DANGER, DANGER
For about two days this past week, I felt super-cool, because I thought I had discovered a piece of "underground" music no one else knew about. It was all my own, and I maintained a quiet sense of superiority, a smugness that bled into my everyday actions, like at the grocery store when I threw a little extra attitude toward an unsuspecting bagger, or at the gym, when I glowered at the sweating, stair-climbing patrons.
Whatever is on your iPod right now
, I thought,
I know about something cooler: Gnarls Barkley
.
Of course, as these things often go, my fantasies of coolness were both undeserved and short-lived. Gnarls Barkley is the collaborative effort between the insane genius producer
Danger Mouse and the undergroundish singer/rapper Cee-Lo, and though I had basked briefly in the delusional pleasure of thinking they belonged to
me
, I soon began hearing the duo's newest single, "Crazy," blaring out of cars on the Plaza, on the radio and on television about 15 times a day. Top that off with Chuck Klosterman's recent Sunday Times Magazine story about Danger Mouse and, it turns out, I was actually way behind.
It was Danger Mouse's reputation as an innovative producer and critic's darling-one who somehow managed to garner lots of press and still not blossom into a household name-that misled me. Until now, he was known mostly for his work with underground hip-hop artist MF Doom and, in larger circles, for his creation of the Internet sensation
The Grey Album
. The latter caused one of the biggest musical stirs of 2004, when Danger Mouse spent 20 days (according to the Times Magazine article) slicing and dicing the Beatles White Album, completely rearranging beats, fills, guitar parts, choruses, and placing them underneath an a capella version of Jay-Z's
The Black Album
. The final product provided the producer a cultish fame, but still kept him under mainstream radar. At first, Danger Mouse did not undertake the project as a musical challenge, concept album or any particular statement but, rather, for the most simple of reasons: It seemed kind of funny to fuse
The White Album
and
The Black Album
.
The idea might have been a rudimentary one, but the result was a complex, bizarre revolution in sound. Similarly,
St. Elsewhere
, the Gnarls Barkley record, is a genre-destroying, integrated piece of pleasantly pseudo psychedelia. It's funky in the wack-ass-P-Funk-freak-show sense of funky, versus the horn-sections-that-white-people-like sense of funky. That is, on
St. Elsewhere
, Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo prove unafraid to take their own catchy, pop-perfect hooks and throttle them with something unexpected: weird drum fill choices, a twist in chord progression, a Violent Femmes cover. Even though most of the songs clock in at the requisite radio-ready under-3-minutes, the friendliness of the album is undercut by dark, weird currents, be they lyrical, musical or both. Think how those psychedelic Brazilian cross-breeders Os Mutantes always managed to subvert their own honey-coated tunes, slicing a perfectly fine melody with screeching guitar or odd, superterrestrial bleatings, and you get the idea. Though less grating and more subtle than those of Os Mutantes' schizophrenic oeuvre, the twists and turns of
St. Elsewhere
combine to produce a similar product, something as sweet and infectious as it is strange and threatening. It just takes a few listens to figure that out.
The tradition of not settling for a really good pop song, but instead infusing it with brain-melting oddities, has a long history in popular African-American music. Hip-hop producers-aided by the popularity of sampling, speed-of-light changes in technology and the continued cross-pollination of genres-have picked up the torch, far outsprinting any other subset of music-makers. One thing that's made the most impact: producers' welcoming embrace of a variety of types of music. What made producer/rapper Dr. Dre's groundbreaking 1992 record
The Chronic
so stunningly fresh (and so stunningly popular), for instance, was his use of vintage synthesizers, most notably the Jupiter 8, to produce a singular, unique sound, one that would come to anchor West Coast hip-hop for years to come. The big deal about that is, the Jupiter 8, before then, had been used primarily by prog rock bands and people like Huey Lewis, artists who couldn't be further away from hip-hop, both culturally and sonically.
But, like Danger Mouse, Dre fused two disparate cultures and, like Danger Mouse, he was able to recognize a nexus where he saw one. Such creative hybridization prevailed in African-American-made music both before and well after
The Chronic
, as in Outkast's brilliant 2003 double-disc
Speakerboxx/The Love Below
(on which Cee-Lo performed), whose mix of rap, funk, soul, pop and psychedelic elements foretold
St. Elsewhere
.
The point is, of all the disparate types of musicians out there, hip-hop artists remain at the vanguard of where we're going, due in large part to their own openness to experimentalism and obsessiveness over music-
any
type of music. To catch a little piece of this in Santa Fe, head over to El Paseo (208 Galisteo St., 992-2848) at 9 pm on Thursday nights to catch Fat Head and a DJ. This duo combines Tony C'de Baca (of the popular, sort of fratty pop/rock band the Lush Life) and his guitar and soulful voice, backed by DJ Seamless providing beats via turntables and vinyl. It's free, but, more important, it's a little taste of Danger Mouse, right in our own backyard.
THIS JUST IN...
Broadway diva Jennifer Holliday has cancelled her Santa Fe Pride performance, scheduled for Thursday, June 22 at the Lensic. For refund info, call the Lensic box office (988-1234) or drop by (211 W. San Francisco St.).
