The D.J. Auteur

North Hollywood sounds like a place that could be glamorous or, at the very least, mildly attractive. It is not. Or at least it's not on Hinds Avenue, where dirty one-story buildings look semideserted and many of the local "beautiful people" appear to have jobs that involve (a) ripping apart used cars and (b) selling those individual parts to less-beautiful people whose cars are even more used. Nobody on this North Hollywood avenue looks famous, and a few of them look terrifying. But it just so happens that 7325 Hinds Avenue is the geographic location of Power Plant Studios, and inside those nondescript walls a human named Danger Mouse is talking about an album that has just sold 91,000 copies in England within the span of seven days. Danger Mouse doesn't look famous, either; he also doesn't look dangerous, or even rodentesque. And even though I am asking him about music, he is talking about movies.

Danger Mouse as the Pink Panther. He and Cee-Lo will be photographed only as movie characters.

The Pink Panther and Inspector Clouseau, a k a Gnarls Barkley, a k a Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo, a k a Brian Burton and Thomas Calloway. Their song "Crazy" is a worldwide smash.

"What changed everything was when I got into Woody Allen," says Danger Mouse, whose real name is Brian Burton. He is sitting on a couch in the Power Plant lounge, eating two different kinds of pizza and drinking Vitamin Water; his legs and arms are folded like a mantis's. There is a massive flat-screen TV in the room that's tuned to the TV Guide Channel, but the volume is off. "When I got to college, I saw 'Manhattan' and 'Deconstructing Harry.' I thought to myself: Why do I relate so much to this white 60-year-old Jewish guy? Why do I understand his neurosis? So I just started watching all of his movies. And what I realized is that they worked because Woody Allen was an auteur: he did his Thing, and that particular Thing was completely his own. That's what I decided to do with music. I want to create a director's role within music, which is what I tried to do on this album."

If you know who Danger Mouse is (which is totally possible, considering the commercial potential of the record we're discussing and the illegal things he's done in the past), these sentiments probably make sense immediately. If you have no idea who Danger Mouse is (which is just as plausible, considering the nature of pop music), they will require a little context before it becomes apparent how a record producer's greatest musical influence could be the man who made "Hannah and Her Sisters." But here's the bottom line, regardless of how much you know about Brian Burton: The musical object in question, "St. Elsewhere," by Gnarls Barkley, is an unlikely fusion of alternative pop, psychedelic R&B and postmodern hip-hop, and it was constructed differently from the vast majority of mainstream rock 'n' roll albums. And if "St. Elsewhere" does well over the long haul, its success will be a direct result of the way it was made, a blueprint that contradicts the conventional way in which rock bands are supposed to create music.

When Gnarls Barkley performs live, there are 14 people onstage. Technically, however, Gnarls Barkley is just two people: Danger Mouse (the aforementioned Burton) and an Atlanta-based singer-rapper named Cee-Lo (born Thomas Calloway). But in a larger sense, Gnarls Barkley is really just one person, and that person is Burton. Cee-Lo is essential, but he's essential in the same way Diane Keaton was essential to "Annie Hall": he is the voice that best incarnates Burton's vision, so he serves as the front man for this particular project. Burton will aggressively insist that Gnarls Barkley is a two-man game, but that seems more magnanimous than accurate. On the surface, Cee-Lo looks like the vortex - he wrote the lyrics and sings the vocals on every song, including "Crazy," a single on the cusp of becoming the demographically limitless song of the moment (i.e., a 2006 version of OutKast's "Hey Ya!"). Yet even while "Crazy" is Cee-Lo's song, it's still Burton's design. It's the product of a singular vision, which is (more or less) the whole idea. The music of Gnarls Barkley is collaborative, but not in a creative sense; the goal of this collaboration is to reproduce the music that already exists inside Burton's skull.

Chuck Klosterman is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author, most recently, of "Killing Yourself to Live: 85 Percent of a True Story."