CEE LO Purchase / Listen

By Dove
~Sheepish Lordess of Chaos~


“Footsteps In The Sand” is a parable of faith telling of a man who had a dream in which his life’s journey was represented by sand, and looking back over most of his life he saw two sets of prints - his and God’s. In the last phase of his dream, he saw the same sand with only one set of footprints. The man questioned God about why he was left alone after he had been promised that God would always be there for him. God answers him: ‘During your times of trial and suffering, when you see only one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you.’
Cee-Lo Green is a man who has walked many a mile without having to look back to know that God has carried him through phases in his life. His new album, Cee-Lo Green And His Perfect Imperfections, is an inspiring anthology acknowledging both personal growth and artistic tribulations. A self-proclaimed ‘Super Chicken’, Cee-Lo is the confident country bird that knew he could fly beyond the steps he had already taken.
Born to parents who were both Christian ministers - Cee-Lo has had spiritual influences from the day he was born. In an attempt to define moments that first compelled him to become an artist, Cee-Lo laughs as he explains his mother’s role in creating this future superstar. “My mother has a divine entrepreneurial spirit - asking me to come down and dance for company – that’s how I grew up. It’s always been natural, there was never a point of me questioning it – it was something that I was able to do – I always could dance and how I began to sing was mimicking other people, imitating rifts and different things, and then I started to listen to myself and I could mimic some things to its exactness.”
Even the most talented artists have to be discovered at some point, and Cee-Lo’s moment of discovery wasn’t necessarily glamorous. “My singing was isolated to the shower at first – and my aunt who is a singer happened to walk in and overhear me singing one day, and she realized I had actual talent and so did my mother… so anytime my mother could put me on stage doing something for her friends. She used to sell Amway products, and we went to some big Amway convention in New Orleans or something one time, and she got me to play this robot on stage. You remember those silver exercise suits that were made out of plastic? She got one of those and a cardboard box, and covered it with aluminum foil and cut the eyes out – and I was this robot and I did a little dance to Midnight Star’s ‘Freakazoid’. I’ve been performing for a long time.” Cee-Lo laughs heartily as he tells the story, and one can’t help but wonder that he may be secretly hoping that photos won’t be popping up somewhere at a random Summer Jam.
Poised and verbally collected, Cee-Lo doesn’t speak upon his own genius unless someone else initiates the conversation. He is modest in claiming his own inherent knowledge, and proceeds to give credit to no one but God. “Actually, my wisdom was bestowed upon me, it almost seemed as if overnight. It definitely is a calling and I definitely am energized, and being led and being utilized – and being a medium and a vehicle in this work of God. I consider my music divine intervention and I consider myself to be divinely human. God utilizes imperfect people all the time, because we’re all imperfect. I think it speaks when it manifests itself in that shape and form – utilizing someone as imperfect as myself. My growing up, I used to be the opposite of what I’m known as today. I consider that my life was spared, and that I was saved – that’s why I always include God and I’m very appreciative, and I try to glorify His name as much as I possibly can as somewhat of a moral obligation.”
Presented with the question of why he doesn’t include God more in his lyrics, Cee-Lo mishears the question and proceeds to answer to why he includes God at all. “What I’m trying to do is do it palatably and tastefully, and not overbearing. I don’t think that I’ve tried to preach and provoke and obligate God to anyone else – I’ve only just proclaimed stories and experiences of how He’s been prevalent in my life. That’s my God, and I do have the right to say so – but I do understand what industry we’re in, and it’s about professionalism and everything don’t have to be so personal and heavy all the time. What I try to do is aspire for balance – I try to make my positivity product and my integrity interesting and my morality marketable.”
After clarifying the initial question about why Cee-Lo might possibly shy away from talking about God too much in his music to avoid losing mainstream fans, he takes a moment to reflect. “The only thing I can give credit to is that the very inner vein of life – there is no positivity without negativity. As much as they conflict, they coincide and coexist, so someone else doing what they do gives me a job and an identity – we kinda equal each other out. It’s of the same caliber as far as quality is concerned. It sounds a bit peculiar, but there is quality negativeness. I think it’s kind of divine for someone who can make an atrocity seem so beautiful - like the poverties of the ghetto life and struggling and things of that nature – and paint a beautiful picture of pain and anguish…and sometimes it doesn’t come with a moral to the story, so I try to offer somewhat of a solution and maybe a root of why that may be. I’m somewhat of a conspiracy theorist – it won’t just be a random questioning of why we in the ghetto – I come with research.”

The Good Die Mostly Over Bullshit

Cee-Lo sighs heavily and pauses. “I hate to get political man,” he says with another sigh. He is obviously hesitant to discuss his thoughts about the tragedies of September 11th – yet once he gets started, the theories he harbors roll off his tongue prolifically. “I do believe there’s more to that story. My feelings about it, I just think that for me, it looked as if they could have just gotten off the phone with Bin Laden and been like ‘hey, if you don’t do this for me, I’m gonna set you up over here’. I mean, who has the audacity to come against the United States? Nothing like this has happened since Pearl Harbor. Who has the nutz to do that without being allowed to do so? I believe that if they wanted to wait thirty more minutes, it could have been the entire fifty thousand people that normally go to the Trade Center, and they could have really hit a nick. So maybe the five thousand that perished was a small price to pay for whatever game that they’re over there warring about right now. And it was ironic to me that - what a coincidence – they just happened to crash into the side of the Pentagon where nobody just happened not to be? That’s speculation, it’s not actual – but it does make you say hmmm don’t it? George Bush, his speech that day… he wasn’t a popular president to begin with – and America can’t have a country that hates their president. Now he’s a fuckin’ hero behind this shit. Did you see at the speech he gave – he couldn’t get one sentence out without everyone standing up clapping like ‘aaaaahhhh’,” Cee-Lo chuckles.
The discussion leads to a mention of the movie Wagging The Dog, and he states emphatically “That’s exactly what it is! Just think of how many Black people never saw that movie. I don’t think nobody’s creativity or imagination is that good where they could just come up with scripts like that randomly. They try to give us the truth all of the time, and I think that’s their way of cleaning their hands of the situation after it’s all said and done – ‘well I told you’.”
As for the after-effect of artists banding together on 9/11 compilations to raise funds for the families of the victims, Cee-Lo says that he would graciously appear on an album of that caliber “on the strength”. “Knowledge, wisdom and understanding is a blessing as much as it is a curse. Once you know better and not do better, it’s transgression. It’s right up there with slapping your momma, it’s the worst. The only hesitancy I would have, is that I don’t know if I would be doing something for a cause that don’t nobody really understand - like we’re just trying to come together over the lives that were lost, but the underlying truth about it is notorious. It’s fucked up – if I’m right – then that’s fucked up that America would go that far. But then again, I wouldn’t want to be nowhere else but in America.”
Would Cee-Lo ever go into politics himself? “I think I’m in it already,” he says firmly.

Still Standing?

Even before Goodie MOb’s 1995 debut Soul Food, Cee-Lo was making waves with the acumen delivered with his high-pitched drawl when Outkast’s 1994 single “Git Up Git Out” featured one verse from Cee-Lo and one from Big Gipp. Although Cee-Lo’s lyrics on the song fit the pace of his co-vocalists, he stood out as an amazing talent to hungry ears and was awarded ‘Rhyme of the Month’ by the Source. Rico Wade approached Cee-Lo about working with the Goodie MOb, and the pace was set for the first single “Cell Therapy”. The follow up to Soul Food was 1998’s glowing sophomore effort Still Standing, then in 1999 the quirky quartet came with the inauspicious World Party. Although all three albums went gold, fans did not quite understand the artistic differences in World Party in comparison to the first two albums - yet for the most part they remained faithful in testament of the group’s greatness. However with no new word on a fourth project, rumors of a Goodie MOb breakup have been running rampant.
Surprisingly, Cee-Lo does not seem disdainful about discussing the current relationship between himself, Khujo, Big Gipp and T-Mo. “Even if I didn’t want to do another album, we’re contractually obligated to five more albums,” he says guardedly. After a pause, he appears to relax into his statement. “It’s just that we started out as kids – on ‘Get Up Get Out’ I was seventeen years old. Since then I’ve evolved into a man, I’ve gotten married and had children, I have a household – and so do the other guys – different religious preferences… and [with] our music we tend to allow what is personal to bleed over into the product. It just means that we’re not all on the same creative page. Since we deal with a lot of issues like religion and things of that nature, I can’t be like ‘well I’m Christian’ and then somebody else be like ‘well shit, I’m this’ – it seems like a bunch of mixed emotions and overly opinionated version of a song. That’s how it started to feel, you know – it wasn’t the same.
“I felt confined because the music that I’m doing on my solo album I’ve always been able to do. For lack of a medium, I couldn’t do it. I aspired to have a solo deal not to leave, or to outdo or outshine the group – because there is no one comparable to Goodie MOb and what we contributed not only to Southern music but to music in general. I’m trying to be an addition and a continuation, because my personal interpretations of music are a great deal different. People are probably gonna be shocked to some degree of how broad my range is – I produced my album. I’m an all-around artist and visionary and conceptualist. I’m a big artist and I needed more room – more space – to be all that I am. I don’t think the guys understood that at first, because it came at a time…well, honestly, I was blessed and fortunate to do more side work than the rest of the guys. There were able to do it but they didn’t aspire to it.”
Considering the constant media attention paid to Cee-Lo, with outsiders proclaiming him to be the leader of the group, he claims he never saw an outward display of antipathy from his group mates. He does, however, realistically understand the possibilities of what might be under the surface. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a rageful degree of resentment sometimes. I don’t know. They’ve never voiced it to me, but it’s almost like that’s too good to be true. I don’t know how it would feel if I had to wear those shoes. But me being the type of person that I am and knowing myself, I am a leader anyway – so I’m gon’ be doing what I got to do for me. I’m into plan B’s and C’s and D’s. I think the guys… they didn’t grow up the way I did – they grew up off straight rap. My upbringing was far more diversified – and it’s not their fault and it’s not mine – but I guess in the financial sense of it, it happened at a time where I had the luxury of saying ‘I don’t want to tour, I don’t wanna do that right now, and I don’t really feel World Party - it doesn’t represent me and it doesn’t stand for anything I want to be remembered by’. That’s when our problems started to arise. But still, it was a financial obligation for everyone else to tour. Goodie MOb is everyone else’s main thing, and I didn’t ever want to depend on it like that – I wanted it to be fun.”
Cee-Lo pauses, then says in a tiresome tone, “Touring and touring and touring. I’m an artist – so my nature is that of color. I have a hard time toning that color down into the black and white of a regimen and having to do something over and over and over again. I’m alive but I’m not living. I just need a break from all that shit right now. I think they have no choice but to overstand now, and I think that a lot of time is gonna pass - I think it’s made them stronger individuals, and myself a lot more self-resilient and reliant. It was a blessing in disguise that we had this time apart, but to make a long story short we’re not broken up – we still talk and we still are trying to mend and come together and find a common ground again.”

Microhard

Asking Cee-Lo to list off his own favorite artists is like asking a child which candy bar to buy. He just can’t choose. After a few moments he begins to rattle off names, pausing intermittently to reiterate how he can’t choose. “Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Mary J Blige, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, Bill Withers, Bobby Womack, Al Green, Marvin Gaye, Dennis Edwards from the Temptations, Billy Joel, Elton John, Steven Tyler from Aerosmith – I like Boy George. Earth Wind & Fire, Barkays, KonFunkShun, Mint Condition - Stokely got a lot of range – people don’t know Stokely could sing like that because I guess the songs that they release don’t really call for him to blow like that. I know Stokely gets down. Outkast, Goodie MOb, Rakim, Slick Rick, Jungle Brothers – That’s one of my favorite Hip Hop albums, Done By The Forces Of Nature. I’m down with everything. I love music. Everybody is dope in their own right and in their own time and space.”
Cee-Lo had an opportunity to let Mike Gee know that he was impacted by the J-Beez sound when Violator’s Chris Lighty introduced them. Cee-Lo has since left Violator Management, but reassures that there was no drama surrounding the departure. “It’s not anything bad. It was just hard facilitation – I’m in Atlanta, they’re in New York. I’m doing something that’s uncommon, and we don’t spend enough time for Chris to get to know me personally, so therefore he can’t speak on my behalf all the way. It’s just that I’m not a knucklehead, I can talk for myself, and I have a wonderful relationship and personal relationship with the CEO of my label, so I can call him or email him with my concerns or my comments.”
Music industry politics is an area that seems to elude Cee-Lo, whether by his decision to stay out of it, or by his genuine belief that people will respect him beyond the dollars he is able to make for them. His 21-track album is due for release in April, however 10 to 15 of the tracks have already been circulated via the internet – and fans are snatching up the new music with fervor. When presented with the fact that people are already privy to the project, Cee-Lo stops cold. After a few seconds of silence, his thoughts seem to fumble into disappointed words. “Actually… I don’t know who gets it out there, but it has to be…I made sure I recorded that album in a small studio, away from all the… I didn’t go to the ‘in’ studio to record at where so-and-so’s in the next room and they’re stumbling in listening – I wanted my album to be a complete surprise. So I know someone on the corporate end leaked this out.” He sighs heavily and another long silence ensues.
“Actually man…in my mind, it may be a bit foolish now, but I expected my album to be sacred until it came out. I recorded enough songs to [change the tracks], but I don’t have a revised version prepared to go. So hopefully people will still be interested and want to get the quality version. I don’t know, I’m still just being faithful about it. I hate that it’s gotten let out so big - but I was suffering from anxiety wondering how people were gonna take the album. I went on to Okayplayer and I checked it out – and I was surprised and I was pleased. It was an experience that was so good and it made me feel real, because I was gonna come under far more scrutiny than I did.” Leave it to Cee-Lo to find something positive in a potentially bad situation.
Cee-Lo is often questioned about his brilliant fusion of lyrical influences. His new album amplifies his artistry not only in words, but in complete songwriting as well. Hip Hop is a love in his life, but he refuses to be boxed in to a rocky relationship with no foundation. “I am rock & roll,” he explains, “I am actually more rock & roll, soul, gospel, r&b and funk more than I am anything. I acquired Hip Hop last. Soul is the origin of all music – music cannot be created without it. It comes to me first. The actual first solo album that I did – it’s never been released, but the first one I started to work on is an all singing album. I’m eventually going to embark upon an all singing album, an all rap album, an all rock album, an all funk – just do the full complete thought and exercise my extremities. People are never gonna get tired of me because I’m versed in all the many things that are a contribution to this album. I tried my best not to leave one rock unturned, especially in my life.
“I just wanted to keep it completely human, to express my vulnerabilities, and loves and strengths, and virtues and vices – why does anybody want to be soul-less and mindless and be heartless like they’re robots? Like they don’t feel. This is voluntary action on the part of my counterparts as far as Hip Hop is concerned, and I’m not enthused by that. I’m not enthused about wearing the same bandana as you, or doing the same thing that you do – and don’t trip on me for spreading my wings – I mean, what are you saying? You want me to do what you do? So me and you can battle and you can show me how much more better you are in talkin’ gun talk than me? That’s what it’s all about – everybody’s wants to [be] like ‘yeah, he’s talking gun talk but shiiit, he was only in jail for two weeks and I was there for two years, I can do it better than him, and he was in the sick ward the whole time’ – you know, just comin’ up with all kinda shit. I’m not into beef – I am into fruit of my labor. You will know that by ‘Big [Ole] Words’ I am not to be fucked with on a lyrical basis. You will also know that I am not to be fucked with on whatever else I want to do – so just leave me alone. Battle with somebody else. I’m doing this out of peace and out of love, and out of trying to be an addition to it. Don’t make me an adversary and make me an enemy, because I am a stern enemy, and I do know the art of war. I actually prepare for war in my times of peace. I’m just trying to say in a nutshell in so many ways that I am a soldier – there is nothing passive, punk, pussy, soft, sweet, about me.”
With Outkast launching a clothing line, and other emcees flexing their skills off the mic, eyes turn to Cee-Lo to see if he will jump on the independent business bandwagon. “I won’t be following suit – I’ll be blazing a whole new trail. I actually do have a clothing line that I’ve been working on. I’m very stylish, very well dressed, and very consistent with it also,” he says with a coy laugh. “I mean, is that a secret to you?” Judging from the Gucci minister’s robe he had specially made – it’s no secret that Cee-Lo’s got some things up his sleeve. The clothing line he is starting with his wife Christina will be called Christian Decarlo. All the begging in the world won’t get Cee-Lo to divulge his plans. “I would rather that you see it, because it’s not done – If I say exactly what it is then I’m giving someone fair game to do it before I can do it. It is fly – it is like me – it’s a fusion of many different styles. I won’t just stick to one thing – I try to always broaden the horizon of the average person, so if I make a velour suit for someone, I gotta give it another kind of hi-tech spin on it, like another futuristic spin on it – it’s just a spin on modern stuff. I could describe it but I’m scared to right now,” he laughs.
A father of three - ages 12, 9 and 1 - the Georgian good-guy is extending his moral services into the development of childrens books. His dedication to his family drives him to explore all the possibilities in the entrepreneurial spirit that his mother passed on to him. He says his favorite thing about being a father is “stumbling upon similarities on how I grew up and just mannerisms”. When talking about his family, Cee-Lo’s voice softens in a touching tone. “I love to be ‘daddy’, and have somebody to depend on me and somebody who is inspired and excited to see me on TV, and then see me at home – they get a chance to put that in perspective. I think it encourages them, because my kids are older, so they see me remain grounded and humble about the whole thing. I believe that watching that is going to give them a lot of character. My younger kid is my boy – that’s my son – so I can’t wait til I can start rearing him. He’s a little soldier already – he just loves me, and I love him to death… I love him, and it brings me to tears how much I love my children. I love my children. I ain’t gonna lie – that ‘s all I be wantin’ to do really. If I didn’t have to travel so much associated with what I have to do to live, I wouldn’t. I’m a big homebody – I can chill out all the way.”
They say you never know a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes. Cee-Lo might have big shoes to fill in the grand scheme of things, but he is a firm believer that God blessed him with the ability to walk in the first place. His heroic “Super Chicken” anthem will provide the theme music as he spreads his wings to fly, shoes and all, onto the next plateau of artistic greatness. Just ask Cee-Lo the same thing that’s asked to him in the final skit of his new album: Damn Lo, what don’t you do? And he’ll reply: Bullshit.

Courtesy of Elemental Magazine – http://www.elementalmag.com