DX: Well I thought you were motivated by something else. When you get deep in your rhymes it sounds like you’re getting prepared for [your] post-music career, so I gotta ask the question you already answered on “Selling Soul,” are you planning to become the Al Green of Hip Hop literally and leave the stage for the pulpit?
Cee-Lo: Wow, I just said that [to somebody] the other day too. You pretty observant [Laughs]. That’s why I stopped talking so much and I decided to just be still and wait on God to move me [towards that]. Because I don’t know at what point in time, or what situation or circumstance would ordain me in that way. I know brother Green had the hot grits thrown on him. I don’t want that to happen, so my music has always been trying to be pleasing in the sight of my maker, and [so] he would move me when he saw fit when my work was done. I’m fortunate to say that I still feel like I have a lot of music left in me. But to answer your question, I don’t really know [yet]. I figure that by the time that happens to me it’s gonna be unmistakable. But I hope that nothing tragic has to happen for me to be pushed in that way. It’s the same way that I lost my mother, which energized me to do what I’ve done thus far.

DX: Is that what your mom wanted? Before she passed did she say explicitly that she wanted you to follow in her footsteps [and become a minister], or did she just want her reckless teenage son to git up, git out and git something?
Cee-Lo: Yeah, more or less. We never spoke about it directly, but there had always been those things [implied] when I was growing up. She told me that my father [who passed] had said I was going to be special and I would have something special to do. And she believed that. But with me being a deviant when I was young – and for the record, I have not always been this well-spoken and articulate. I dropped out of the school in the ninth grade. I’m self-civilized. So with that being said, I didn’t believe [what she believed in me] wholeheartedly. I felt like, “Well, all parents think their kids are special.”

If you listen to the new Gnarls record, there’s a song called “She Knows,” and loosely that’s what it’s about. I feel like I took on my mother’s spirit. This is her work, not my work. Although it is voluntary on my part at this point, [the] initiating point of what happened to me I had nothing to do with. It’s almost like I woke up one day and could articulate and was wise, and was driven and compassionate. When I was just robotic the day before. So I do feel like it’s my mother’s ambition. I just felt like I had disgraced her so many times before I could never do it again. I felt like I owed her the rest of my life because I knew she had given her life for me.

DX: It’s hard to imagine you as a pistol-packing petty criminal.
Cee-Lo: Have you heard that from me or from somebody else?

DX: Read about it in articles.
Cee-Lo: I want somebody else to tell you. It sounds a little outrageous coming outta my mouth. I put it like this, a song like “Crazy,” the magnitude and the impact that it had, can you imagine all of that internalized with no outlet? My chest couldn’t hold it. I would’ve imploded with it. That is the rocket fuel behind my [musical] exploration. The fact [is] it’s therapeutic to me. I have to do it.

And for the record, people don’t just respect me for [music], but I’m also a G. And I’ll say that in print. I’m a soldier, man. I’m a warrior. Gangster sounds a little cliché, and a little typical at this point. My whole thing on that is I can show you better than I can tell you. But I’d much rather do something for the greater good. And I’m very fortunate that my life was spared because of [music]. And I could never let that be in vein. I feel like I went on to be somebody. But the street people they know where I come from. And they know I don’t glorify none of that dumb shit.

DX: Switching gears here, maybe I’m too much of a Hip Hop head, but the Gnarls Barkley phenomenon of the past couple years kinda passed me by. I guess when the alternative and rock media anoint something Hip Hoppers create as being great I become immediately suspicious of it. Am I just too much of a purist who needs to expand his horizons?
Cee-Lo: Nah, I wouldn’t say that. I respect that. Like I said [though], you can’t pretend with that, what emotions are involved. You can’t pretend with that entire genre, that entire culture, which just happens to be greater America. [Gnarls] is the real thing. This is the same energy and emotion unbridled that drove me to do Goodie Mob. I need to harness [that energy] into something constructive and productive. Just talking shit for the sake of rappin’, that’s never what I’ve done. I need cause. So the same energy and aspirations that was behind Goodie Mob [are behind Gnarls]. This is just a very humane version and side of me. It’s the most human I’ve ever been because a lot of times you forget that human beings are soldiers, you just [call them] soldiers. And that’s what Goodie Mob was, although there was humanity in that as well. Continued on page 6 »