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Hype writers

People complain about buzz, ever suspicious someone or somebody is manipulating Old Miss Music. Now after so much Gnarls hype, people complain that Barkley writers (like yours truly) aren’t meeting the music head-on enough, that we’re too caught up in the details of the phenomenon at the expense of the music, like the pop songs about paranoia, as if every pop song ever written weren’t about paranoia in some way or another. Maybe we’re looking for gold (and platinum) in the wrong places. But when it’s time to fill out Top 10 lists at the end of the year, my #1 album won’t be Gnarls — just Gnarls’s publicist.

P. Diddy showed up at the show; so did T.I. and this one guy who looked like a hybrid Nitsuh Abebe/Albert Einstein. They weren’t at Webster to hear Cee-lo sing about how he likes railing corpses. They came to see Cee-lo ask “You guys having fun?” and a bunch of white people throw up their guns, then 30 seconds later watch Cee-lo ask “When’s the last time you guys had this much fun?” Not a single person in the room seemed to know that the answer was 30 seconds ago.

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Gnarls Barkley: http://www.gnarlsbarkley.com/