If you’ve never heard of Cee-Lo Green then you should probably run down to the local convenience store and purchase a lottery ticket; odds are if you’re the one person around that has not heard of the voice of Gnarls Barkley, then those same odds may just make you an instant millionaire. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
If this actually happens, by the way, all I ask is a 1% “Inspiration” fee.
Gnarls Barkley’s album St. Elsewhere soars on the heavenly vocals of Mr. Green, as it bobs and weaves through the dense beats and sonic scenery provided by Danger Mouse. Once you’ve had a chance to sit and listen to the album, one question comes instantly to mind. Namely, where on earth did Cee-Lo and his voice — not to mention his incredible lyrics that managed to be spacey, spicy, and just downright odd all at the same time — come from?
Closet Freak: The Very Best of Cee-Lo Green the Soul Machine is as good a place as any to begin looking.
A mixture of tracks originally emanating from three albums, 1995’s Soul Food by Goodie Mob (of which Cee-lo was a seminal member), 2002’s Cee-Lo Green and His Perfect Imperfections, and 2004’s Cee-Lo Green… is the Soul Machine, Closet Freak seems to set the stage perfectly to remind people that Gnarls Barkley’s — and Cee-Lo’s, especially — quick-fire success in 2006 was not all that “quick,” after all.
Cee-Lo has been “in the game” for a while now.
Fittingly, Closet Freak opens with the same soulful invocation that opened up Goodie Mob’s first album, Soul Food. “Free,” a prayer for the chance to be free in every aspect of life, also served, and still serves, as a righteous clarion call announcing the fact that Cee-Lo was not going to allow himself to be pigeon-holed into the role of a hip-hop performer.
In many ways, “Free” is as much a demand for freedom from such restrictions, as it is a prayer for anything else.
Two other tracks on Closet Freak are from Goodie Mob’s Soul Food album, the haunting and hauntingly beautiful “Cell Therapy,” which was their first single, and the title track, “Soul Food” itself, which manages to paint a very vivid picture of what it feels and sounds like — at least as much as any music can —to have a soul that grew up poor and black in the “Dirty” South.
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