The rapper Cee-Lo -- the highest-profile member of the Atlanta hip-hop crew Goodie Mob -- grew up listening to gospel music and singing in church as the son of a Baptist minister. He can still remember the first secular album he was forbidden to buy: Motley Crue's Shout at the Devil. "I loved that song 'Looks That Kill,' " he says with a chuckle, "but my mom saw the pentagram on the cover and wasn't having it."

So when Cee-Lo describes his solo debut, Cee-Lo Green and his Perfect Imperfections, as "a race for redemption," it doesn't come off as empty hyperbole. "With this album," Cee-Lo says, "I want people to know that what Goodie Mob did early on was genuine, that it wasn't bullshit or a gimmick." He's referring to Goodie Mob's 1995 debut, Soul Food, and their follow-up, Still Standing, released three years later. Both albums were acclaimed for their live instrumentation, their organic, bluesy vibe and their smart, unusually soulful lyrics. (The cover of Soul Food was a shot of the group praying around a dinner table.) Both albums also failed to break through in a big way. When it came time to record their third album, World Party, Cee-Lo was persuaded by his band mates to move in a, shall we say, bling-bling-ier direction.

"World Party was the greatest disappointment in my career," Cee-Lo says today. He's wearing a white undershirt, gray sweats and white tube socks and is sprawling, stomach down, on his bed at the Muse hotel near New York's Times Square. "I hated that album," he continues. "It didn't fall in line with anything I wanted to be remembered for. But, I mean, I participated. I wanted people to know we weren't monks, that we were just regular guys. So I said to Gipp" -- one of his Goodie Mob mates -- " 'Hey, if this works, and we finally have a platinum album, I'll shake your hand, and you can say I told you so. But if it fails, I'm definitely doing a solo album.' Commercially, we ended up selling our same numbers. But morally, it failed. Rap was congested with women, cars, drugs, and people were expecting us to be the last real hope. And we failed them."

With Perfect Imperfections, which he also produced, Cee-Lo has certainly taken a step back toward his roots -- which is to say, all over the map. There is growly singing and speed rapping, gospel and classic soul, banjo and metal guitar. Songs range from the introspective "Gettin' Grown" to the Funkadelicized first single, "Closet Freak." Cee-Lo's voice pitches somewhere between Al Green and Rerun from What's Happening!! A pile of CDs he just bought, sitting on the nightstand, speak to his musical eclecticism: Diana Ross, Billy Idol, Marvin Gaye, Madness.

Cee-Lo grew up in southwest Atlanta, in a household that included his mother, a sister, two uncles, two cousins, a grandmother and great-grandmother. His father died when he was two. "Gospel, soul music, blues -- I think it reminded me of an ideal father," Cee-Lo says. "I wanted my father to be a singer: cool, bluesy, moody."

Early on, Cee-Lo began messing around on the grand piano -- a family heirloom nobody in the family knew how to play - that dominated the living room. He also had an aunt who sang at a local restaurant, Aunt Fanny's cafe, performing everything from blues standards to the Oak Ridge Boys' "Elvira." She encouraged Cee-Lo to keep on singing, even though, he says, "it was such an act of vulnerability. Singing means you care, that you have feelings and emotions. I didn't know if it was boyish to sing. But I could."

School didn't work out as well. Disciplinary problems landed Cee-Lo in a military academy, and later in a GED course for dropouts, where he ran into an old friend, Dr? from OutKast. "OutKast was initially going to be a trio," Cee-Lo says. Instead, he began hanging out at the Dungeon - the basement recording studio run by the Atlanta producers Organized Noize, who eventually paired him up with Goodie Mob, a group he insists has not broken up.

While Goodie Mob were recording their first album, Cee-Lo's mother was in a serious car accident that left her a quadriplegic. "I saw her suffer for the last three years of her life," Cee-Lo says. "That was the most helpless I ever felt. But I was compelled to write how I truly felt." He rolls over onto his back. "My ignorance," he says, "was innocent. I had no idea about what sells. But I always felt like we could do music in good taste and still make it viable, a commodity. And from that point on, I had no shame incorporating my feelings about God or the world into my music. From that point on, I never thought twice."

MARK BINELLI
(RS 891 - Mar. 14, 2001)