Part II: Baby Hulk

Not to dwell on the superhero theme, but Cee-Lo reveals that, as a child on his neighborhood football team, he was known as Baby Hulk. “I was a young, powerful menace,” he says.

The Hulk didn’t wear a gold jacket or a diamond bracelet, but with Cee-Lo’s stocky build, you can see how the soulful singer earned his nickname. Danger Mouse, on the other hand, is tall, reedy and bearded. He says their physical appearances—as well as their personalities (“the yin to each other’s yang”)—inspired The Odd Couple’s title.

The album’s concept yields other interpretations, as well. “It’s the marriage of musicality and melody,” Cee-Lo says. “The odd pairing of something sung soul over something folky.”

And then, of course, there’s the idea that Gnarls Barkley, with its extremely vivid sound, likes to name its albums after visual media. Both The Odd Couple and St. Elsewhere were TV shows (although I don’t know why you’d name a revolutionary neo-soul album after a medical drama starring Howie Mandel).

Yet for me, The Odd Couple really refers to the band’s place in the pop music world—one half of the couple is Gnarls Barkley and the other half is the rest of what’s out there. There’s Gnarls, and then there’s everybody else.

And in this interpretation, maybe it’s not so absurd to imagine Gnarls Barkley as—wait for it—a superhero, soaring from galaxy to galaxy, searching for both inspiration and people who want to be inspired.

The duo’s strength lies largely in its ability to bend time, traveling back and forth between the trippy 1960s and the computer-dominated modern world. Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse don’t exactly exploit the friction between the eras. Rather, they find surprising ways to integrate the two. Danger, for instance, samples choral passages along the lines of the Mamas & the Papas or Free Design—groups that lived in a liberated era, yet carried a certain melancholy in their harmonies. Gnarls also borrows heavily from the funky ’70s. While the musicians claim not to have discussed musical influences while making the record, they both adore Sly and the Family Stone. Apparently Cee-Lo fell in love with a coveted Sly bootleg Danger picked up while touring Japan, leading Danger to get his partner a deluxe box set of Sly’s complete works for Christmas—VitaminWater redux. Cee-Lo’s vocal power (“he’s got some range,” Danger brags) evokes the rawness of the Funkadelic era while channeling everyone from Al Green to Nina Simone. Danger’s cut-and-paste production echoes Odelay and Paul’s Boutique. Add all of this up and underpin it with a heavy bassline, and you’ve got a unique new-school/old-school pastiche, a sophisticated pop collage that’s accessible enough to resonate around the world.