I’m actually not going to analyze “Crazy”; the chart-topping 2006 radio hit from Gnarls Barkley, on a musical level, in this post. If I were, gee, that would be a challenge, since it’s not every day you come across a song that lacks even a single phrasing unorthodoxy or solitary creative flare, in terms of its structure. The four-bar phrasings in the conventional verse and chorus of this song march along with more regularity and mundanity than a battalion at Boot Camp. (And no, I don’t care whether battalions ever materialize in any boot camp, for the record.)
What was particularly weighing on me, today, when I was sitting around on my lunch break from work, was the confident, cocksure way this song has of representing a sort of clinician’s transcription — it’s as if taking a sense of entitlement to the psyche of the listener, and wielding an unscrupulous expedition in browbeating it and pigeonholing it into Barkley’s little two-bit version of being “crazy.”
What makes for effective pop music? Well, apparently there’s a fallacy in my discourse here, since “Crazy” is certainly effective, at least statistically speaking, despite the fact that I hate it.
Actually, what I sense as taking place and as informing the popularity of “crazy,” is a certain voyeuristic ambition on the part of the listener to belittle introverts and people who spend a lot of time alone. Remember, this song was released in pretty close temporal proximity to the wholly insufferable movie Napoleon Dynamite, which was the epitome of launching a petty attack against people who are aloof and existing on their own mental plane (the denotative opposite of “creepy,” roughly, in other words).
Why should you not rip out a page of the PDR and call it a song fit for radio and for our hearts? Well, textbooks don’t exist on an emotional arc, obviously. An artist making a sound, systematic argument against a certain type of behavior or thought process is functioning within his or her left brain — a left brain that has practice analytical disposition before behavior to deem it “good” or “bad,” and one, of course, that has initiated the endeavor to be popular and played on radio.
What we are supposed to come to, with “Crazy”; is a certain psychological solidarity, I guess, and the idea that, no matter how vacuous and meaningless our interactions seem to be on this planet, people who are alone, I assure you, are more miserable than people who hang out in groups. Well, the only problem is that music is an emotional enterprise. A left-brained analysis of a person’s psyche does not exist on an emotional arc, such as Elton John’s “I Guess That’s Why They Call it the Blues”; with its longing and loneliness, and, pertinently enough, Seal’s own take on “Crazy”; which is much more invigorating a call of arms to growth and synergy than Gnarls Barkley’s wallpaper-like older-brother pep talk. I’d prefer my older brother just be a meth addict, probably.
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