'The Ladykiller' Album Review: Cee-Lo's 'F*ck You' Sellout Move

You probably saw it on YouTube; maybe you read about it on Newsbusters; or, if your humanity is in question, you first saw it on Glee. Cee-Lo Green’s single “Fuck You” (or FU) is one of the biggest songs of 2010, a viral hit due to its breezy classic pop mixed with a generous helping of modern vulgarity. The song’s success is certainly a career-saver to the soul singer. He got his start with the rap outfit Goodie Mob and is best known for his work with the hugely-in-demand producer Danger Mouse in Gnarls Barkley– or rather, he’s best known for the Gnarls Barkley single “Crazy.” The duo’s sophomore album, The Odd Couple, didn’t do anywhere near as much business as their debut St. Elsewhere. Therefore The Ladykiller, his third solo LP, was a make-or-break moment for his career. While it made sense for him to gin up attention with some silly shock-mongering, it’s kind of a letdown considering how great the rest of the record is without it.

In an album full of earnest soul music, FU is a tonal left turn that leaves a bad taste in your mouth. The sound of the song fits; throughout the album, there are a few upbeat, bouncy pop tunes flavored with retro soul, and quite a few moments of wry humor show up, as well. But the problem here is that FU is a drastic shift in the album’s narrative voice; the titular Ladykiller breaks character here. On an album with only one other curse word (he mutters “shit” to himself on “It’s OK”), this side of Cee-Lo’s persona doesn’t fit; the rest of these love songs maintain an air of classicism, mystery, chivalry, poetry, and even danger. FU comes off as whiny, literalistic, and straining, the kind of thing a 23-year-old Pennsylvanian nobody writes as a juvenile, desperate attempt to get a viral hit and rise to stardom. The obvious marketing ploy jumps right out at you and destroys any feeling of authenticity. My philosophy: swear all you want in your music, curse up a storm if necessary. Just do it for a reason. Attracting press isn’t much of a reason.

Moreover– and this is my biggest complaint– the attitude towards the woman in the song, if it’s not borderline misogynistic, is completely incompatible with the attitude we see throughout the rest of the LP. We learn nothing about her, besides the fact that she’s a “gold digger.” There’s none of this one-dimensional tomfoolery elsewhere; the “ladykilling” theme elsewhere presents itself as love so powerful it becomes consuming or even predatory, as though the Ladykiller is forcing the Biblical principle of dying to oneself onto his mates through a twisted rationale that he’s already taken that step with his own love. It gives certain songs (“Bodies,” “Love Gun”) an unsettling, enthralling moral ambiguity from which FU’s “You hurt me, so I hate you! Waaah!” is a far cry.

Since FU is such a radical departure from the rest of the album (and the whole plays better without it), what was the reasoning behind the decision not to merely make it a single? “This one was written in retrospect,” Green explains in an NPR interview, “[t]he same way if you ask, ‘How did Peter Parker become Spider-Man?’ Well, he got bit by a radioactive spider. How did Lady Killer become a Lady Killer? He got his heart broken.” To which I say: don’t you dare give George Lucas the idea to insert a prequel scene into the Blu-Ray version of A New Hope right after Vader’s introduction. Fans may say I’m nitpicking, but you can’t excuse an album faux pas due to a single song’s value. If I placed the most hilarious slapstick scene in the history of cinema into Schindler’s List, it wouldn’t be appropriate, because it undercuts the work as a whole. The same is true of FU; it simply does not fit on The Ladykiller.

As an outro to our time together today, I’d like to share the real standout track from The Ladykiller, a collaboration with Phillip Bailey entitled “Fool for You.” What an embarrassing indicator of our culture that this sort of classic, timeless ballad, set to a snappy beat, performed with real emotional urgency by a truly gifted and stylish singer, is not the same attention grabber as a silly potty-mouthed pop ditty.

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“Fuck You,” forget you.