Not one genre for Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy.

I was randomly listening to my music collection when the next song in the queue came up to be: Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy.  I currently have this song under my “Rock” genre.  I don’t know what I was thinking when I assigned “Rock” for this song.  Anyways, my first reaction was to move it from rock to …. – then, i froze.  What genre is this song, really ? It has a dance groove, but the vocals are heavy on R&B, hmm…

After a quick google search, I found an article that decomposes this song and mentions its genre:

“Crazy” is not really gospel, that “Ha ha ha, bless your soul” line notwithstanding. Nor is it disco (despite the undeniable groove), or hip-hop (despite the presence of a rapper and a DJ), or a pure pop song (despite the monumentally catchy chorus). In fact, “Crazy” seems to float outside genre altogether, which helps explain its wide appeal—most every musical constituency feels comfortable claiming it. “Crazy” has landed on the pop, R&B/hip-hop, adult contemporary, and modern-rock charts. No other hit in recent memory has crashed as many radio formats.

heh.  I knew I wasn’t alone.  There are very few songs that are released nowadays that have a great appeal to audiences from multiple genres.  Popular music is more than 50 years old and many music variations have been tried.  It takes songs like “Crazy” to prove that there is still room for uniqueness in the music industry.  It’s no surprise this song made a huge impact in 2006  (#7 top song of the year).

As to my personal dilemma in assigning a genre to “Crazy”, well I just left it at Rock, for the moment.  As I have mentioned before, I don’t place much emphasis/time in genre associations in my digital music collection – I just pick whatever makes sense at that moment.