first round
(12) DJ Casper, “Cha Cha Slide”
danced past
(5) Gnarls Barkley, “Crazy”
129-117
and will play in the second round
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/5/24.
Aaron Angello on Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy”
In the spring of 2006, producer Danger Mouse (The Gray Album, The Gorillaz’s Demon Days) and singer/songwriter CeeLo Green (Goodie Mob), together as Gnarls Barkley, released the album St. Elsewhere. The first single, “Crazy,” was a massive hit. It was everywhere.
In that same spring, I was living in an apartment above a garage in Venice Beach, California with my dog and soon-to-be ex-wife. The apartment was too expensive for us, but it was otherwise perfect. The beach was half a block to our west. We were just a few steps from Sidewalk Café and Small World Books. Half a block to our east was a great little dog park, filled with some of the few remaining Venice weirdos that we loved so much. Our apartment was on one of the neighborhood’s funky little alleyways that led to the beach, and I spent many hours sitting on the windowsill, window wide open, smoking American Spirits that I rolled myself as I watched the fringe of LA society (a group to which I proudly imagined myself to belong—whether I did or didn’t is a different story) parade their eccentricities up and down the cracked asphalt. I remember the woman in a pink bikini who would roller-skate up and down the alleyway every morning singing along to whatever was playing through her headphones so loudly and so off-pitch that you could hear her for blocks. I remember the boardwalk vendors, dragging their wares in old red wagons down to the beach each morning. I remember countless unhoused people, wandering through the alley, arguing with the people I couldn’t see, the voices I couldn’t hear. They were crazy.
Our apartment was owned by a guy not much older than us, a guitarist and film composer who we met on an indie film set—he was the composer, and we were doing craft service (a job I hated, by the way—made me totally crazy). He was an amazing musician, a holdover punk, hung out with Lemmy, and he directed low-budget horror films on the side (I remember he was really into shooting sequences on 8mm film, a la Guy Pierce, of things like young, beautiful, naked angels having their wings ripped off). There was a courtyard that separated our apartment from the main house, where our guitarist/composer/horror auteur landlord lived, that was stuffed with set pieces from his films: giant crucifixes, a weathered pew, demonic sculptures. It was pretty crazy. But, you know, it was great for us.
My favorite room in the apartment was a little sunroom at the entrance. To get into the apartment, you walked into the creepy courtyard, climbed the stairs behind the garage, and entered an entirely glassed-in sunroom with a table, a really comfortable, white(ish) papasan chair, and a stack of poetry books. We had a couple of parakeets that flew freely around the apartment, and I’d screwed a branch into the wall in that room, just above a window, so that they’d have a place to perch. It was ideal, really. Everything.
The problem with ideal things, though, is that the idea of an ideal is not real. One day, a few years after we moved into that incredibly cool place, I would find myself walking into that courtyard after having been sleeping at a friend’s house for months. I would climb those stairs. I would find my wife, dressed in white I think, curled on the floor of the sunroom in front of a few boxes of my things, crying loudly, hurling insults at me, blah blah blah.
Look, there’s nothing unique about this experience. It’s not special. I’m not special. This is just life. And we all have to live it.
*
In its earliest recorded uses, crazy (or crasie), meant broken, cracked, likely to fall apart at any moment. A boat was crasie and therefor unlikely to make a trip successfully; an old man’s staff was crasie. Shortly thereafter, English speakers began to use the word to refer to a person who was acting strangely or irrationally. A fractured mind. A broken self.
*
In June of 2006, Chuck Klosterman wrote a feature in the New York Times Magazine titled “The D.J. Auteur,” that focused on Danger Mouse (whose real name is Brian Burton) and his recent collaboration with CeeLo Green (whose real name is Thomas Calloway) on an album called St. Elsewhere under the name of Gnarls Barkley. The album had been flying off shelves in England, and the single, “Crazy,” was, in Klosterman’s verbiage, “on the cusp of becoming the demographically limitless song of the moment,” a prediction that, in fact, undershot the mark. As anyone who was sentient from the summer of 2006 through the end of 2007 can attest, the song was everywhere. It was inescapable. It rang through the collective consciousnesses of everyone even minimally plugged in to the pop culture zeitgeist.
Danger Mouse composed a song that was, in his words, “a complete Ennio Morricone ripoff.” He was influenced by the soundtracks from 1960s Spaghetti Westerns. The song utilizes a sample from the track “Last Men Standing,” by Gian Piero and Gian Franco Reverberi, a piece from the soundtrack to the 1968 film Django, Prepare a Coffin. He apparently had the mix more or less worked out when he and Green had a discussion about what it takes to be a successful artist. He told Klosterman, “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. We talked about this for hours, and then I went home. But while I was away, Cee-Lo took that conversation and made it into “Crazy,” which we recorded in one take. That’s the whole story. The lyrics are his interpretation of that conversation.”
Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo Green went on to perform “Crazy” (and, I suppose, to perform “crazy”) always in costume—dressed as characters from various movies, as characters from Back to the Future, Star Wars, Waynes World, A Clockwork Orange.
How does one perform a fractured self, a broken mind—and make oneself even more desirable?
*
In the summer of 2002, I was working at an outdoor theatre in Topanga, CA, where I was in the ensemble of The Taming of the Shrew. The production was set in a Vietnam era US. Petruchio had recently returned from the war, Kate was a hippie—you know how those things go. In addition to playing several smaller roles, I played guitar in an onstage band. We performed covers of songs like Edwin Starr’s “War (What is it Good For)” and The Youngbloods “Get Together.” It was a great time of life, really.
One afternoon before rehearsal, a woman who worked with the theatre—short, dark hair, gentle, inviting eyes—I don’t think she was in Shrew, but she was likely in something else at the time—was sitting in the stands, talking to the daughter of the artistic director. In addition to being an actor, this woman was (is) a phenomenal singer/songwriter and has since gone on to have a lot of success in the indie music scene. Anyway, I wanted her to think I was cool, a good musician, interesting—worthwhile. I was on stage tuning my guitar. “How’s it going?” she asked me. “Oh man,” I replied, “things are crazy.” The two women began to laugh and mock me mercilessly. “I’m so crazy, man. I’m crazy!” I guess I didn’t deploy the term properly.
*
I’m in second or third grade. My parents make me go with them to a family therapist in Woodland Park, CO. We sit a cold room, dingey green or brown carpet, wood paneling on the walls, in a log cabin style building. The chairs are arranged in a circle. My parents are young, so much younger than I am now. They are troubled. My two older brothers, five and seven years older than me, are also there. My middle brother (five years my senior) has been acting strangely. He’s started to experiment with drugs. He’s only in middle school, but there’s something wrong. The therapist is young, and he seems to me really smug. He’s handsome, but I don’t like him. He begins to tell my parents that the problem with him is them. They’ve failed him. Their parenting methods are wrong. Basically, he is telling them, in so many words, that they are terrible parents, and my brother’s strange behavior is their fault.
That was more than forty years ago, and I haven’t been to therapy since.
*
“Crazy”—Willie Nelson (then Patsy Cline)
“Crazy”—Kenny Rogers
“Crazy”—Eternal
“Crazy”—Seal
“Crazy”—Simple Plan
“Crazy”—Aerosmith
“Krazy”—Pitbull
“Let’s Go Crazy”—Prince and the Revolution
“I Get Crazy”—Nicki Minaj
“Gone Crazy”—Alan Jackson
“I’ll Go Crazy”—James Brown
“Crazy Little Party Girl”—Aaron Carter
“Mama He’s Crazy”—The Judds
“Crazy Woman” LeAnn Rimes
“Crazy Times”—Jars of Clay
“Crazy Cool”—Paula Abdul
“Still Crazy After All These Years”—Paul Simon
“Beautiful Crazy”—Luke Combs
“I’m Gonna Show You Crazy”—Bebe Rexha
“Crazy Rap”—Afroman
“Crazy Girl”—Eli Young Band
“Crazy Town”—Jason Aldean
“Crazy for You”—Madonna
“Crazy for You”—Let Loose
“Crazy Over You”—Blackpink
“Crazy Horses”—The Osmonds
“She Drives Me Crazy”—Fine Young Cannibals
“Crazy Little Thing Called Love”—Queen
“Crazy in Love”—Beyonce
A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
*
In fourth or fifth grade. I am locked in the bathroom because my brother wants to take me with him to California. There is a lot of yelling. The cops are coming (they would be called often). My brother is ranting about the trinity. I don’t understand what he means. I don’t know what the trinity is. There are holes in the walls.
*
After topping the charts in England, Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” spent seven consecutive weeks in the number two spot on the Billboard Hot 100 charts. It never reached number one. That must have made a lot of folks crazy.
*
We are traveling. I think we are somewhere like Tennessee, but I don’t know. I am walking with my brother. He is being very kind to me. He is laughing for reasons I am unaware of. He whispers back to the voices that are making him laugh. He picks a flower from beside the sidewalk, kisses it, throws it up in the air and laughs. He lights a cigarette.
Later that trip, he says to me, “What do you do? What do you do when you’re sitting on a toilet, and someone tells you you’re God?”
*
In high school, I explain to a friend that schizophrenia isn’t the same a multiple personality disorder. I am getting so heated about it, so upset, really, that another friend ends the conversation. He says I’m right. I must be right because of my passion. I don’t even bother to tell them the difference between schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder. They don’t want to know anyway.
*
I remember when / I remember, I remember when I lost my mind / There was something so pleasant about that place. —“Crazy” Gnarls Barkley
The lunatic, the lover, and the madman / are of imagination all compact. —Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy. —Holden Caufield in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye
In the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman: on one hand, the man of reason delegates the physician to madness, thereby authorizing a relation only through the abstract universality of disease; on the other, the man of madness communicates with society only by the intermediary of an equally abstract reason which is order, physical and moral constraint, the anonymous pressure of the group, the requirements of conformity. —Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
*
Throughout my adult life, my brother has generally refused to see anyone in his family. While my father was alive, he was, in my brother's mind, the Antichrist. The literal Antichrist. When he (our father) and our mother tried to see him at his halfway house, a mental health facility on a quiet backstreet in Manitou, CO, a house in which he lived with several other men for years before it closed, he would refuse to see them. When they came, they would sometimes see him outside, smoking. He would yell uncontrollably, raging at them, at the home’s employees, at things they couldn’t see. They (our parents) would leave without speaking to him, just drop off some money for cigarettes and fast food. It was the best they could do.
My soon-to-be ex-wife met him once, my brother, just after she and I were married. It must have been early 2003. We were visiting family in Colorado, and we stopped to see him (he was willing to see us that day). He was doing well. He had been working out—training, he said, for some inevitable great battle. His hair was buzzed short. We walked to McDonalds. He was muttering to himself (to others) the entire time. He was agitated, but that was normal. He kept staring at a stranger, a burly man in his mid-twenties. My brother, still muttering to himself, gesturing to the air above him.
“You go a problem, man?”
I jumped in. “It’s cool. He’s not well. Sorry.”
My brother trembled. Clinched his fists. Ready for battle.
As we were driving away, my soon-to-be ex-wife started spouting a bunch of pop-Foucauldian, “Who are we to say what’s sane and what’s crazy? Maybe we are the crazy ones. Maybe he’s in touch with something we don’t understand…”
Just thinking back on that makes me so fucking angry. She doesn’t get to say that.
*
Entertainment Weekly—Dec. 7, 2006—“Gnarls Barkley on their ‘Crazy’ Success” - Interview with Michael Endelman
Endelman: Why do you think people responded so strongly to “Crazy”?
CEE-LO: Maybe it’s because “Crazy” is completely sincere. There’s a lot of humanity and a lot of humility in the song. I think it helps describe and makes sense of a living condition that we are all subjected to from time to time.
Endelman: I have a theory about the success of that single: I think that there’s an awful lot of hit club songs — Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love,” for instance — with the word crazy in them. What’s up with that?
CEE-LO: [Laughs] I don’t know, man. It is fairly true. I’m not sure what it is.
Endelman: It’s definitely a trend, right?
CEE-LO: Yeah. Maybe it’s because to be out of control, to be trusting, to be committed and devoted could be considered crazy. Like, “I’m crazy for you. I wouldn’t do this, but it’s you that’s causing me to be out of control. Are you gonna handle me with care? Are you gonna steer me in the right direction? I would hope so. I want you to be in control. I want to be out of control. I want to be crazy about you.” Maybe that’s it?
***
Hollywood, CA—2007—the last time I saw my soon-to-be ex-wife. I was staying at some friends’ house just off Franklin, on Wilton. There was a disgusting old recording studio in the basement that was there when they bought the house—filthy, white, shag carpet on the walls of the booth. Apparently, a decade or two before, this house was known as the “Wilton Hilton,” and LA punk bands would crash there and record in the basement. I always kind of felt that remnant energy there, though I was probably making that up. My friends were in the process of renovating the house, turning it into a little boutique pensione (a Hollywood mise-en-abyme, right?), and I was using one of the rooms.
Soon-to-be-ex pulled up, blocked the driveway, and pulled out divorce papers. She asked me to sign them on the trunk of her Honda Civic, and I did. Fin.
*
I’m fascinated with the way a song can attach itself to memory, can lodge in some temporal space, a forever soundtrack to a personal story. In my mind, every car that passes through the years 2006-7 is blasting Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” from the open windows. It can be heard coming from the open doors of the boutiques on Melrose. It’s playing from a rollerblader’s boombox on the Venice boardwalk. An anthem of madness, of dissociation. A celebration of a break from reality.
Who do you think you are? / Ha ha ha, bless your soul / You really think you’re in control?
I don’t know, man. I’m trying.
Aaron Angello is a writer and theatre artist living and working in Maryland. Currently, he teaches writing and literature at Hood College, where he also is director of the theatre program. His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals, and his genre-defying book The Fact of Memory: 114 Ruminations and Fabrications was published in 2022 by Rose Metal Press.
Thank You, DJ Casper: ben jatos on “cha cha slide”
In the morning hours of October 6, 2002, in a long neglected neighborhood park, a boy of 15 was shot in the arm. 15 hours later, a different boy was then shot in retaliation for the first boy in the same park. Neither of the shootings were fatal, and in fact, neither required a hospital stay of more than three days, but the ramifications were felt at the local high school, 1.5 miles away from the crime scene.
In 2002, I was in my tenth year of teaching English, but only my second at Fort Vancouver High School, in Vancouver, Washington, located directly across the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon. My new school was a large, urban school with students hailing from over 50 countries. The school itself was a pleasant place most of the time, with hard-working teachers, a great principal, kids who got along to get along, and an “Us against Them” mentality. Our school was one of four high schools in the district and it was definitely seen as the “ghetto” school. We had the oldest and ugliest building, sad, fluorescent lighting and low ceilings, the worst athletic teams, and it had been years since a district administrator had set foot in our school. A year prior to my arrival, the district even changed the boundaries of the four high schools, removing our only high income neighborhood and giving us rows of low-income housing apartments, which put our percentage of students eligible for free lunch at 85%. (Gerrymandering happens everywhere.) We also became a dumping ground for every expelled student in the district. Get kicked out of school for bringing a weapon to class? Miss some time and then enroll at Fort Vancouver. Finally, each student in the district who was determined to be “not proficient” in speaking English (immigrant students) was routed to our school.
For me, one of my favorite parts of working at Fort Vancouver was walking through the halls between classes and hearing so many different languages being spoken. It was beautiful and gave me such optimism about life. I loved working there and although it seemed like things were stacked against us, as a school, it didn’t matter. My students were amazing and I soaked up as many of the cultures as I could. I went to Quinceaneras as an honored guest. I went to a Bosnian restaurant at 8:00AM on a Saturday to watch pirated European soccer on tv and eat incredible Bosnian food with a group of men who spoke no English but one of my students invited me to join them. I went to a baptism at a huge gorgeous Russian church. I went to a wonderful family party where I had soul food and authentic barbecue. On top of that, my classes were places of learning and support and I looked forward to going to school every day.
But that neighborhood shooting wasn’t good as both kids that were shot were students at Fort Vancouver and both had older sisters at school. There were definitely gangs in the neighborhood, but they usually left that stuff outside the school. This time was different. The week after the shooting was Homecoming Week and was supposed to be filled with exciting dress-up days, pep assemblies, and merriment for all culminating in the football game Friday night and the Homecoming dance on Saturday night. This was a big week for many high school kids.
Monday started at 7:00AM with a PA announcement calling for a staff “stand up” meeting in the library immediately where we were informed about the two shootings and told to be visible between classes in case of trouble. There was trouble. Numerous near fights and a couple that escalated into hands being thrown occurred on campus as boys and girls from both sides of the rival factions got involved with payback. Tuesday and Wednesday were more of the same and kids were getting suspended daily. Admin just kept trying their best to de-escalate but they were ignored and put into reaction mode.
Thursday is when things took a downturn. The final hour of school was to be spent out on the football field watching Powderpuff Football between the girls in each grade. There was talk of canceling the event but the assemblies had been drama-free thus far so the admin decided to move forward with the festivities. The event was fine, a bit misogynistic in hindsight, but at least no fighting. Teachers were instructed to be on high alert and monitor the crowd and then about halfway through the game, heads in the crowd started all turning toward the parking lot. A stream of about 15-18 cars sped into our lot, about 200 yards from where everyone was. They parked haphazardly and slowly a bunch of men got out of the cars. Some were dressed head to toe in blue and each of them, at the least, had a blue bandanna on their person somewhere. The football game stopped as many of the students decided it would be a good time to just go home. The teachers moved toward the cars, hoping to provide a buffer in case anything transpired but most kids just walked back to the school or went the other way. Many ran and it was pretty chaotic. A few of our students wanted to go confront the men but the staff kept them under control as we could tell their hearts weren’t really in it. The men in blue just stood outside their cars, about 50 men in total, and they stared daggers at the boys we were holding back about 50 yards away. After a couple minutes, sirens were heard in the distance and the men got back in their cars and were allowed to drive away. It was legitimately scary.
Friday’s assembly was canceled although that evening’s football game went off fine. The dance on Saturday was allowed to take place but with extra security and extra chaperones, of which I was one. There were about 500 kids in attendance, all looking great in dresses and dress shirts and having a decent time dancing, but seemingly distracted as well. It was like everyone was waiting for something bad to happen. There were about 25 kids at the dance that had ties to the two beefing gangs, including both of the shooting victims and their older sisters. Friday had been the first day back in school for each of the four and the counselors and principal had spoken to each individually about not seeking retribution but nobody was sure how it would play out. The four kids sat at two different tables far away from each other and took turns eyeballing and ignoring each other. None of them were dancing; instead they all sat there watching the dancers and sipping on punch. It was distracting but most of the 500 didn’t pay them much attention.
Halfway through the dance, the first notes of DJ Casper’s hit song, “Cha Cha Slide” rang out. I had never heard it but apparently the kids had because almost every single one of them shrieked and the dance floor was flooded and immediately somehow organized into rows of kids. “We’re gonna get funky” and the kids screamed more. “Everybody clap your hands” and about 500 kids start clapping in sync. “One hop this time” and it was like the kids had practiced this a thousand times because they were all on point. I walked over to get behind the dj stand because I wanted to see this mass of humanity from the front. “Cha cha real smooth” and the kids all did a little cha cha move. It was an incredible sight but what caught me off guard was four kids in the front. “Hands on your knees! Hands on your knees!” and those four kids were next to each other and smiling, having a blast. One boy’s arm was in a sling but he was in the moment. The other boy couldn’t get too funky but he was in it too. The sisters eyeballed their brothers, made eye contact with each other, and smiled. I saw this happen. It was incredible. “How low can you go? Can you go down low? All the way to the floor?” and they did. They all got down to the floor and laughed and screamed cries of joy and relief and the boy with the sling fell on his butt and he was helped by the other boy and they laughed together and kept dancing.
The last hour of the dance was perfect. Kids stayed late, they danced nonstop, and the two boys and their sisters sat at the same table and chatted and danced more. Something magical happened that night and all sense of trepidation was replaced by feelings of hope and love.
It’s 21 years later and I still teach English at Fort Vancouver. I’m much less involved at work (having a family will cause that), but I still love my school. We’re still a melting pot of languages, cultures, and kids, although we’ve lost some of that “Us against Them” mentality. I just think we haven’t recovered from the pandemic a couple years ago because the spirit and familial feel just isn’t the same. But whenever I hear Cha Cha Slide, I’m reminded that anything is possible, music can heal, and my school can still be the best.
Ben Jatos is a 31-veteran of teaching high school English who writes for pleasure after his student essays get their teacher feedback. Married to Jessica for 15 years, with a 12 year old daughter, Frances, Ben has had work published in The Rumpus, Slice Magazine, and a few other places. This is his first essay for this wonderful website.