Widespread Panic

Why No Other Song In 2006 Could Touch Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy"

originally published December 27, 2006

In 1968, Italy's Reverberi brothers Gianfranco and Gian Piero, students of the great Ennio Morricone and possessors of the kind of destiny-shaping last name usually reserved for Jedi, composed the score for Preparati la Bara! (Prepare a Coffin!), one of dozens of unofficial sequels to the spaghetti western Django. The film's theme song, "Nel Cimitero di Tucson," was a minor-key march in the vein of Morricone's best, its insistent bassline and melancholy brass evoking a romantic view of the West, yet one where death was a constant presence.

Over the next three decades, Preparati la Bara! and "Nel Cimitero di Tucson" joined thousands of other movies on the scrap heap of obscurity, that vast repository haunted by obsessive collectors who treasure their limited-release German DVDs, and no one else. That is, until late 2005, when a track from the much-anticipated (in certain circles) Cee-Lo/ Danger Mouse collaboration found its way onto the usual spots on the Internet. That instantly familiar martial bassline was now joined by four-on-the-floor drums, the horns were replaced with strings, and the melody was carried by the voice of insanity itself.

When Gnarls Barkley’s "Crazy" was officially released in the United Kingdom earlier this year, it became the first single to ever reach No. 1 based solely on downloads; when it hit American shores, its spot as Song of the Summer was already assured. Gnarls Barkley arrived with the surest sign of success in 2006: there was a backlash before the album even hit stores. How big was "Crazy" in 2006? The band pulled the single from U.K. shelves after 11 weeks, for fear that listeners would get sick of it.

From Film Score to Ubiquity

“Crazy” was inescapable this year, playing everywhere you went - on the radio (pretty much every format except country), in clubs and bars, from cell phones, and from the stage at the live shows of dozens, if not hundreds, of bands. If you saw a concert this year, there’s a good chance you heard a band other than Gnarls Barkley play “Crazy.” There seemed to be a mania among musicians for covering “Crazy,” kicked off by Paris Hilton announcing in May that she was delaying her debut album to include her own version of the song (though that, alas, never materialized). Soon, MP3 blogs were flooded with “Crazy” covers - from Nelly Furtado, Greg Dulli’s Twilight Singers, Brit newcomers The Kooks and Ray Lamontagne - and bands from The Raconteurs to Murder Beach to Of Montreal to Bryan freakin’ Adams were adding the song to their repertoires.

My initial plan here was to answer the question “Why is everybody covering ‘Crazy?’” but in the course of scouring the web for MP3s and doing research, I came across a piece written by Jody Rosen for Slate on Sept. 7 titled “Crazy for ‘Crazy,’” which handily answered that same question, and in language eerily similar to my own (you’ll be forgiven for thinking the preceding paragraphs are a “cover” of Rosen’s intro). What to do, I thought - my point had already been made for me, and three months earlier, no less. But in a way, that’s appropriate - one of the shared characteristics of all the “Crazy” covers is their subservience to the source material. The most radical reinterpretation was probably The Twilight Singers’, and their main innovation was to slow it down a bit and make piano the dominant instrument. None of the artists have owned the song, the way Jeff Buckley took “Hallelujah” from Leonard Cohen, or the way Cat Power's Chan Marshall remade “Satisfaction” in her own image. To be fair, none of the artists covering “Crazy” seemed to be too interested in owning the song; they’re all just borrowing it for a while. (Although when Marshall performed "Crazy" at the 40 Watt last month, she came close.)

Most covers these days are done for one of a few reasons: to pay homage to a favorite (frequently obscure) artist, to expose new facets of a well-known song, or to make an ironic goof on a hit. These reasons often overlap; see, for example, Ben Gibbard’s takes on Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated” and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” which seem to mean very different things to him and to his audiences. But the “Crazy” covers don’t easily fit into those categories. Gnarls Barkley is too new and too popular to be some obscure favorite, and the covers are neither ironic nor particularly revelatory, because “Crazy,” to put it bluntly, isn’t a piece of crap; its strengths and pleasures are evident in the original, and the original is still the best version of the song.

Brilliance In Simplicity

Perhaps the cover mania is a result of a sort of widespread relief or amazement that a couple of dudes like Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo, both dripping with underground cred, made a Top-40 smash. Maybe music blogs and YouTube were a factor, each new cover begetting two more through endless digital connections. Or maybe the artists just couldn’t help themselves. Music can still be a virus; the right song can rewire your brain. And “Crazy” rewired a lot of brains this year.

I find it kind of odd to say that Gnarls Barkley’s version is the best, because when I first heard “Crazy,” I thought it was a demo; the only way the song could be simpler is if it were Fergie’s “London Bridge.” The Reverberi sample, largely unmessed-with, does most of the heavy lifting, and the drum part is something I could probably play. The song is built on repetition of the same uncomplicated five-chord pattern, which only changes twice (the beginnings of the second and third verses), and even then, it’s the same chords, just rearranged. There isn’t even a bridge. But in popular music, simpler is usually better, and it’s that simplicity that makes “Crazy” an irresistible cover choice - you can play those chords on any instrument you’ve got lying around.

“Crazy” might be the first song to inspire such widespread covering that’s built so heavily on a sample, which is pretty interesting; but as Rosen noted, Danger Mouse puts that sample to use as melody, and not as rhythm, which is increasingly rare these days. But the melody is not just in the sample, it’s in the vocals, and it’s the interplay between the two that gives “Crazy” its magic. Anybody can strum the chords, but nobody has yet equaled Cee-Lo’s weird, almost throwaway performance. His phrasing is so conversational that it seems like he’s making up the words as he goes along, yet it’s precise and perfectly matched to the music. Listen to a few of the covers; the singers who imitate Cee-Lo’s phrasing don’t match up, and those who try something new end up sounding wrong. They just don’t have as much soul as the Soul Machine.

All Covered Up

And that brings us to this: Look at the list of artists who’ve covered the song - they’re all white. Go hit YouTube and look at the kids playing “Crazy” in their bedrooms - they’re all white, too. The only mention I can find of a black artist covering the song is Trey Lorenz, a backup singer for Mariah Carey who sang it during Carey's costume changes on her 2006 tour. And though “Crazy” charted on seven U.S. Billboard charts, in addition to the Hot 100, its lowest peak was on the Hot R&B/ Hip-Hop Songs chart, at No. 53 (by comparison, it hit No. 8 on Hot Adult Contemporary Tracks, No. 7 on Modern Rock Tracks, and No. 2 on the Hot 100). This from a group whose members are both black musicians with roots in hip hop. I’m not suggesting it’s always true that black artist = black audience, but in the world of mainstream radio, this (and its Caucasian and Latin corollaries) is usually the case. As an anecdotal example, “Crazy” is one of the few songs by black artists that I can remember getting airplay on modern-rock juggernaut like LA's KROQ or Atlanta's 99X in the past few years (the others: Jay-Z’s “99 Problems,” Outkast’s “Hey Ya!” and some old Cypress Hill).

More anecdotal evidence (based on, you know, hanging out with people) suggests that “Crazy” resonates with just about every listener, regardless of race, but there are reasons to believe otherwise. In an Apr. 17 review of St. Elsewhere that I’m pretty sure is only about 25-percent joking, hip hop blogger and XXL columnist Byron Crawford dismissed “Crazy” as “The 2006 version of [insert the name of something that became inexplicably popular on the Internet and also in foreign countries]. Or am I missing something?”

“Crazy” simply doesn’t sound like modern R&B and hip hop. What it sounds like is soul, but not neo-soul; it’s soul like they used to make, but with the added benefit of 40 more years of technology and music by which to be influenced. Though it doesn’t sound old-fashioned, “Crazy” has more in common with Sam & Dave than Ghostface Killah; it sounds more like the kind of R&B that influenced modern rock than like modern R&B.

That might explain why there are so many covers, and why they’re largely from white artists: “Crazy” is comfortable. Jack White has been covering “Crazy” on tour with The Raconteurs; if you arranged his repertoire of covers with both that band and The White Stripes by date of original recording, you’d probably have to go all the way back to Son House to find the second-most recent song by a black artist. White artists have been performing and recording black music since recorded audio was invented, but it’s been harder to do in recent years. The old Pat Boone template of making an R&B hit palatable for white audiences doesn’t cut it when black music is popular music.

Black and White

“There’s just no way to do a serious cover of, say, Jay-Z’s ‘Izzo,’” says Rosen, which is true, but there’s more to it than that - any white artist attempting such a cover is going to sound inauthentic at best and offensive at worst. It’s not just a matter of hip hop songwriting being built on rhythm instead of melody. Hip hop is still largely a product of a specific culture that white America hasn’t managed to (completely) co-opt yet. And what’s more, most hip hop is inextricably linked to the performer, more so than most rock; rappers might be the only artists who are assumed to be always telling the truth. (And that logically leads us to one answer to why there aren’t more black artists covering “Crazy.” When was the last time a rapper covered anything? Mix-tape remixes, like the one with Joe Budden rapping over the “Crazy” instrumental, are what hip hop artists do instead of covers.)

Nerdy white guys like Dynamite Hack and Ben Folds can tackle N.W.A., and props to those guys for finding some lovely melodies in “Boyz-N-The-Hood” and “Bitches Ain’t Shit,” but at the end of the day, it’s a comedy routine, “enlightened” post-racist white dudes dropping N-bombs for the cheap thrill of it. And that’s not even mentioning the technical aspect of hip hop; part of the appeal of listening to Jay-Z is actually hearing him rap, and any indie rocker who tries to imitate his flow is going to be living down the inevitable debacle for years.

Things aren’t much better with contemporary R&B. Folks like Bonnie "Prince" Billy and The Mountain Goats have attempted works from the R. Kelly oeuvre, but when you strip away the vocal gymnastics and the production and put the songs in a rock context, what you’re left with are lyrics that embarrass you even as they’re coming out of your mouth. So when a DJ and an MC put together a song with vaguely smart lyrics, a chord progression you can play on an acoustic guitar, and bundles of art-project mystique, white artists are going to jump all over it. The same thing happened three years ago, on a somewhat smaller scale, with “Hey Ya!,” though people got sick of doing that a lot sooner.

All Together Now

Like “Hey Ya!” before it, “Crazy” will soon be put away for a while, to be replaced by some new musical phenomenon that demands fealty be paid in the form of awkward digital videos and joyous main-stage encores. And there, finally, is the real reason, the best reason, for the “Crazy” Class of 2006.

Covering “Crazy” was like tapping into this vast reservoir of shared energy just waiting to be unleashed. Crowds went nuts for any band that played it. As sappy as it sounds, covering the song was a way of bringing everybody together for three minutes. It was the kind of communal experience that doesn’t happen very much in our fractured popular culture, and all the more precious for it. For a few months there, covering “Crazy” made you a priest in the briefest of religions.

Gardner Linn