You didn’t have to hear Gnarls Barkley last year to hear their hit song “Crazy,” although chances are you were probably familiar with both. The omnipresence of “Crazy” was viral, another “Yesterday” or “Lose Yourself” or “Hey Ya!,” inspiring covers by Nelly Furtado, Cat Power, Ray LaMontagne, Paris Hilton, Of Montreal, the Raconteurs, and Billy Idol, among others (all this according to Wikipedia).

Fortunately, “Crazy” is brilliant, and critics thought so, too. In a year where the results of best-of albums ballots ranged from mildly obscure (Pitchforkmedia.com choosing the Knife’s Silent Shout as their number one album) to far-reaching (Stylus.com siding with Ghostface’s Fishscale) to predictable (Dylan’s Modern Times topping Rolling Stone’s list; Joanna Newsom and the Hold Steady splitting the indie rock vote), “Crazy” was a near-unanimous choice for best single of 2006.

Even the Grammys noticed. On Feb. 11, the 49th Grammy Awards will air live on CBS. And Gnarls Barkley is up for five awards, including Record of the Year for “Crazy,” Album of the Year for St. Elsewhere, and Producer of the Year for Danger Mouse (real name: Brian Burton), who, with vocalist Cee-Lo, make up the group.

The Grammys, for the most part, are insufferable. Compared to their equivalents in television and film, the Grammys have perhaps the least amount of integrity, proving themselves, on an annual basis now, to be either outdated (honoring U2’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb for Album of the Year at the 2006 ceremony when the album was released in 2004) or out of touch (Steely Dan’s ridiculous win in the same category in 2001 over much more deserving releases by Eminem and Radiohead. If you remember the name of that Steely Dan album, the rest of this essay probably isn’t for you.).

Nonetheless, the Grammys’ choosing to nominate Gnarls Barkley is an interesting development in Danger Mouse’s prolific career, and “Crazy” has a very real chance of winning Record of the Year. (Look for Album of the Year to go to the Dixie Chicks or Justin Timberlake.) It’s a sign that Danger Mouse has broken through another layer of music industry stuffiness, another reason for people who don’t normally listen to hip-hop to like a song by a hip-hop artist.

Just what is it about Danger Mouse that’s so appealing? The answer seems to lie more in the ideas he presents than in the music he makes, “Crazy” notwithstanding. In 2004, Danger Mouse made and released The Grey Album, a pioneering blend of Beatles music and Jay-Z raps that was, we knew all along, completely illegal. (Beatles songs are notoriously copyrighted.) The whole thing was an experiment that just happened to work, and Danger Mouse, who wasn’t known for his talents as a producer at this point, became an ideal collaborator, working with electronic pop group Gorillaz and underground rapper MF Doom and releasing two albums’ worth of new music in 2005.

What Danger Mouse did with The Grey Album is nothing short of incredible: by introducing the most recognizable rock group of all time to the most recognizable rapper of all time in a setting that was both new and familiar (all of the music on The Grey Album had been previously recorded), Danger Mouse became something bigger than a producer or a sound manipulator, or even a tastemaker. He became a host.

He is what Malcolm Gladwell, in his popular book The Tipping Point, calls a “connector,” someone who, “by having a foot in so many different worlds,” has “the effect of bringing them all together.”

In an article for The New York Times Magazine last June, pop music journalist Chuck Klosterman revealed one of the key influences behind Danger Mouse’s method: the producer’s love for Woody Allen. Allen, Danger Mouse argues in the story, made a certain kind of movie, and those movies, when collected and examined, all share unique things in common. At one point, Klosterman writes that Cee-Lo’s involvement in Gnarls Barkley was not unlike Diane Keaton’s role in Annie Hall: “The music of Gnarls Barkley is collaborative, but not in a creative sense; the goal of this collaboration is to produce the music that already exists inside Burton’s skull.”

Other directors also have this quality; it’s just as fair—if not more accurate—to say Danger Mouse approaches music the way Stanley Kubrick approached films, focusing on details rather than bigger themes, making art that reflects a singular vision rather than several.

But whereas Kubrick was known for shaping actors around his ideas—so that you weren’t just watching a movie but a Stanley Kubrick movie—Danger Mouse appears to inspire greater performances from his guests (especially Gorillaz’s Damon Albarn and Cee-Lo, who’s enjoying a career revival with the success of Gnarls), who are, essentially, contributing to ideas they have no control over.

Fitting, then, that Danger Mouse’s greatest achievement still remains The Grey Album. And fitting for what The Grey Album is: pieces of music on which the creator doesn’t play a single note.

—The Grammy Awards are Feb. 11. Danger Mouse also produced the self-titled debut album by The Good, the Bad & the Queen (which features Blur/Gorillaz member Damon Albarn and Paul Simonon from the Clash), which was scheduled for release Jan. 23 on Virgin Records.