MUSIC

A BAND SO FICTIONAL IT'S REAL

or Damon Albarn's strange experiment in pop

By Morty Tillman 

The Gorillaz are a collaborative virtual band founded by Damon Albarn and Jaime Hewlette. But what’s fascinating about them is that they created four fictional characters to represent the band, each with elaborate backstories. We might say the split in the band is between the real-life creators and the fictional band that they themselves have created. And all that might seem a rather simple joke on celebrity, or pop music, or fandom, but the tensions and strange ideas that come from it are far from simple and far from being easy to describe.

Albarn and Hewlette formed the band in 1997 and according to the lore that they themselves created, the real founder, though fictional, is bassist Murdoc Niccals. Murdoc made a deal with the devil to ensure he would found and lead a successful band. Would you sell your soul for that? It's one of the fundamental questions of Albarn and Hewlette's project and one that haunts everything about the Gorillaz. 

Along the way, Niccals picked up a vocalist, a drummer, and a guitarist. Stuart Pot, also known as Stu-Pot or 2-D became the lead singer after getting into a series of accidents that took out both his eyes and left him with blue hair. After getting a hold of 2-D, Murdoc bought a studio for the band on a shady website. He named it Kong Studios and, on a side note, it turned out to be haunted. Murdoc kidnapped the drummer from an old record shop, Russel Hobbs, who ended up liking the music so much he decided to stay. Russel was a good fit, as he already had a history with the paranormal and unusual. Finally, Murdoc put out a newspaper advertisement looking for a guitarist. Without even receiving a proper reply, a box with a small girl inside appeared on the doorstep of Kong Studios. She promptly popped out and hit a sick guitar riff and sung a single word, Noodle, which became her name. From that moment on, Gorillaz was a band, or at least Albarn and Hewlette's idea of a fictional band that was really real.

In Gorillaz self-titled album, Gorillaz, they criticize and parody popular music and celebrity culture. The art style for all the collateral uses bold, thick linework, angular and flatly shaded with highly detailed clothing with simplistic faces. It was a boundary-breaking album that blended many different genres of music together to create a unique, fresh, new, and appealing sound. It defined what people would come to expect as the Gorillaz style, unusual music coupled with a scathing critique of the world of pop music.

In this first phase, they introduce the idea of “Celebrity Takedown,” which is a bit ironic since Albarn and Hewlette were already celebrities and their fictional band would soon become celebrities, too. Their self-titled album gained enough attention to inspire the fictional band to pursue the creation of a Gorillaz movie. Although the fictional deal fell apart, the fictional band decided to stay in Los Angeles, get high on fictional drugs, and mess around in fictional ways. Here Albern and Hewette played the “fame-can-go-to-your-head” trope perfectly. It was both an ironic comment on pop ambition and a good narrative hook for the Gorillaz lore.

Although not directly talking about being a celebrity, multiple songs in the self-titled album harp on the desire and need for money and fame through creativity. In the song, ‘Slow Country’, 2D sings about the loneliness of being famous. The first song in the album, ‘Re-Hash’ also has a similar theme, as they sing about how pop music can be a quite financially lucrative career. This brings the listener back to the real-world counterpart of the band, Albarn. He was inspired to create Gorillaz as a comment on the soullessness and artifice of pop. What appealed to him about creating a faceless band was how he could still create music, but sidestep really fame. It's a problem he knew quite well as the frontman of the very popular band Blur.

What is so interesting about this album is it not only touches on the struggles of being famous, but it also simultaneously says “fuck you” to traditional notions of fame. With its funky, unique tracks in a wide array of different genres, Damon is not tied down by the mainstream branding and genre-limiting nature of traditional bands. The song “Rock the House” has a real feeling of freedom to it, where they just get down and funky with the music without any real commercial or studio vision. The music video reflects this as well, as the band performs in a white void with blow-up monkey dolls.

Their second and arguably most popular album of all time, Demon Days, was released four years later. The album began as a playful comment on the artificiality of music, and a way for Albarn to continue escaping from British Pop music. Albarn and Hewette had thought so far ahead about the album that they created a back story that filled the 4-year gap between Demon Days and Gorillaz. During the hiatus, the virtual band continues to find ways to deal with their fame, and what you get is a double celebrity takedown. Albarn and Hewlette taking down celebrities, and the virtual band doing the same thing, allowing both their real world and the fictional world they have created to collide. Although the seemingly chaotic nature of the lore created by Damon and Hewlette suggests that Gorillaz lives in total chaos, their real world creators are at least five steps ahead of the reality of their own fictional creations.

What makes the storytelling of Gorillaz so brilliant is that they have an off-kilter, realistic approach to an essentially comic book-equivalent world. Their live performances reflect this insane nature. During the release of Demon Days, the Gorillaz had several live performances. Some of the songs were performed by the real-life counterparts of the characters, and other songs were performed by the four fictional characters dancing around and singing on a screen. During Demon Days’ tour, Albarn and Hewlette came up with the idea that the fictional band couldn’t play all the concerts and had contracted Albarn and his collaborators to perform for them. This created the feeling that even if the cartoon counterparts could not show up, they were still behind the music that was being played. It is a reflection of Albarn and Hewlette's pure storytelling genius that they continue writing from the virtual band’s perspective. It’s not metafiction, but the inserting of the fictional into the real world.

The most representative song of their second album was “Slow Boat to Hades”. The album was created to show a “journey through the night”, with each song confronting a different personal demon. In the continuing Gorillaz lore, the entire album was produced by Noodle. She came up with the idea while the rest of the band was taking a break during the three years that it took to release the album. During this phase, the band came back together to work with Noodle in Kong Studios. When they were starting to wrap up the creation of the album, Murdoc suggested they make a crazy music video where Noodle gets shot down on the floating island used in their video for their most popular song, “Feel Good Inc.” In the music video for "El Manana", Noodle is shown running away and just barely escaping the fall from their helium-filled island. Her disappearance causes the band to disperse after releasing the album to the public.

The Floating Island

With the whole band astray, and Murdoc in big trouble from selling illegal weapons to a pirate collective named The Black Cloud, he finds a beach in the most remote place in the world. The beach is made completely of trash, which inspires him to repaint it, build a studio, and produce the album Plastic Beach. The phase that encompassed this time in Gorillaz history is appropriately named, "Escape to Plastic Beach". Murdoc was able to replace the now missing Noodle with a robot counterpart which could not only play the guitar for the band, but also serve as a bodyguard for Murdoc while he escaped from "The Black Cloud". He replaced Russel with a dinky beat-making machine. The only member Murdoc could not replace was 2D, as he relied on his angelic vocals. However, 2D no longer wanted to work with Murdoc after the havoc he created from the "El Manana" music video, so he had to instead kidnap 2D and lock him away until he was ready to unwillingly sing for the album.

Albarn and Hewlette’s idea behind Plastic Beach was to touch on environmentalism, the human condition, and holding onto hope in a world where everything is falling apart. The idea of a plastic beach was the perfect symbol, garbage repurposed into nature. It is a complex symbol of hope in a trashed world. And as for fame, the Gorillaz story shows how fame overcomes Murdoc. It’s both depressing and invigorating the way Hewlette and Albarn turn conventional ideas upside down, how what is catastrophic can lead to a new way of thinking about things. It’s clearly an allegory of the Blur experience.

In phases four through seven, the Gorillaz did not have as many significant things in terms of lore, other than the return of the band from their longest hiatus to date, seven whole years from the time between the release of Plastic Beach and Humanz, followed by The Now Now, Song Machine, and Cracker Island. The complexity of what Albarn and Hewlette have set up is not only a great joke, but also great art.

©Morty Tillman and the CCA Arts Review