Cee Lo Green in Toronto last weekPeter Power/The Globe and Mail
Prince's career didn't suffer much when he changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol - in fact, people seemed to talk about him more than ever. It's a little different when people confuse you with someone you never were, as singer Cee Lo Green discovered when he stepped out from his most recent group project, Gnarls Barkley, to record a solo album that includes the f-bomb single known in some quarters as Forget You.
"I saw on Twitter, where someone was like, 'Why did Gnarls Barkley change his name to Cee Lo Green?' " he said in a quiet voice, during an interview in Toronto. "I can laugh at that, it's adorable, but my manager would look at that with concern."
Green can afford to see the adorable side of mistaken identity, because in the big scheme of things he's becoming more visible, not less. The Lady Killer, out recently on Atlantic, is his third solo record, and like the first two, it has pleased critics across the board. But unlike the first two, it caught the ear of a large mainstream audience, thanks to that smash-hit single. About 27 million people have seen videos for some version of Forget You on YouTube, and the tune is still high on the Canadian singles chart, three months after its release.
Green has taken the long road to overnight success. He had made half a dozen records, alone or with the Atlanta rap crew Goodie Mob, before Gnarls Barkley (whose other half is producer Danger Mouse) put a pair of Grammy awards in his hands in 2006 (one for the group's debut album St. Elsewhere, another for the viral single Crazy).
Green's brassy singing voice and audacious visual style make him seem like a natural extrovert. But though he has been performing for most of his 36 years, it took him a long time to get up the courage to sing in public.
He was a breakdancer first, and a rapper after that. His first stage was a space in his grandmother's converted garage, where three generations of his family hung out and put on talent shows for each other. His first public performances were at anti-drug "lock-in" events organized by his grandmother, an Atlanta activist for the Reagan-era anti-drug campaign, Just Say No. Dancing with a troupe, as he did then, was attractive because it let him go onstage with a protective community of peers.
"I could always sing, but I was shy about it," he said. "Singing was a very vulnerable thing for me. You're alone with that emotion. You kind of close your eyes and let it take you somewhere."
His mother was a preacher; his aunt, a nightclub singer, who encouraged him to defend his creative rights, whatever it cost him at the hands of the establishment ("my mother, basically"). When he was still a kid, his stepfather turned him on to the recordings of soul pioneer Jackie Wilson, who became the custodian of Green's private heaven.
"Jackie was the first voice that spoke to me, to my soul," he said. "But I didn't see myself in the music. He made me feel that I was welcome to sing along, his song invited me in, but it was all about him. I began to emulate him, till I knew each riff, each inflection, and I could do them very naturally. At some point you couldn't tell the difference between me and Jackie."
That obsession, and that training by example, remained a private thing, even when he got into the music business for real. In 1995, with three friends, he formed Goodie Mob, a fun-loving, "conscious" rap group that, with OutKast, put Atlanta on the hip-hop map.
"Goodie Mob was kind of a boy-scouts version of Public Enemy," Green said. "It was like a reform school for me. My mother had passed at that point, and I needed that kind of safe structured environment. It gave me something constructive to do."
It also gave him a persona that he came to find somewhat limiting. After three records with Goodie Mob, he broke out, with a solo album and a single called Closet Freak, an explosive, funky ode to releasing your inner wild thing (youtube.com/watch?v=8krxhNgVhvU).
"Leaving the safe haven of Goodie Mob to do something as loose and wild and bizarre as Closet Freak, that was probably the most vulnerable moment for me," Green said. "But I knew that no one could stop me, no one could get in the way of my right to be artful." He paused for a second before adding: "I would have died for it."
He had no intention of going back into a group setting, but when he met Danger Mouse, he had another of those private revelations, almost like he did with Jackie Wilson.
"It was this controlled, chaotic, atmospheric thing," Green said of the sound Danger Mouse built for him. "It sounded like a storm, and it spoke to my soul. It was like something excavated, something written in stone this entire time, that you uncover with brushes."
The name Gnarls Barkley seemed like a joke to him when it was first suggested, and it hadn't even been agreed upon when it leaked out and got on everyone's tongue. So be it, Green thought, little knowing he'd have to redefine his own identity later.
The new disc has some manic lyric conceits (in one song, the Lady Killer finds a corpse in his bed), and is certainly the most old-school, soul-oriented thing he's done. That has been read in some quarters as a retreat from the wildness of his earlier work, but in another sense, it's a return to his secret origins, in those Jackie Wilson songs that are still imprinted on his psyche.
He has performed the new songs in public and on talk shows (including, for The Colbert Report, a parody call Fox News), but his current dream is to build a show for an extended run in Las Vegas.
"I'd like to do something so my generation can reinvent that Vegas mythology for our time," he said. "I look at it as something monumental and legendary, to have a successful run there. I think it could work: Lady Killer in Vegas …" He snaps his fingers and shimmies in his chair a little, and suddenly he's channelling the Rat Pack. Cee Lo Green may have a little work to do to get his identity straight in the public mind, but he's still got many roles to play.