6 April 2006
For those who were aware of it in 2006, how long before the shine of ‘Crazy’ wore off for you? Certainly it soon outgrew its initial impact and became ubiquitous to the point of tedium. That summer I was at a wedding reception that showed a video montage of the bride and groom’s life journey, with the soundtrack being the then-modish ‘Crazy’. Unfortunately, the video got left on a loop for most of the evening, and I know my table was heartily sick of the song well before dessert. (This was in rural France, so we consoled ourselves with excellent wines.) It wasn’t just us: after nine weeks at number one in the UK, ‘Crazy’ was pulled from sale, probably by a record company aware of the overkill but eager to cash in with new Gnarls Barkley product. Here in Ireland it went to the top of the charts for a week, then got displaced by our next number one, before returning to the summit for a further seven weeks.
I suspect much of the early music press enthusiasm for ‘Crazy’ was a nod to the hipness of Danger Mouse: producer du jour, Internet sensation behind the Beatles-Jay-Z mashup The Grey Album, and the non-vocal half of Gnarls Barkley. He lent a veneer of cred to a track of mainstream blandness: plangent indie bassline, Internet-philosophical musings, movie-soundtrack samples, mild electronica, gospel-lite singing. The weaker part of ‘Crazy’ is CeeLo Green. Notwithstanding the welcome streak of character in “Ha ha ha! Bless your soul!” his use of “I’m crazy” to mean “I don’t understand the modern world and those youths with their iPods so therefore I’m authentic” is naff, plus the lyrical progression from “I’m crazy” to “you’re crazy” to “we’re all crazy” is cliched cornball. Maybe we can write off ‘Crazy’ as one of the mid-’00s periodical lunges towards any bit of Internet-based pop culture that looks “authentic”. There will be others!
