The vocal melody is memorable, and the words seem meaningful and possibly even spiritual. The song is called 'Taxi Cab Confessions (Sign of the Times),” and it's a highly idiosyncratic personal meditation about self-searching and soul-searching. The album, which runs only twenty-six minutes, starts with an excerpt of a conversation between Dick Cavett and Sly Stone that seems to suggest the benefits of personal fortitude: 'In order to get to it, you gotta go through it,' Sly says, and Cavett parries with 'Who said that? Was it Emerson?' What follows is loopier than anything from Sly or Emerson: the instrumental theme to the late-seventies sitcom 'Taxi,' over which CeeLo sings entirely new lyrics.

Elsewhere,” and a few years later the duo released a follow-up titled 'The Odd Couple.' Then, last week, without any advance notice, CeeLo released an online mini-album called “TV on the Radio” which upped the ante on both songs about TV and songs about mental disarrangement. That first Gnarls Barkley album was also one of the early examples of CeeLo’s obsession with television, or at least with television-themed titles. Photograph by Didier Messens / Redferns via Getty CeeLo had been exploring the seam of hip-hop and soul before then, but that song marked the birth of a new style in which he used his powerful, gospel-tinged vocals to perfect a kind of extroverted introversion-it's a song about mental disarrangement and self-doubt sung proudly and loudly for maximum entertainment value.Īs an act of psychological and pop-cultural provocation, CeeLo Green’s “TV on the Radio” is both extreme and effective. But he's probably most famous (or most justifiably famous) for 'Crazy,' a collaboration with Danger Mouse that was released under the name Gnarls Barkley and became a massive global hit back in 2006. CeeLo started out, in the nineties, in the Dirty South hip-hop group Goodie Mob, and he had one of the most gleefully profane singles in recent memory with 'Fuck You' (or, if you'd prefer, 'Forget You'), in 2010.

He's a poster boy for poor judgment much of the time, and yet those other two aspects of his personality don't disappear as his behavior gets worse. I should preface this by saying that I have never seen “The Voice,” so my idea of CeeLo Green is based entirely on his long history of superb singing, his outsized and flamboyant persona, and his problematic personal behavior.

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