The Acid Nerd Gangsters

Cee-lo and Danger Mouse met in 1998, when Goodie Mob played a gig at the University of Georgia, where Danger Mouse was studying telecommunications and making music on the side. But they didn't work together until 2003, when Danger Mouse included Cee-Lo on a remix of a record he made with the indie rapper Jemini. In the studio, Danger Mouse played five or six demos, including early versions of "Just a Thought," "Necromancer" and "Storm Coming," that would eventually grow into the Gnarls project. For Cee-Lo, the dense swirl of samples and live instruments -- which sounds a little like Norman Whitfield-era Temptations jamming with Kraftwerk -- made his turbulent childhood come rushing back.

"This music made me reflect years back to when I was a kid," he says. "I could tell that somewhere internally, Danger had gone through something closely related to what I had gone through." The child of two ministers (his father died when he was two), Cee-Lo exhibited a lot of what he calls "behavioral problems" growing up. In the "Crazy" video, inkblots morph into the faces of Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse. Cee-Lo, who struggled in school despite being exceptionally bright, remembers taking Rorschach tests as a kid. "Growing up, I was artistic and autistic," he says. "Not technically diagnosed, but I was bound to color outside the lines a little bit." In the third grade he was friends with Andre 3000, with whom he'd eventually make music as part of the influential Atlanta hip-hop collective the Dungeon Family, which included both Goodie Mob and OutKast. "I remember Dre being very quiet," says Cee-Lo. "Once, he got in trouble and his mom came up there and tore his ass up in front of everybody at school. My mom did that to me on quite a few occasions too."

By junior high, Cee-Lo was getting in enough trouble that he was shipped off to military school, where he got turned on to acid. "I don't know what it is about white boys," he says, "but you guys get to that stuff early." After considerable prompting, he opens up about what it was that got him sent away. "I was a gangsta," he says quietly. "I was muscle for whatever crew I was running with at the time. When people were getting killed over Jordans and Starter jackets, that was my whole line. I got up every day to take." He pauses, then adds, "I robbed some little girls before."

On "Just a Thought," Cee-Lo sings, "When I was lost, I even found myself looking in the gun's direction/And so I've tried/Everything but suicide/But yes, it's crossed my mind." The darkest moment in Cee-Lo's life was when his mother -- an ordained minister who never had her own congregation and sold Amway to pay the bills -- was in a car accident when he was sixteen. She died two years later, around the time Cee-Lo started making music with the Dungeon Family. "She was a quadriplegic," he says. "I watched her suffer, and I watched her die." Cee-Lo sees the music he's making now as penance. Literally: He believes that it will go a long way toward earning him a place in heaven. "I want to please in the sight of my maker and my mother," he says. "I'm gaining favor. A lot of my music is to ease my rite of passage, just in case." He hopes the music will help others, too. "When was the last time you heard a black man talk about suicide?" he asks. "It's meant to be therapeutic. If you questioned where you stood sanitywise prior to hearing that record, I think it would cause a moment of clarity more than it would push you over the edge."....

[Excerpt From Issue 1007 — August 24, 2006]