CeeLo Green as his alter ego Gnarly Davidson. Photo / AP
CeeLo Green as his alter ego Gnarly Davidson. Photo / AP
It was perhaps the most bizarre attention-seeking stunt in a night filled with them: CeeLo Green rocking the Grammys red carpet dressed like the love child of C3PO and a Ferrero Rocher.
As the pint-sized singer, best known for his work as one-half of Gnarls Barkley and his worldwide hit F*** You, strode the red carpet on Monday, viewers worldwide were united with one simple question:
It now appears that Green's bizarre get-up on Grammy night - complete with gold body paint and facial prosthetics - was the public debut of a brand new artistic alter ego. Like Ziggy Stardust, Sasha Fierce and Chris Gaines before him, CeeLo's undergoing artistic reinvention.
Ladies and gentlemen, meet 'Gnarly Davidson'. More than 20 years into his career, Green has invented Davidson as an alter ego to release his new, 'edgy' musical output.
"He got the idea to have another personality for a specific kind of music he's doing, so that's why he transformed himself. [His new music] is pop music, a lot of it, edgy pop music like his song, F - k me, I'm Famous, Motörhead, a lot of edgy stuff coming out," an insider told the New York Post.
Green - sorry, Davidson - dropped some of the fruits of this musical output following the Grammys ceremony this week. Jay-Z's Girl is a faithful remake of Rick Springfield's 80s hit Jessie's Girl, rewritten as an ode to Beyonce. It's...odd:
The Post also quotes an insider as saying that Green planted the seeds for his new persona back when he released a faked video last year showing a cell phone exploding in his hand.
"He was hatching Gnarly Davidson and turning into a superpower. Gnarly is a prankster, a grown up Dennis the Menace, who doesn't talk," the insider said of the video, which Green was later forced to apologise for after uproar from fans who thought he'd been seriously injured.
We're not sure how successful this much-hyped rebranding has been yet: so far, the official Gnarly Davidson Twitter account has around 1300 followers, or 0.06% of CeeLo's 1.83m Twitter followers.
Hopefully, as public recognition for Davidson grows, people will stop turning pictures of golden CeeLo into hilarious, embarrassing memes. Until then, here are a few of our favourites:
