Gnarls Barkley, the ones responsible for the 'superhit' 'Crazy'

BarcelonaBeyoncé and Jay Z together reached a peak of popularity that was difficult to surpass with Crazy in love, a 2003 song that on Spotify alone has accumulated almost 2 billion streams, more or less the same as Hey Ya!, by the duo OutKast, also from 2003. Another duo, Gnarls Barkley, spread the magic of Crazy around the world in 2006, and today it has a not insignificant 1.568 billion streams. Gnarls Barkley was an adventure of the New York producer Danger Mouse and the Atlanta singer CeeLo Green, each with their own career. The former had already produced Gorillaz albums and had shown boundless imagination in his own projects. CeeLo Green could boast a quite successful career, first with the hip-hop group Goodie Mob and then as a solo artist. But Crazy was a whole other story.

Danger Mouse took the melody and the string arrangement from a piece from the soundtrack by Gianfranco and Gianpiero Reverberi for the spaghetti westernThe Hanging Tree (1968). And CeeLo Green provided the voice, deep and silky, trained in gospel and consolidated in the dirty south rap.

The success was overwhelming, later endorsed with two Grammy Awards, and Gnarls Barkley continued with two albums, St. Elsewhere (2006) and The odd couple (2008). Then the odd couple disbanded and each went their own way... until March 2026. Twenty years after Crazy, Danger Mouse and CeeLo Green released the album Atlanta, the unexpected return of those responsible for one of the best songs of the first decade of the 21st century.