Crazy Hip-Pop

The idea of pop as art or art as pop is frustrating in part because it so often cul-de-sacs in koans. Take Andy Warhol: "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it." To which Cee-Lo Green, formerly of Goodie Mob, a solo singer and currently the voice of pop/freak/soul duo Gnarls Barkley responds: "It's so deep how you can be so shallow." And that's the group's shtick: let's make a mess of cultural signifiers, let's pose for press photos in mouse costumes or like Alex and his buddies from A Clockwork Orange, let's cobble together a weird name out of a retired basketball player, let's blow sweet-smelling smoke in interviews like: 

"It seems like you guys are trying to create an air of mystery around the project."

"Not create one. Maintain one. The mystery just is; it's still mysterious to us as well." 

But really, they aren't half as hard to read as they think they are (or as Warhol really was), they just pose that way. Producer Danger Mouse, whose notoriety sprung from The Grey Album (a mash-up of The Beatles' White Album and Jay-Z's The Black Album) wants you to dance to his beats, which is a pretty uncomplicated and reasonable desire. Cee-Lo confesses wacky things like wanting to have sex with dead people and seeing boogie monsters in the mirror, but he also talks about committing suicide and does one of the most horrendous Violent Femmes covers imaginable, proving that he's as human as the rest of us. 

I'm using less than 1/3 of this space to talk about the music, which seems appropriate. Smoke means that there's a fire somewhere, but when you get down to it, St. Elsewhere is self-consciously about image. "Crazy" (which broke records in England by going to No. 1 on digital sales alone), manages to have lyrics about intense paranoia and a beat you can move to. The rest is wildly eclectic and interesting, but sometimes overwrought. Gnarls Barkley are hardly mind-blowing, they just don't want you to know that they know. Instead, they think that you already are in the know as a result of their not telling you. The point is that after all the spin, we'll probably be too dizzy to figure out the difference.

May 22. Webster Hall, 125 E. 11th St. (betw. 3rd & 4th Aves.), 212- 353-1600; 8. $25/$30.