreciated on those projects, he blew the doors open with St. Elsewhere, sampling from a huge range of musical styles(including Peruvian music and Silent Film scores) and incorporating a healthy amount of live instrumentation. Cee-Lo’s incredibly versatile vocal abilities helped take these songs to interesting new places. The influences of gospel, rock and roll, Mo-town, soul, funk, punk, new wave, and hip hop of the old and new school are clearly evident in this unique musical hybrid. They released the single "Crazy" in the UK and made history as the first single to be certified number one from downloads alone. It evidently caught just as quickly in the US as at their American debut show at the Coachella Valley Music Festival, nearly everyone in the audience sang along to "Crazy". I know, I was there. Their live show is an awesome, nutty party which I took part in 3 times on the first US tour alone. Highlights of the record for me are the opener "Go-Go Gadget Gospel", shortie "Feng Shui", the drum heavy "Just A Thought", schizophrenic "Transformer", and epic "Storm Coming".

I actually understand very little about the process of producing and engineering records like this, and that’s part of the reason on so impressed by people who can do it so well. Positively no one could have made this record like Danger Mouse, which pretty rad if you think about it.