Free Everybody's Brother by CeeLo Green Page A

night I rapped with Sleepy Brown and did some singing. He told me he liked my singing more than my rapping. Then Rico Wade walked in with André Benjamin and Antwan “Big Boi”Patton, who were just starting to call themselves OutKast. Since Dré and I had known each other since third grade, he was excited to see me. “This is my homeboy we been telling you about,” he told Rico. “Man do all the story raps. And he can sing!”
    From then on, I was a member of the Dungeon Family. In the beginning, I would mostly just sit at the top of the stairs and try to size up the situation and figure out all of the players. The roots ran very deep there. Along with Dré and Big Boi, I already knew Big Gipp and “T-Mo” Barnett, who grew up in my neighborhood. They were slightly older than me, Original Gangsters—O.G. in the popular abbreviation—to be respected and possibly feared. Gipp was kind of quiet, but in an extremely striking way that let you know that he was someone special. Gipp was, is, and always shall be simply and utterly unique. Maybe that’s why Gipp has always called himself—and in his heart of hearts considered himself to be—an earthbound mutant. I think maybe it’s his ears. To me, Gipp is kind of like the black Spock—and just as lovable a character too.
    Then there was T-Mo, who I’ve known the longest. T-Mo is four years older than me, but he is forever young. The man doesn’t look any different to me than the day that I first met him—and that was back when I was in nursery school. Gipp was more or less a free agent, but T-Mo was in a group with Willie “Khujo” Knighton, another O.G. who was especially legendary on the streets of Atlanta. They were calling themselves Khujo and the P-Funk Goodie Mob. And that fit right into the spirit ofthe place, because the Dungeon Family was growing into a collective, a Dirty South version of George Clinton’s psychedelic dynasty, a Parliament-Funkadelic of hip-hop. In the Dungeon, I finally found my crew and I found my way in life too. In the Dungeon, I was set free in a manner that would open up the whole world to me.

Big Gipp: Whatever it looked like to anyone else, the Dungeon was the center of the universe and heaven on Earth to us. We never really recorded in the Dungeon. Organized Noize would make beats and keep the beat on for two or three days at a time. You would go home, take a shower, go to school, go to work, come back, and that beat still be playing. And that’s how we created songs. When we started to be able to record, we thought that we were on to something, we was big time. Outside of that, we’d just rap to each other and rap to the sky.
    That was the first time I had a good chance to really watch CeeLo and figure him out. He was a fascinating guy even then. CeeLo was never the one rushing into a rap battle. Instead, he was always the one studying the music, sitting up against the drum machine and figuring out exactly how everything worked. Lo may not have paid much attention at school, but I’m telling you that no one ever paid more attention at the Dungeon. I guess in the end, that was the school he really needed. When he didn’t know something, he asked questions constantly: How you do this? How you do that? He was never halfhearted. He was always focused on the music, while the rest of us were taking time off or playing the game. He never got into that stuff. He was always off listeningto the music, and he was like a walking encyclopedia of music. He wasn’t just listening to a song, he was studying who wrote it, who produced it. The rest of us were mostly just noticing what people were wearing on the cover. He always took a deeper approach. He knew who played bass. I know what sounds good to me. But he knew
why
it sounded good. It dawned on me later that back right in his first days at the Dungeon, CeeLo was already developing the talents that I didn’t start seeing until later. That’s also right about the time that