Tones of Tumult
Apr 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Kylee Swenson
Philosophy is not something that is often associated with mainstream hip-hop. But in Cee-Lo's mind, there's a lot more to be pondered than the next club party. At one point, the Atlanta rapper and singer nearly got caught up in the billion-dollar bling-bling formula. After moderate success with his critically lauded Dirty South group, Goodie Mob, the pressure mounted to throw out a wider net and reach a larger audience. The result was the group's third album, World Party (LaFace, 1999). With its mission to create a celebratory mood, the album didn't demand too much deep reflection.
But Cee-Lo takes stock in the messages that he relays, and with his first solo album, Cee-Lo Green and His Perfect Imperfections (Arista, 2002), he got back to challenging ideas. “What compels me is what hasn't been said before and also what's been said and how I can see it differently,” he says. “How can I make an individual statement but speak for others, as well?”
By digging deep into his own experience (his minister father died when he was 2, and his mom died not long after Goodie Mob's debut), Cee-Lo managed to say something profound yet universal enough for a vast audience to relate to. It's one explanation why Perfect Imperfections, which Cee-Lo produced mostly himself, ended up on so many Top 10 lists in 2002, including Rolling Stone, Time Out NY, Chicago Tribune and USA Today. Cee-Lo's fans can connect to the integrity of his messages: “They're able to grasp that they are being considered,” he says. “And that's what it's about for me, living for the love of the people, because I am the people.”
On Cee-Lo Green Is the Soul Machine (Arista, 2004), his second solo album, Cee-Lo brought in a few big guns to produce half of the album (the rest of which he took on himself). But despite some tracks from The Neptunes, Timbaland, Premier and Jazze Pha — as well as guest vocals by Pharell Williams, TI and Ludacris — the album is still uniquely his own. Yet Cee-Lo realizes that his creativity doesn't guarantee that he'll always have a job. “Integrity is against the grain,” Cee-Lo says. “I don't think integrity is a commodity or an attribute that [label execs] rate priority for an artist to have. They simply need product. So the fact that I do what I do consistently is daring. It's also daring in that sense, as well, because they would rather have robots than individuals. Individuals have minds and opinions of their own, which causes conflict with their planning. Basically, a capitalistic society has to have someone to capitalize on.”
That fact aside, Cee-Lo has found a few ways to buck the system and remain unique, due in part to his thirst for challenging musical formula. It's also helped having innovative musical friends. Cee-Lo got his start rhyming on Outkast's “Git Up, Git Out” from the duo's 1994 debut, Southernplayalisticaddilacmuzik (LaFace). In fact, he almost made Outkast a trio; instead, he ended up in Goodie Mob. But after three albums with the group, Goodie Mob hooked up with Outkast and the production group Organized Noize (which has produced both acts) to release their all-star collective effort as Dungeon Family called Even in Darkness (Arista, 2001). Cee-Lo then went onto his solo explorations.
MELTING-POT MUSIC
Like any good producer/artist, Cee-Lo has appreciated music from all angles. If you've heard Cee-Lo's gritty, soulful voice, you won't be surprised to hear that he has a love for Curtis Mayfield or Marvin Gaye. But Elton John, Def Leppard, Pink Floyd and Mötley Crüe might throw you for a loop. Nevertheless, it explains why it's so hard to pigeonhole Cee-Lo's music, with its varying spoonfuls of hip-hop, R&B, soul, disco, rock, electronic, Latin and gospel.
“I consider genre to be man-made or opinion-oriented,” Cee-Lo says. “But I believe that all of music in general is the derivative of each other. That's why I consider all music to ultimately be soul music because music cannot be given or received without a soul. Soul is the very thing that makes us conscious, makes us alive. So even Mötley Crüe is soul music.”
But to break it down — not by genre, but by body part — different music serves different purposes. “A lot of people go for the body,” Cee-Lo says. “Crunk music or house music goes for the body. And Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead or Aphex Twin, to me, their production goes for the mind. Ultimately, they affect the body, but I don't know if they set out to. And, of course, R&B and funk is going for the soul. It affects the body, too. Public Enemy was mind and body. De La Soul was heart and mind. It took a lot of courage to be a first of a kind like they were. And then you go to Al Green, and it's complete soul. But I intend on being everything. I want the heart, the mind, the body and the soul. I want you completely. I'm going after all of the organs — the many degrees of our existence — and trying to affect them all at the same time.”
Obviously, that's a tall order to fill. Cee-Lo is one of the more confident artists on the block, but cramming mind, body, heart and soul into one song is not exactly a cakewalk. “That's why variety is such a necessity to me,” he says. “I have to attempt to do it within the scheme of an entire album. That's why the album resembles life more than anything, because it's peak-and-valley. It's equated as one word, and that's chance. You take a chance getting up and getting dressed and walking out your door every day. You could try to play it safe like Ja Rule has or anybody who comes into a niche of their sound and ends up running it into the ground. It ends up becoming typical and predictable because you've done it countless times before, but you're only trying to give people what they want or what they wanted from you at one time, but you forget to grow, as well. Life is not playing it safe. If you're not going to take a chance, you have to ask yourself, ‘Are you really even alive?’”
This question is brought up in an extremely infectious piano- and horns-based R&B track from Soul Machine called “Livin' Again.” Upon hearing it, it's hard to stop yourself from hitting the Rewind button. It's the perfect example of a pop song that makes you think, as well as bob your head.
GETTING DOWN TO BUSINESS
If you're like most up-and-coming producers, chances are, you've released music that you are less than content with. Perhaps it has an off-time guitar part, vocals that could have been stronger or a lopsided mix. The truth is that even when you're getting help from the biggest producers, something could still bug you about your recordings. “I don't normally listen to any of my previous work because I'm my own worst critic, and there's always that, ‘Aw, I could have done this better,’” Cee-Lo says. “But more than just that, it's done. It's finished, and I let it go. I'm through with it.”
Cee-Lo recorded in three studios throughout the course of working on Soul Machine. Excluding the Timbaland, Neptunes, Jazze Pha and Premier tracks, some of which were created in the producers' own studios, Cee-Lo recorded at DARP (Dallas Austin Recording and Production), Maze and Zac Digital studios in Atlanta. Engineer Ben Allen worked through the process with Cee-Lo. “The first couple of months were a lot of us going over to DARP or Maze and just hooking up the Motif and having some ideas that he'd roughed out at home,” Allen says. “They would just be sequences, and, basically, I'd turn the volume up to 11 and let him write for a couple of hours and just get the vibe in the room. Generally, most of his stuff starts out as four- to eight-bar loops. And then we'll go in and do some edits and mutes and add some live stuff to give it a little bit more feel and a little less loopiness.”
When it came to the vocal tracking, Cee-Lo and Allen didn't spend time doing any vocal comping. Either the verse vocal take was perfect, or Cee-Lo would sing or rap it over. As it turns out, he didn't have to spend too much time doing that, either. “Honestly, sometimes, he would just nail the first take,” Allen says. “He's got just incredible microphone technique, and he puts so much personality into everything that even if there is a flaw there, it's so overshadowed by what he's doing most of the time that it becomes irrelevant.”
But Cee-Lo is human (as he says on “Livin' Again,” “I'm so human that it is a goddamn shame”). So when he records vocals for a certain section of a song — stacking verse parts, then choruses — he won't stop until he's happy. “He might screw up, but he'll go back and do it again until it's right,” Allen says. “He wouldn't screw up and let it slide. He'd screw up and go back and recut it until it was the way that he wanted to do it. And that may be literally one take or 20 takes.”
DISTILLED TO BASICS
Perfect Imperfections marked the first time that Cee-Lo produced his own music. Walking away from Goodie Mob with what he'd learned from Organized Noize, Cee-Lo ended up doing his first solo album on his Yamaha Motif 7 and a couple of drum modules. “I like for it to be raw and basically bare necessities — pots and pans,” he says. But Cee-Lo is less certain about pinpointing his production style. “My tastes vary so much that I can hardly keep up with them; it's like chasing the wind,” he says. “I have yet to find my sound or my signature. I've always had a production ear. I'm not trained to play anything formally, but I hear it, so I'm able to orchestrate it, and I can capture my ideas. I can make a song on a Casio. I do not lean on a mechanism. A mechanism can only enhance and complement, but it's pointless without the heart and soul, which is what music ultimately is. It's captured and immortalized due to a recording, and that's the wonder of making music.
“I was explaining that to an artist who I'm helping to rear right now, that how getting in front of the mic is always intimidating no matter how comfortable you think you are with a song or with yourself. Because the way you record it, you can stick it in a time capsule after the fact and, 50 years from now, pull it out of the ground, and it'll be the same exact way. So you have to be careful. Is this the way that you want it to be? Is this the way you want it to go out into the world?”
Part of what makes Soul Machine dynamic is Cee-Lo's ability to play well with others. There is a lot of live instrumentation on the album. “If the drum programming is done with the MPC, of course, I can sit down with the keyboard and pretty much get everything I want out of it,” he says. “But [in collaborating with other musicians] I feel like I'm giving back, and I'm allowing another heart and soul and mind to chime in and express. If my bass player, Aaron [Clay], would do something live, he sings with fingers, so his bass line is like a vocal. It brings me joy that sometimes I have an idea and I give him more or less the blueprint of what I hear, and I say, ‘Go with it. Play it for the most part, but vary it and make it yours.’”
THE BIG GUNS
For tracks such as “I'll Be Around” — which showcases Timbaland's signature simple yet unusual beats — Cee-Lo set his Akai MPC and Motif aside and went into collaboration mode. The outside producers would either come by with a Digidesign Pro Tools session tracked out, or they'd mail over a 2-track audio file on CD. “And then we'd load it into the computer, cut vocals to that, send it back, and they would lay in all the beats under it,” Allen says. “A lot of the 2-tracks they would send us, the timing and sequencing weren't perfect, so [Cee-Lo] would do a ton of vocals to that, and then the producer would send us the track in another Pro Tools session. And I would have to sit there for hours on end lining everything up, bar after bar, a lot of little stuff like that. But that's sort of typical.”
For Cee-Lo, choosing to collaborate with big-name producers wasn't a shallow decision. “I didn't pick [Timbaland] because of his namesake,” he says. “I picked him because of his quality. I told Timbaland, ‘You and Missy [Elliott] are divine. I am impressed, and I'm humbled by your skill.’ I could have hoarded the whole budget and produced the whole album again by myself, but I pay Timbaland for how good he is. So this album is about riding with him in his vehicle to uncharted territory to plant a flag there. I like to plant my flag all over.”
When Cee-Lo plays the role as producer, he puts a certain amount of trust in Allen's hands. Letting his collaborators add their own personal stamp keeps everyone happy. For example, it allowed Allen to get creative and come up with cool sounds. “Lo is probably the first big client I've worked with in a long time who was open to trying stuff,” Allen says. “When he wanted to record drums, he would just be like, ‘Cool, just make it sound how you want to.’ And we would throw drums down the hallway, or we'd do drums in the vocal booth or in the lounge.”
MIXED EMOTIONS
Soul Machine meanders into varied emotional territory. Much of the first half is cheery and positive whereas the second, beginning with “Evening News” — which kicks off with the baritone-voice intro, “And now … the nighttime” — provides a platform on which Cee-Lo gets to air some grievances. He goes directly from the summery, relaxed “All Day Love Affair” into outright anger. And the music reflects his mood with some discordant and harder sounds. “If I'm trying to evoke emotion deep down, I may have to lose an organ or something. Even ‘Livin’ Again' is peak-and-valley,” Cee-Lo attests. “It's rising up; then, it drops down. I'm down with contrast. With urbanism, [people living the urban lifestyle] are conditioned to it hard and revel in it hard because they can't fathom it being any easier than what it is.”
So when you get a Cee-Lo album, you get a mixed bag of hard, soft and in-between. “The drums are always hard to make sure that they're feeling me,” he says. “And the melody is to give them hope and optimism and broaden their horizons. And so it's all of these different contrasts that make up the song. The hook is like the wheel to get up and do it and make sure you're marching off into it like the battlefield of life. There are casualties in any war, but for the most part, you plan to come out victoriously — follow the gat line; you know what I mean? I felt like Goodie Mob was infantry because we were foot soldiers for the South. I felt like we were more or less civil-rights activists. So, now, I've moved up in ranking due to my experience and going out to war time and time again. Now, I can delegate strategies for soldiers to live by, to move by. But I'm not going to send them out there to die just because. I'm going to send them with a cause and for a cause. Of course, we all live and die, but to live and die nobly and honorably … not over a pair of tennis shoes, not over drugs, not over nothing like that. So I guess it's all wrapped up to living again. Every new day is a new opportunity to progress. And that's what it's all about. You have to hop to it and march.”
CEE-LO'S SANCTUARY
At Maze, ATL, DARP and Zac Digital studios in Atlanta
Access Virus plug-in for delays
Akai MPC2000XL sampler workstation
Apple G4 computers (one per studio)
Avalon VT-737sp mic preamp
Blue Dragonfly mic: “For almost all vocals,” says Engineer Ben Allen (pictured at right).
Bomb Factory 1176, Moogerfooger 12-Stage Phaser plug-ins
Digidesign Pro Tools|24 Mixplus system, 888|24 I/Os (4), ProControl console
E-mu Planet Phatt, Proteus 2000 sound modules
Glyph Net Drives 80GB FireWire hard drives (several)
Fender Telecaster guitar
Line 6 Pod effects unit
Millennia Media STT-1 mic pre/EQ/compressor/limiter/de-esser: “A lot of the guitar sounds were that vintage Prince sound, where it just plugged straight in to the Millennia, maybe a wah pedal or something like that, but a lot of real dry, funky guitar,” Allen says.
Neumann U 47, TLM 193 mics
Roland VP-330 Vocoder Plus synth
Royer R-121 mics: “Ribbon mics are very, very fragile,” Allen says. “You can actually break them if you put something too loud in front of them. But the Royers are real resilient. We put a pair of them up in an x/y stereo pattern in front of the horn section. You're listening to the speakers, and it sounds like you're standing in the room with them.”
Solid State Logic SL 4000 G console
TC Works MegaVerb plug-in
Waves AudioTrack, TrueVerb, Renaissance plug-ins
Yamaha Motif 7 keyboard
Yamaha NS-10 monitors
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