http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/18/magazine/18barkley.html?_r=1&oref=sloginThe D.J. Auteur
By CHUCK KLOSTERMAN
North Hollywood sounds like a place that could be glamorous or, at the very least, mildly attractive. It is not. Or at least it's not on Hinds Avenue, where dirty one-story buildings look semideserted and many of the local "beautiful people" appear to have jobs that involve (a) ripping apart used cars and (b) selling those individual parts to less-beautiful people whose cars are even more used. Nobody on this North Hollywood avenue looks famous, and a few of them look terrifying. But it just so happens that 7325 Hinds Avenue is the geographic location of Power Plant Studios, and inside those nondescript walls a human named Danger Mouse is talking about an album that has just sold 91,000 copies in England within the span of seven days. Danger Mouse doesn't look famous, either; he also doesn't look dangerous, or even rodentesque. And even though I am asking him about music, he is talking about movies.
"What changed everything was when I got into Woody Allen," says Danger Mouse, whose real name is Brian Burton. He is sitting on a couch in the Power Plant lounge, eating two different kinds of pizza and drinking Vitamin Water; his legs and arms are folded like a mantis's. There is a massive flat-screen TV in the room that's tuned to the TV Guide Channel, but the volume is off. "When I got to college, I saw 'Manhattan' and 'Deconstructing Harry.' I thought to myself: Why do I relate so much to this white 60-year-old Jewish guy? Why do I understand his neurosis? So I just started watching all of his movies. And what I realized is that they worked because Woody Allen was an auteur: he did his Thing, and that particular Thing was completely his own. That's what I decided to do with music. I want to create a director's role within music, which is what I tried to do on this album."
If you know who Danger Mouse is (which is totally possible, considering the commercial potential of the record we're discussing and the illegal things he's done in the past), these sentiments probably make sense immediately. If you have no idea who Danger Mouse is (which is just as plausible, considering the nature of pop music), they will require a little context before it becomes apparent how a record producer's greatest musical influence could be the man who made "Hannah and Her Sisters." But here's the bottom line, regardless of how much you know about Brian Burton: The musical object in question, "St. Elsewhere," by Gnarls Barkley, is an unlikely fusion of alternative pop, psychedelic R&B and postmodern hip-hop, and it was constructed differently from the vast majority of mainstream rock 'n' roll albums. And if "St. Elsewhere" does well over the long haul, its success will be a direct result of the way it was made, a blueprint that contradicts the conventional way in which rock bands are supposed to create music.
When Gnarls Barkley performs live, there are 14 people onstage. Technically, however, Gnarls Barkley is just two people: Danger Mouse (the aforementioned Burton) and an Atlanta-based singer-rapper named Cee-Lo (born Thomas Calloway). But in a larger sense, Gnarls Barkley is really just one person, and that person is Burton. Cee-Lo is essential, but he's essential in the same way Diane Keaton was essential to "Annie Hall": he is the voice that best incarnates Burton's vision, so he serves as the front man for this particular project. Burton will aggressively insist that Gnarls Barkley is a two-man game, but that seems more magnanimous than accurate. On the surface, Cee-Lo looks like the vortex — he wrote the lyrics and sings the vocals on every song, including "Crazy," a single on the cusp of becoming the demographically limitless song of the moment (i.e., a 2006 version of OutKast's "Hey Ya!"). Yet even while "Crazy" is Cee-Lo's song, it's still Burton's design. It's the product of a singular vision, which is (more or less) the whole idea. The music of Gnarls Barkley is collaborative, but not in a creative sense; the goal of this collaboration is to reproduce the music that already exists inside Burton's skull.
"A song like 'Crazy' is a great example," Burton says. "I brought in a song that I felt was a complete Ennio Morricone ripoff" — he's referring to the definitive composer of countless spaghetti-western scores. "But Cee-Lo and I started talking, and I somehow got off on this tangent about how people won't take an artist seriously unless they're insane. And we were saying that if we really wanted this album to work, the best move would be to just kill ourselves. That's how audiences think; it's retarded. So we started jokingly discussing ways in which we could make people think we were crazy. We talked about this for hours, and then I went home. But while I was away, Cee-Lo took that conversation and made it into 'Crazy,' which we recorded in one take. That's the whole story. The lyrics are his interpretation of that conversation."
On the surface, such a methodology might make Danger Mouse sound like Phil Spector, the studio genius, egocentric taskmaster and accused murderer who supposedly threatened musicians with firearms when they did not perform songs to his liking. This would not be accurate. A better comparison might be Brian Eno, the British engineer-musician who used various bands and artists to generate the myriad musical concepts he imagined. There's at least one crucial difference, however: Though Eno was the intellectual force behind groups like Roxy Music and albums like "Heroes," he was never the star; the star was always someone else (like Bryan Ferry or David Bowie). What's atypical about Gnarls Barkley is that the star is Burton, even though he's barely visible onstage. Burton has the kind of paradoxical personality that's weirdly familiar among creative types: he's simultaneously confident and insecure, and he's a natural introvert who elected to become a public figure. More significant, he's a highly focused dude, and that focus is clear — Danger Mouse wants musical autonomy. He wants to be the first modern rock 'n' roll auteur, mostly because he understands a critical truth about the creative process: good art can come from the minds of many, but great art usually comes from the mind of one.
"I don't make a band's next album," he says. "I don't like making someone else's songs better. I'm not interested in that. This is where the Woody Allen thing comes back in. I have to be in control of the project I'm doing. I can create different kinds of musical worlds, but the artist needs the desire to go into that world. I won't fight with people to try and make the sounds I hear inside my head. What I want is for the leader of a group to come to me, and then I lead that person. Because even with some of my favorite bands, I only like 30 or 40 percent of what they do. I'd want to make that 30 percent into the whole album."
I ask if there is anyone he considers to be a model for this paradigm, or if there is any producer whose career he would like to emulate.
"Musically, there is no one who has the career I want," Burton says. "That's why I have to use film directors as a model. But I think there are other people who could do what I do, and maybe 'St. Elsewhere' will open things up. Like, Jack White was able to take control of Loretta Lynn, and the result was a great record" ("Van Lear Rose," which came out in 2004). "And that's cool. That's the goal."
The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival is the hottest weekend in American popular music. This designation is literal: It takes place in the arid California desert, and it feels like watching MTV2 inside a blast furnace. Set on an expanse of polo fields 25 miles west of Palm Springs, Coachella annually features around 80 disparate musical acts and 60,000 highly disparate fans; I was told that one of the people in attendance at this year's event was Francis Ford Coppola, spotted wearing unmatched socks and sitting in the V.I.P. area with his daughter Sofia, checking out a Sunday-afternoon performance by Phoenix.
There were three acts at the 2006 Coachella that its 60,000 guests seemed to be talking about the most. The first was Madonna, arguably the most important female musician of the 20th century (curiously performing inside a tent, far away from the main stage). The second was the prog-metal band Tool, a reclusive, hypercredible volume machine performing live for the first time in four years. The third act was Gnarls Barkley. The combined record sales of Madonna and Tool exceed 200 million; during the weekend of Coachella, Gnarls Barkley had yet to release a record in America.
Gnarls would play Sunday afternoon; on Saturday, Burton and Cee-Lo conducted backstage interviews with a succession of random journalists (this was four days before I would talk with Burton privately in North Hollywood). Because it's an outdoor festival, the backstage area of Coachella is merely a collection of couches shaded by tents, hidden on three sides by trailers. There were no throngs of pretty girls, although there were several girls dressed as if they thought they were pretty; there was no backstage debauchery, unless you count random roadies eating hummus. When I first saw Burton and Cee-Lo, they were talking to a reporter from Rolling Stone. Burton was dressed plainly and wearing sunglasses. Cee-Lo was eating Lay's potato chips. Cee-Lo's head is bald, and his limbs are freakishly huge; his wristwatch looked as large as a wall clock. He is covered with tattoos. One is the familiar symbol of yin and yang. Another is the logo of the University of Georgia Bulldogs. Another is the word "BLOOD." When I sat down with Cee-Lo, I asked him if the BLOOD tattoo meant he was a gang member, and he said it did not. This denial, however, was not particularly convincing.
"I am not gang-affiliated," Cee-Lo said, "but I am gang-associated. I'm not the least bit active, but — coincidentally — a lot of my homies are Bloods. A lot of them."
Cee-Lo is a clever guy. He has also had a strangely diverse career. Before Gnarls Barkley, Cee-Lo was best known as a member of Goodie Mob, one of the first significant hip-hop acts to emerge from the South (he would eventually quit the group, citing his peers' unwillingness to expand musically). He was also a backup singer on TLC's No. 1 single "Waterfalls" and the writer and producer of "Don't Cha," a hit for the Pussycat Dolls (and a track currently used in a Heineken commercial, the beverage Cee-Lo — perhaps coincidentally — drank during our conversation). He has also appeared in an episode of the MTV reality program "My Super Sweet Sixteen" with his 15-year-old stepdaughter Sierra (it is important to note that Sierra is his stepdaughter, as Cee-Lo is only 31).
Cee-Lo classifies himself as a soul singer and a writer but not as a rapper ("Rap is just a cadence," he says). When he talks, Cee-Lo sounds like a preacher, which might be a product of his upbringing; both his parents were ministers, though his father died when he was 2 and his mother died when he was 18. It sounds as if Cee-Lo's youth was not tranquil.
"I was reckless," he said. "I was a bully. I was a violent guy, and I was a pyromaniac. I almost burned down our house once. We were moving into this house in College Park, Atlanta; we had just moved in, and the heat wasn't turned on yet. I was sprinkling gasoline on a fire to keep warm, and the fire jumped up through the nozzle. I panicked. I threw the whole gas can into the fire. It burned up a side of a wall."
After he told this anecdote, I mentioned that this did not sound like the actions of a teenage pyromaniac; it sounded more like an accident.
"Yeah, except that I liked it," Cee-Lo responded. "I liked the fire I was causing."
Before they ever met, Burton knew who Cee-Lo was. This was primarily because he liked Goodie Mob, but also because Burton's sister married a guy who had gone to Cee-Lo's high school ("My brother-in-law told me he was a thug," Burton recalls). They first interacted in the mid-90's, on a rainy night in Athens, Ga., back when Burton was still an unknown telecommunications student at the University of Georgia. Goodie Mob was playing a show with OutKast, and there was a local talent contest to see who would serve as the opening act. Burton enlisted a few friends and created an ad hoc group dubiously dubbed Rhyme & Reason. They placed second in the contest, but they still got to perform at the show. Afterward, Burton gave Cee-Lo a CD of music he had been working on, because he knew Cee-Lo's tastes went outside the normal parameters of rap.
"He knew I liked Portishead," Cee-Lo said. "That was our unspoken bond. When he told me he dug Portishead, that was all I needed to know."
Considering the consciously genre-defying construction of "St. Elsewhere," it might seem almost paradoxically predictable that the druggy, suicidal soundscapes of a white British trip-hop act served as the foundation for a musical relationship between two black guys in Georgia. "When I played my music for Cee-Lo," Burton says, "he moved his body in the way I imagined this music was supposed to make people react. So I thought, Maybe I've found the singer for these songs." The pair eventually began work on "St. Elsewhere" in the fall of 2003, starting with a demo called "Storm Coming," which would eventually be included on the final LP. Something happened between then and now, however, and that something probably needs to be explained before we go any further: In 2004, Danger Mouse released the most popular album in rock history that virtually no one paid for.
"Ah, 'The Grey Album,' " Burton says, sighing heavily. We are back in North Hollywood, where Danger Mouse is still consuming pizza. I had a suspicion that this was a subject Burton might find troubling, and I assumed he would not want to talk about it. I was half right. "'The Grey Album' is so misunderstood. I didn't even call it 'The Grey Album.' If you look at my original files for those songs, they're labeled 'The Black-White Album.' And the thing is, most people who have that record think the way it sounds is the way I wanted it to sound. And that's not the case at all."
Timing isn't everything, but it's close. Sometimes interesting things happen and nobody cares; sometimes interesting things happen and everybody cares. "The Grey Album" exists in that second category. In early 2004, Burton was working on albums with a couple of uncommercial indie rappers; he had already released three well-regarded (but widely ignored) electronic albums under the moniker Pelican City, and he'd earned some money making interstitial theme music for the Cartoon Network. He was unknown to the world at large, but mildly established within a specific, insular faction of the music industry. And that industry was being reinvented against its will. The concept of downloading music had suddenly become normative; because of Napster (and the lawsuits that had shut it down), most music fans understood what downloading was, even if they weren't doing it. That process raised new questions about who owned music and about what that ownership meant. Meanwhile, technology had accelerated, making it possible for anyone with a computer to manipulate existing music and copy it instantaneously. The entire sonic landscape teetered on the precipice of wholesale evolution.
It was at this point that Burton decided to straighten up his bedroom.
"One day I was cleaning my room and listening to the Beatles' White Album," he says. "I was kind of bored, because the other hip-hop work I was doing was really easy. Somebody had sent me an a capella version of 'The Black Album,' but I was already doing stuff with Cee-Lo and Jemini and Doom, so I didn't want to waste my beats on a remix record." "The Black Album" is a 2003 release by Jay-Z. Jemini and Doom are the two indie rappers whom Burton was collaborating with. The Beatles are the Beatles. "So I'm listening to the White Album and I'm putting 'The Black Album away, and I suddenly have this idea: I decide to see if I could take those two albums and make one song, just because of the names of the two albums and because they're perceived as being so different and because I've always loved Ringo Starr's drum sound."
Despite the avalanche of publicity that eventually surrounded "The Grey Album," the first part of Burton's explanation for its creation is consistently overlooked: This was mainly a linguistic coincidence. If everyone referred to the Beatles 1968 double album by its proper name ("The Beatles"), none of this would have ever happened.
"I sat down and tried to make one track, and it happened really fast," Burton recalls. "Then I tried to make a second song, and it took a lot longer, but it still worked. And I thought, Wow. What if I can do the whole album? It was almost this Andy Warhol moment, where I made a decision to do something artistically without a clear reason as to why, except to show people what I could do. And I could never do an album like that again. I still don't know where I found the patience to make those songs. It took me about 20 days in a row, and those were all 12- and 13-hour days. And the whole time I was doing it, I was terrified someone else would come up with the same idea, which would have ruined everything. Because really, the idea is pretty simple."
If you aren't among the countless masses who downloaded "The Grey Album," here's what it sounds like: Imagine every musical element of the White Album chopped into separate parts (every individual drum fill, the bridge from "Helter Skelter," the intro to "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and so on). Burton then reconstituted those dissected parts into loops and patterns and samples, which were then placed underneath Jay-Z's rapping (Jay-Z had released the a capella version of "The Black Album" officially, so the acquisition of the words was easy). Some of those combinations melded remarkably well, and it all seemed like such a clever idea, and it was the perfect moment for something like that to happen. And people just went nuts for it. Entertainment Weekly named it album of the year, and the record label EMI sent Burton a cease-and-desist letter for unlawful use of the Beatles catalog. Burton now assumes the album has gone multiplatinum, although of course he has no way of knowing for sure. And it was all because some shadowy, enigmatic figure called DJ Danger Mouse burned 3,000 CD's to impress a handful of people nobody had ever heard of.
"I thought it would be a weird, cultic record for techies to appreciate, because they would be the only people who would understand how much work was involved," he says. "But then it was taken into this whole different world, where a million people were downloading it at the same time. At best, that record is just quirky and odd and really illegal. I never imagined people would play those songs in clubs. I also think the people who love it tend to love it for the wrong reasons, and the people who hate it tend to hate it for the wrong reasons. I think some people love it for what it supposedly did to the music industry, which was not my intent. I did not make 'The Grey Album' for music fans. I made it to impress people who were really into sampling."
To unsuspecting consumers, "The Grey Album" seemed like the union of two cultures that were not only different but ideologically opposed; it made people realize musical connections they never knew existed. That is more or less the story of Burton's life. His childhood was spent in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Spring Valley, N.Y., where his was one of only two black families. "My parents didn't tell me anything about why I was different," he insists. "I think that was good. I had no idea why I looked the way I looked, so I had to use my imagination." These were the 1980's, so Burton listened to Poison. When he became a teenager, his parents moved to Georgia; everyone there was black. He listened to RZA. By the time he got to college, he had become deeply obsessed with hip-hop; for a long while, it was the only musical genre he consumed. But then he decided to have a beer in public, and everything changed.
"I remember hearing Pink Floyd's 'Wish You Were Here' in a bar," Burton says. "This was around 1995. And I remember thinking it was so beautiful. It just put me in a daze. I asked someone what it was, and they were like: 'You don't know? This is Pink Floyd.' Now, I had heard of Pink Floyd, but I never really knew what they sounded like. I had never actually played Pink Floyd records. And I suddenly found myself wondering, Why have I spent all these years never listening to this music? And the reason was that I was afraid to do anything that would have seemed socially unacceptable. I was afraid that people wouldn't think of me as this hip-hop guy, because hip-hop was my Thing. So then I went out and bought every Pink Floyd record."
When Gnarls Barkley finally takes the Coachella stage at 6:42 p.m. on Sunday, the band opens with the intro to "Breathe," from Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon." This is not because Burton had a beer in 1995; this is because all 14 group members are dressed like characters from "The Wizard of Oz," a movie that collegiate stoners and so-called "synchronicity buffs" like to play simultaneously with "Dark Side of the Moon" (you hit "play" on the CD player when the MGM lion roars for the third time, just before the opening credits). The stage is populated with numerous flying monkeys, two Dorothys (one black, one white), two Scarecrows, a bunch of witches and a laptop computer. Burton portrays the Tin Man and hides at the rear of the stage. Cee-Lo is out front as the Cowardly Lion, sporadically asking the crowd if they have ever "seen freedom" and if they "want to rock."
Cee-Lo's voice is several octaves higher than his physical appearance would indicate, so it soars above the unconventional tempos of the music; one of Burton's pet interests is presenting melodies at unorthodox, inconsistent speeds. All the songs are short, often under three minutes. Considering that this show was still nine days before the U.S. release of "St. Elsewhere," it was surprising to see how much of the audience was already familiar with the material, but perhaps that should be expected; the songs had been in the electronic ether for weeks. "Crazy" went to No. 1 in the U.K. solely on the strength of download sales.
None of the 12 musicians added to the Gnarls Barkley touring lineup played on "St. Elsewhere," but they're generally polished veterans; most have more professional experience than Burton. The drummer (Chris Vrenna) was in Nine Inch Nails. The bassist (Justin Meldal-Johnsen) plays with Beck. One of the backup singers (Res) has her own record deal with Universal. When the "St. Elsewhere" songs are performed live, they sound a bit like funk songs; when I later mentioned that to Burton, he got a little bummed out. ("Yeah, I know," he said, mildly annoyed. "We kept saying: 'Too funky. This is too funky.' It's a problem.") During the early days of the "St. Elsewhere" sessions, Cee-Lo and Burton had no intention of touring at all, or at least no notion of how such a tour would operate. The only goal was to make a certain kind of album.
"What I was originally trying to do was make a psychedelic record that sounded liked psychedelic records from the late 1960's and early 70's," Burton said. "Basically, anyone who was copying the Beatles. I suppose bands like the 13th Floor Elevators and the Electric Prunes are the ones people have heard of, but that was really nameless music; there were thousands of those groups. And what I liked about those bands was that the musicians made crazy decisions. They would play a normal melody for 30 seconds and then throw in something completely uncommercial and insane. Why did they do that? It blew my mind. I wanted to make experimental music that still had melody."
The degree to which "St. Elsewhere" succeeds as psychedelia is open to debate; at first exposure, it doesn't seem especially trippy or mind-altering. Burton claims there is a "steep learning curve" to the album, because the unorthodox tempos and cinematic elements can be lost on casual listeners. This certainly does not seem to be the case with "Crazy." The learning curve on that ultra-accessible single was ridiculously low, which is probably why it worked. "To have a record go to No. 1, you have to appeal to people who have no idea who you are or what you do," Burton says. "That's just the way it is. "
There are several espoused mysteries surrounding Gnarls Barkley, some of which the duo seem to perpetuate on purpose. They usually refuse to explain why they named the band "Gnarls Barkley," prompting many writers to assume they must love the former N.B.A. power forward Charles Barkley. This is not the case. Burton was in a cafe with several friends in Silver Lake, Calif., and everyone at the table started making up fictional celebrity names like "Prince Gnarls" and "Bob Gnarley." When someone came up with "Gnarls Barkley," Burton wrote it down. That's the whole story. The pair also decline to be photographed unless they are both dressed as movie characters, which leads people to suspect that the outfits have some sort of symbolic relationship to the music; as it turns out, this is just something they like to do. Perhaps the strangest thing about their friendship is that Cee-Lo actually refers to Burton as Danger Mouse in casual conversation. As far as I can tell, he is the only person who does this.
"I very rarely call him Brian," Cee-Lo says. "I love the name Danger Mouse. It's an oxymoron, you know. But he is dangerous. He is."
When I spoke to Burton at Power Plant, he was in the process of leading band rehearsals for a Gnarls Barkley tour, although — at the time — no tour schedule had been set. The future of the band is still being invented, as there is still some uncertainty about how popular "St. Elsewhere" will be in America (it opened on the domestic Billboard charts last month at No. 20, rising to No. 15 the following week). Nonetheless, Burton says there will definitely be another Gnarls album in the future.
At the same time, he already has plans to release albums with Black Thought from the Roots, Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse and Blur's frontman Damon Albarn (Burton was recently a producer of the album "Demon Days" for Albarn's side project, Gorillaz). When he describes those projects anecdotally, they sound like ordinary collaborations; Burton sounds less like a movie director and more like a regular producer: a guy who simply records someone else's musical ideas. What will be more compelling is when (and if) Burton can ultimately employ his auteur philosophy in rock production.
"Let's use Spike Lee as an example," Burton says, falling back to film analogies. "Let's say Spike Lee makes a movie with Jamie Foxx and Robert De Niro. Because of their three different reputations, you will have totally different demographics coming together for totally different reasons. But the film will still be taken seriously. In music, you don't have that. If you put Jay-Z on a record with Radiohead, it's a gimmick, because there's no central person you can depend upon to contextualize the ultimate product. But you can easily put two different actors in the same movie and still have it make sense — if the right director does it."
It will be interesting to see if anything akin to a "Danger Mouse Sound" eventually emerges. Traditionally, rock producers are defined by their ability to inject specific, recognizable qualities into the records they superstruct. For Spector, it was the dense, layered "wall of sound." Steve Albini (best known for his work with the Pixies and Nirvana) consistently captures raw, jagged guitar riffs with vocals that are low in the mix; Robert (Mutt) Lange (Def Leppard, Shania Twain) specializes in polished, sculptured anthems that sound the way the 1980's felt. At this point, it would be impossible to categorize what a record by Danger Mouse could be expected to sound like (while "St. Elsewhere" sounds older than it is, his contributions to Gorillaz's "Demon Days" made that album sound vaguely futuristic). He doesn't have a clear sonic signature. That might be because it's still too early in his career (Burton is only 28). It might also be because his aspirations don't necessitate a signature; if he's able to find artists who actively want to be directed — rather than just produced — then every Danger Mouse production will be a creation unto itself.
Chuck Klosterman is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author, most recently, of "Killing Yourself to Live: 85 Percent of a True Story."
― Abbadavid Berman (Hurting), Monday, 19 June 2006 01:46 (nineteen years ago)