Crazy (2006)

"Crazy" is the debut single of American soul duo Gnarls Barkley, taken from their debut studio album, St. Elsewhere (2006). It peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and topped the charts in the United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and several other countries.

The song was leaked in late 2005, months before its regular release: it received airplay on BBC Radio 1 in the United Kingdom, and radio DJ Zane Lowe also used the song in television commercials for his show. When it was officially released in March 2006, it became the first single to top the UK Singles Chart on download sales alone. The song remained at the top of the British charts for nine weeks, the longest number-one spell for more than ten years. The band and their record company then decided to remove the physical single from music stores in the country (while keeping the download available) so people would "remember the song fondly and not get sick of it". In spite of this deletion, the song was the best-selling single of 2006 in the UK. Due to continued download sales, it reached one million copies in January 2011. In December 2006, it was nominated for the United Kingdom's Record of the Year but lost to "Patience" by Take That.

The song won a Grammy Award for Best Urban/Alternative Performance in 2007 and was also nominated for Record of the Year, which it lost to "Not Ready to Make Nice" by Dixie Chicks. It was also nominated and further won a 2006 MTV Europe Music Award for Best Song. The song was also named the best song of 2006 by Rolling Stone and by The Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop critics poll. The song was listed at number 11 on Pitchfork Media's top 500 songs of the 2000s. In 2010, it was placed at number 100 in the "updated" version of Rolling Stone's list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time" and ranked at the top position of Rolling Stone's top 100 songs of the decade (2000–2009). "Crazy" was performed at the 2006 MTV Movie Awards, with Danger Mouse and Green dressed as various Star Wars characters.

Background

The song was picked up by Downtown Records. Danger Mouse's manager sent the song to Downtown's A&R Josh Deutsch because they were looking for an independent label with the same resources as a major. According to an interview with Deutsch in HitQuarters, he heard the song and signed it after a single listen. He said:

"Once in a while you hear a record that is obviously so important on so many levels. The beauty of my position is that it's very direct. If I find something I like there's no bureaucratic process associated with signing it."

By the time the record was signed to Downtown, there was already a huge swell of anticipation, in part due to the established reputation of the two artists but even more as a result of the demo being played on BBC Radio 1 and sparking a profound online awareness; in December 2005, Pitchfork ranked the white-label release of "Crazy" at number 36 on their Top 50 Singles of 2005 list. The record began to break even before the deals with Downtown Records were complete. On its release, "Crazy" became the most downloaded song in the history of the UK music business, going to number one in the strength of downloads alone.

Composition and inspiration

Musically, "Crazy" was inspired by film scores of Spaghetti Westerns, in particular by the works of Ennio Morricone, and the song "Last Men Standing" by Gian Piero Reverberi and Gian Franco Reverberi from the 1968 Spaghetti Western Django, Prepare a Coffin, an unofficial prequel to Django. "Crazy" samples the song, and also utilizes parts of the main melody and chord structure. Because of this, the Reverberis are credited as songwriters along with CeeLo Green and Danger Mouse.

The lyrics for the song developed out of a conversation between Danger Mouse and Green. According to Danger Mouse, "I somehow got off on this tangent about how people won't take an artist seriously unless they're insane... So we started jokingly discussing ways in which we could make people think we were crazy... CeeLo took that conversation and made it into 'Crazy', which we recorded in one take."

Reception

Critical response

Upon release, "Crazy" received widespread acclaim from music critics. The song was ranked at number one on Rolling Stone's 2009 list of the 100 Best Songs of the Decade. They also placed it at number 100 in the list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, but was dropped to number 307 in its 2021 list. In October 2011, NME placed it at number 32 on its list "150 Best Tracks of the Past 15 Years". In 2007, "Crazy" was named the best single of 2006 by The Village Voice's Pazz & Jop annual year-end critics' poll. NME also placed the song at number 475 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.