SONG OF THE DAY

“Forget You” a.k.a. “F***ck You” by Cee-Lo Green (The Lady Killer, Elektra Records, 2010). Written by Cee Lo Green, Bruno Mars, Philip Lawrence, Ari Levine, and Brody Brown.

RECOMMENDED BY…

Aunt Yvette, but this song is so hot right now that it was already on my list of blog-worthy songs, and had in fact already been mentioned in one of my WNHU playlists from 2010. But now the song gets its own special day in the spotlight.

INTERESTING FACTS (a la wikipedia)

– Thomas DeCarlo Callaway (born May 30, 1974), better known by his stage name Cee-Lo Green or simply Cee-Lo, is an American singer, rapper, songwriter, and record producer.

– He originally came to prominence as a member of the southern hip-hop group Goodie Mob, later launching a critically acclaimed solo career and forming Gnarls Barkley with DJ/producer Danger Mouse.

– Among Cee-Lo’s hits are the singles “Closet Freak” (2002); “I’ll Be Around” (2003), produced by Timbaland; “Crazy” (2006), by Gnarls Barkley; and “Fuck You” (aka “Forget You”) (2010).

– Cee-Lo was born in Atlanta, and attended Benjamin E. Mays High School in southwest Atlanta.

– Both of Cee-Lo’s parents were ordained ministers and he started his music career in his church. His father died when he was 2 years old. His mother Sheila J. Tyler-Callaway was involved in a car crash, leaving her paralyzed. She died 2 years after the accident, when Cee-Lo was 18 years old and his career with Goodie Mob had just begun taking off.

– His brother, Elais, moved to Canada a year before her death. Their mother’s death led Cee-Lo into depression, as is reflected in various songs throughout his career, including “Free” by Goodie Mob, songs on St. Elsewhere, and on The Odd Couple (“She Knows”, “A Little Better”).

– Cee-Lo also expresses his love for his mother in the song “Guess Who” from Goodie Mob’s Soul Food album.

– Cee-Lo has described himself as being a “goon” in his youth. By the age of 10, he made a hobby of torturing stray animals. He also spent his high school years assaulting homeless people and mugging pedestrians. He would later call this behavior maniacal.

– Cee-Lo was married to Christina Shanta Johnson. Together they have a son Kingston; and Cee-Lo is a stepfather to Christina’s daughters, Sierra and Kalah.

-Sierra was on a season 1 episode of MTV’s My Super Sweet 16 as well as the follow-up MTV television series, Exiled. Kingston is featured on the intro of Cee-Lo Green… Is the Soul Machine.

– In 2010, at age 35, Cee-Lo became a stepgrandfather when his 20-year-old stepdaughter Sierra had a son.

– Along with Big Gipp, T-Mo, and Khujo, Cee-Lo was an original member of the Atlanta hip-hop group Goodie Mob. He is the youngest of the four. During the making of the album World Party, Cee-Lo left the group to pursue a solo career under Arista and the remaining members continued to perform together under the Goodie Mob name with Koch Records.

– Although the next Goodie Mob album seemed to mock Cee-Lo with its title, One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show, the group expressed that it was more of a jab at Arista and the music industry as a whole.

– In 2005, Cee-Lo and Big Gipp were both noted in interviews as saying the entire group is back on good terms and that they have been in the studio working on a new Goodie Mob album. No title or release date have been given for the new project.

– On the heels of the success of Gnarls Barkley, Arista released a 17-track greatest hits collection of Cee-Lo songs, Closet Freak: The Best of Cee-Lo Green the Soul Machine. It features predominantly Cee-Lo solo tracks and several Goodie Mob songs.

– His new song “What Part of Forever” has been included in The Twilight Saga: Eclipse Original Motion Picture Soundtrack.

– On August 19, 2010, Cee-Lo released a single, “Fuck You”, to YouTube ahead of his planned solo album release, due to its partial leak on April 13, 2010.

– “F*ck You” was an instant viral smash hit, registering over two million plays in less than a week.

– “Fuck You” made a debut at #1 on the UK charts, notably beating out “Shame” from the recently reunited Robbie Williams and Gary Barlow.

– The album was released by Elektra Records on November 9, 2010. On December 1, 2010, Cee-Lo received five Grammy nominations for “Fuck You”.

– Additionally, a college student’s hilarious singing of the song in ASL has recently gone viral on YouTube.

– Cee-Lo describes his most recent album, The Lady Killer, as: “I suppose this is a more clear, concise, consistent, conceptual, entire album. It’s a complete thought, because it’s written to be like a score. The album’s meant to be a motion picture, you know? I’ve never taken that approach to doing an album before.”

– Along with DJ Danger Mouse, Cee-Lo is currently part of a duo called Gnarls Barkley. They first met when Danger Mouse took second in a talent contest and opened for OutKast and Goodie Mob at a University of Georgia concert in 1998. Afterwards, Danger Mouse gave Cee-Lo an instrumental demo tape and told him to call him if he was interested.

– “Crazy” is the first single to go straight to #1 in the UK based on digital download sales alone. The album is Cee-Lo’s greatest selling venture yet, having shipped over 3 million copies in the United States according to Nielsen SoundScan.

– In 2010, he recorded a song for the Sex and the City 2 soundtrack which reached #9 in the charts and was written by him and produced by T-Pain which is called “Language Of Love”.

– He along with The Red Hot Chili Peppers and One Republic frontman Ryan Tedder were rumored to be appearing on British DJ Paul Oakenfold’s upcoming album.

– Cee-Lo, along with the rest of the Goodie Mob, had a cameo in the 1999 film Mystery Men as a member of the Not So Goodie Mob.

– On January 15, 2011, Cee-Lo both acted and performed on NBC’s Saturday Night Live hosted by Gwyneth Paltrow, who, in November 2010, covered his song “Forget You” on an episode of Glee.

– “Fuck You”, alternately titled “Forget You”, has a remix featuring 50 Cent and also has a video similar to the original version of the song.

– A remix by American hip-hop group Chiddy Bang was was released.

– The song topped the charts in The Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Israel. It became a top ten hit in Australia, Belgium (Flanders), Canada, Denmark, Hungary, Ireland, New Zealand, Spain and Sweden. In the US it peaked at #9 on the Billboard Hot 100.

– On December 1, 2010, the song became nominated for Record of the Year and Song of the Year at the 53rd Grammy Awards scheduled on February 13, 2011.

– Green performed the song live on The Colbert Report on Tuesday, November 9, 2010, substituting “Fox News” for the title phrase for a portion of the song.

– The official music video was released on September 1, 2010 and was directed by Matt Stawski. He is interested in a girl, known as “The Heartbreaker”, throughout the video. It begins with Cee-Lo as a young boy entering a diner with his parents. He shouts “Fuck You” at the camera twice and his outraged mother hits him on the head the second time (this does not happen in the clean version). When he sees the Heartbreaker for the first time, she is with another boy and Cee-Lo offers to let her play with his toy truck, but she ignores him and walks away with the other boy. The video then fastforwards to Cee-Lo’s teenage years, where he works in the diner as a chef. He tries to woo the Heartbreaker with a bouquet of flowers, but ends up getting embarrassed when a boy deliberately spills fries on the ground to make Cee-Lo slip and fall on them. As he falls, the flowers fly out of his hand and land on a much younger girl’s lap. During Cee-Lo’s college years, he studies in the diner with another woman (implied to be his tutor) and then asks the waitress to send the Heartbreaker some food from him. She brings the Heartbreaker a hot dog with ketchup shaped like a heart on the side. The Heartbreaker is not impressed and throws the food on Cee-Lo’s shirt and he goes through an epiphany about his life. Finally, Cee-Lo is in his “Lady Killer” years with his own car and three beautiful women in the back seat. He waves at the Heartbreaker, who is now a cleaner outside a youth club, as if to say “Fuck you.”

– On December 1, the video was nominated for the Best Short Form Music Video at the 53rd Grammy Awards, scheduled on February 13, 2011.

– The series 7 contestants of the British TV talent contest The X Factor performed the “Forget You” version of the song on the October 24, 2010 episode. Green’s response was, “I saw it, I thought it was cool.”

– The same version of the song was featured on the November 16, 2010 episode of Glee, “The Substitute”, whereon Gwyneth Paltrow sang lead. This version reached #11 on the Billboard Hot 100, and helped propel the original to a new peak of #9.

– William Shatner performed his own rendition of the song on Lopez Tonight, substituting a few words in the song.

– Chiptune artist Brendan “Inverse Phase” Becker released a parody written for 8-bit Nintendo hardware on September 27, 2010. The lyrics were changed to that of a forlorn NES singing to its owner that had forsaken it for a Sega Genesis. An accompanying video was released which featured an intro sequence to display the “sung” lyrics.

– Taylor Momsen’s band The Pretty Reckless performed a cover version on Britain’s BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge show.

– Jason Lipshutz from Billboard gave the song a positive review stating, “it’s as sunny as a ’60s Motown hit and as expletive-laden as an early Eminem song, a combination that fits the singer’s sky-high vocals and offbeat sense of humor well. Over a twinkling piano line, bumping bass and steady percussion, Green shakes off a failed relationship with a gold digger by packing the simple pleasures of old-school soul music into tongue-in-cheek verses and a suitably soaring chorus.”

– It was named the #1 song of 2010 by Time.

– He is due to perform the track at the 53rd Grammy Awards.

– The Lady Killer is the third solo album by American recording artist Cee Lo Green, released November 5, 2010 on Elektra Records.

– The album debuted at #nine on the US Billboard 200 chart, selling 41,000 copies in its first-week. It received positive reviews from most music critics, earning praise for its production, classicist soul music approach, and Green’s singing.

– The Lady Killer received positive reviews from most music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 79, based on 32 reviews, which indicates “generally favorable reviews”. Allmusic writer Andy Kellman gave it 4 out of 5 stars and called it “a thoroughly engrossing album”. Entertainment Weekly’s Leah Greenblatt commented that the album “both honors and tweaks the tropes of vintage songcraft with hefty doses of sweet Motown/Stax boogie, a smattering of Curtis Mayfield superfly, and imaginary theme songs for James Bond”. Bill Friskics-Warren of The Washington Post wrote that it “offers some of the most ebullient pop this side of old-school hit-machines ranging from Holland-Dozier-Holland to Gamble and Huff”. Rolling Stone writer Jody Rosen called it “one of the most engrossing records of 2010”.

– In contrast, Jon Caramanica of The New York Times perceived Green as “reduced to an accent piece… purposefully restrained” and stated “Green’s vocals are buried low in the mix, mere decoration for the arrangements and textures… crisp, lovely and certainly well rehearsed”. Will Salmon of Clash expressed a mixed response towards its high-spirited style and stated “musically it feels like a lesser take on Outkast’s The Love Below“.

VIDEO OF THE DAY

This video is awesome:

and here’s the clean version: