The death of 2D — Gorillaz and how Damon Albarn killed the world’s greatest cartoon band
As a child, living in my own world, being wired up to machines to test if my brain was working properly, there were very few bands that spoke to me the way Gorillaz did.
When their debut album dropped on march 26th 2001, I was aware of the concept and had regularly seen the band’s music video for Clint Eastwood on top of the pops.
The imagery of a strange band of misfits wouldn’t look out of place on Cartoon Network, sandwiched between Angry Beavers and Courage the Cowardly Dog in the afternoon schedule.
The pummeling, crashing drums introduce the dissonant piano riff, followed by 2D’s tired, disinterested voice, were the sound track to a bizarre cartoon in which drummer Russel Hobbs summons a Zombie Gorilla posse ready to rain havoc on the band. What then ensues is a battle between the band and the apes, with Noodle delivering an awesome flying super kick to smite the enemy attempting to railroad their performance. With the help of an iconic feature performance by Del the Funky Homosapien, who appears as a gangster rapping ghostly figure out of Russel’s baseball cap topped head, Gorillaz eventually finish victorious, as the sun rises and the enemies skins peel away, the band stand around the graveyard looking on as if this was just another day.
That music video is a classic. It fully cemented a band that was designed for someone like me. Someone who wanted to find an escape into a new world. I wasn’t interested in real things. I was interested in exploring other universes.
Gorillaz were the band I had been craving.
It didn’t matter who was the creative team behind the artwork, or who wrote and recorded the music. I never cared about the back story. I was captivated by the strange drawings of the band that kept appearing on top of the pops, a programme I’d watch religiously as a kid and was the first formation for my love of pop music.
In the Gorillaz world, with their fantastical drawings and animations, the strange character’s demonstrated a real presence. From the exhausted and comedown soaked vocals delivered by 2D, to Murdocs never ending disgusted look while picking his bass, moving onto Noodles childlike playful persona as she liberally strums on her guitar and ending with Russel Hobbs keeping everything together on the beat, albeit a little less bright than the others, relatively speaking.
As I grew up, and after many copies of their first record ended up in donation bins in charity shops across the UK, Gorillaz stayed prolific. Their much celebrated sophomore Demon Days produced some of the most era defining songs in modern British musical history.
Feel Good Inc. is the only song I can remember that made the bass guitar appealing to my peers in school. I remember weeks after that single dropped and went to number 1, anyone who played an instrument wanted to replicate the bass line. I remember one lass impressing her mates when she painstakingly learned the staccato riff on her squire bass.
It was a cultural phenomenon, one of the few songs I could relate to other people at school. I had the single on CD and found myself constantly listening to the B-side, spitting out the demons, a 5 minute dub inspired jam with some strange, ethereal, almost orchestral sounds thrown in for good measure.
Quickly followed by Dare, Dirty Harry and Kids with Guns, Gorillaz amassed a string of successes that elevated them to genuine hit makers and a band that could stand in the pantheon of great, so called ‘Real Bands’.
Ultimately, my curiosity was piqued and I began to delve into who was behind the art and who created these characters and the music accompanying it.
I learned the music is created by Damon Albarn, acclaimed front man and chief songwriter of the much documented britpop band Blur. His artistic collaborator is Jamie Hewlett, a comic book artist who had recently had his critically acclaimed strip-turned-graphic novel Tank Girl adapted into what can only be described as a messy, and not very well received, inferior version of Mad Max.
I must though make it clear that I have never read Tank Girl. I think I glanced a copy of the book in Borders once. Nor have I ever really sat down and listened to a Blur album. I think Song 2, Country House, Parklife and The Universal says enough about the band.
Melodic, sometimes loud, but otherwise very safe. I have never heard a blur album be described as ground breaking. There aren’t many bands who proudly list blur as a main influence. Maybe Sports Team, but then again, I’m not big on them either.
So why does this context matter? Well, the film adaptation of Tank Girl failed miserably at the box office and Blur were at the very end of their collective tether, both Jamie and Damon needed a change.
They say they were up late watching MTV and talking about how ridiculous everything was, and then they got talking and thought “What if we formed a cartoon band?”.
This is information that’s been retold by fans and critics alike when doing retrospectives based on one interview they did that was featured on Cery Levi’s 2008 documentary about the band, Bananaz.
But this shouldn’t be taken as gospel. Idea’s tend to stew in peoples minds. The light bulb doesn’t switch on automatically. It takes time to warm up. Damon had ideas for a solo project, Jamie was at a creative cross roads himself and asked if Damon needed help with art work and the conversation just began to grow from there. That’s just speculation, however.
And that’s as far as my interest in the band went.
I never got to see them live during this period. I did get into plastic beach too many years after it came out, which I believe is the best Gorillaz album. It’s a fully realised vision of the dystopian future Damon and Jamie wanted to create.
With a wrap sheet of some of the most impressive names to turn up on a record, from Snoop Dogg to Lou Reed to Kano and Mark E Smith, Plastic Beach seeks to show us a world, one not too dissimilar from ours post a climate catastrophe.
Stylo stands out as having one of the most impressive music video’s in the Gorillaz catalogue, as well as being their best song in the entire discography. There isn’t anything quite as enthralling as Bobby Womack screaming his lungs out as the synths and percussion gain intensity with each passing beat, while Bruce Willis is chasing down the band in a high speed car chase, firing bullets from his handgun out the window.
From this creative peak, a series of underwhelming albums from the band dropped throughout the rest of the 2010’s with a series of releases that had no real lasting impact. The Fall, Humanz, The Now Now and The Song Machine project only have a handful of songs worth noting, a particular highlight being Hallelujah Money, featuring mercury prize winning songwriter/poet Benjamin Clementine. A truly haunting Gorillaz song that was written off at the time as their weakest single, but I think is one of their best.
However, despite this and to my surprise, my 3 times delayed Primavera Sound Porto ticket meant that after a few line up changes, I would finally get to see Gorillaz live. After a burning hot day on the beach sharing a 2 litre jug of sangria with my wife, with added Super Bock, I was ready.
However, although myself and the rest of the excited crowd north of the river Douro within the natural amphitheaters of Parque da Cidade enjoyed the tunes Damon delivered on the night, what we weren’t treated to was a full audio visual experience.
This sounds naive, but I really did expect at least some prominence of 2D, Murdoc, Noodle and Russel to be somewhere. I thought, maybe they’d have something more than just using the video monitor behind the band.
Instead, we were treated to a Damon Albarn dressed in a pink tracksuit outfit, struggling to climb up onto the barrier to sing to the audience, about 20 musicians on stage, and a string of guest appearances including Beck, Poss from De la soul, Little Simz and Mos Def at the 1am headline slot.
But why this creative choice? Is it even a virtual band anymore? Or is it all just an aesthetic?
This is jarring to me, considering everything I appreciated about the band until I saw them live in flesh was the fact that it was a new world to explore. Why did the universe never expand to more characters? Was there never an opportunity to create a rival band for Gorillaz to compete with? Where is the Gorillaz movie that isn’t just clips of Albarn working in the studio with whoever he wants?
I had my theories. I originally set the framework of this essay to be about how the last minute Glastonbury Headline in 2010 fundamentally changed the band forever. It was so poorly received in the press that Damon Albarn felt the need to apologise for it. He insisted that it was because there wasn’t enough interaction with the audience.
I disagree with this hypothesis.
I think people were underwhelmed because they were expecting to see the characters of Gorillaz. What they got instead was Damon Albarn larping about the stage looking like a grown up Dennis the Menace while bringing out guests to help pad out the set. It demonstrated a lack of confidence in the concept. Damon Albarn had given up on Gorillaz as a virtual band. They had just been a marketing tool for the music all along.
One back injury to Bono on that fateful June evening really exposed the limitations of the performance, and although there is still some fantastic moments like Mark E Smith walking out late to Glitter Freeze with the lyrics in hand and still not really paying attention to them, or Lou Reed letting his guitar ring out to the Glastonbury crowd before ripping into Some Kind of Nature, the verdict was made and Damon was happy to draw the wrong conclusion.
But when you look into the media that’s put out from Gorillaz, it turns out this thought process regarding how seriously Albarn was about committing to being a full time cartoon band was on display quite early on.
During the Bananaz documentary, there is a scene where Damon, Jamie and voice of Russell Hobbs and long time collaborator Remi Kabaka Jr. are doing their first telephone interview with a journalist from America. Jamie and Remi commit to playing Murdoc and Hobbs, but a visibally unsettled Albarn picks up the phone from Kabaka, who glumly states “oh wait, some guy named Damon Albarn wants to speak”.
Damon takes the phone into the other room and finishes the interview, he’s heard explaining what the band is, who is doing it and why they’re doing it.
Jamie looks visibly upset at Damon. “It was going so well” he says to his collaborator, before Damon goes on a tirade about how Americans don’t understand irony and that they need things explained to them before they can enjoy it.
It’s revealing that Damon Albarn refers to his potential American audience as too stupid to get it the first time around. Because somehow an 8 year old kid in Minnesota wouldn’t have instantly got what Gorillaz were all about upon seeing their video for Clint Eastwood the same way I did as an 8 year old boy looking for an escape.
The way Jamie tries to argue that it didn’t matter doesn’t seem to register with Damon, and it’s one of two very uncomfortable moments in the documentary that reveal more about Damon Albarn than anything he’s said or done regarding Blur, Gorillaz, or his other projects like The Good The Bad and The Queen and Everyday Robots.
After what is considered a blip in proceedings, the documentary then turns to their live show, which is much more compelling and interesting than any show they’ve done since.
Playing behind a cinema screen, the shows look like a garage rock peformance mixed with the visual stylings of the grateful dead. Intense, colourful and it looked like the audience really were buying into the whole package. Those audiences in 2001 got a way more immersive experience than anyone who paid a ticket for Glastonbury in 2010.
Their next live shows in the documentary then focuses on Demon Days, specifically to their 5 show run in Harlem, New York in 2006. An area that is proudly the birthplace of hip-hop, has experienced much degradation, violence and political abandonment amidst the aids and crack epidemics of the 80’s and 90’s, Damon Albarn saw it as the perfect place to perform their Demon Days set.
Demon Days is described by Damon himself as a pacifist record. The record was made in the era of the Bush Administration leading the U.S and UK into 2 unjustifiable wars. As well as a growing number of mass shootings across America.
However, looking back, there’s nothing really in the record that intends to provide solutions to the problems that Damon raises. It mentions guns, and talks introspectively about them in songs like Dirty Harry or Kids With Gun’s.
And in the context of the band, it wasn’t supposed to. This is Gorillaz world. One that 2D and co. inhabit. It works in their world because they don’t have the answers to their own problems. It’s story telling.
But in the physical world, the context is very much different.
For the show in Harlem, Damon Albarn recruits local singers to be in the choir for the performances. These are predominantly Black and Latino singers who care deeply about their community. They will no doubt at the very least know of people who they grew up around have been killed at the hands of police, their own neighbours caught in the crossfire and having loved ones succumb to horrific drug and alcohol addictions.
They have lived experiences of their community suffering at the hands of successive local and national governments neglecting them, and in the case of the CIA, literally fueling the crack epidemic by importing the drugs from Nicaragua, in a bid to destabilise South America and oppress the black population at the same time.
It’s important to note that when performer’s who are not directly in the main act are hired to sing for an artist, because of the way casting calls are done, a lot of the time these singers wouldn’t have known what they were going to be doing that day, and this is explained to Damon Albarn by a woman by the name of Dr London. She was asked to get together a choir of children to perform the song Dirty Harry at the Apollo Theatre and she has some concerns about the lyrics.
She questions why the lyrics say “I need to a gun to keep from harm”. Damon, pretty miffed that she’s been given the wrong lyric, tells her not to worry about it as that’s the wrong lyric.
When it’s explained to her, she points out that in rehearsal that’s what they’ve been told to sing. The conversation starts to turn with more singers appearing to back her up.
She asks a follow up question “so what does the gun represent?”. To which Damon explains the concept of Demon Days and how it’s a pacifist record.
Another singer points out to him that he’s asking them to sing about guns when they have very real lived experiences of gun violence in Harlem, as does America in the wake of the columbine massacre.
Damon struggles to explain himself. He admits that this has never been raised to him before and how he wrote and performed these lyrics with other black artists, much to the bemusement of the singers.
“Really?” One retorts.
Damon is struggling, he’s pausing and doesn’t quite know how to explain himself. He’s lost all confidence in this moment because it’s the first time in his career he’s been challenged by the very people he’s inspired by.
Without the influence of black music, there is no Gorillaz.
Damon Albarn is a product of the white, middle class art world, with parents who had successful careers in the creative industries. They had access to the world music on record that would shape his musical up bringing.
His early life was growing up in a predominantly black neighborhood in London before moving to a considerably more white Essex town Colchester, a place he described himself as a Thatcher experiment town. Everything he demonstrates in Gorillaz is taking influence from black music and repacking it for a western, mainly white audience. A tale as old as Elvis.
So to be challenged in this way is so jarring to him. He freezes, he gets frustrated, he looks upset. How could they be saying this to him? He has black friends, black musicians in his band who respect him, how could this all really happen?
What happens next is shocking.
One of the singers says “Look, I don’t know what it’s like in England but we have an actual real problem with kids with guns in schools”.
In response, he replies “We have the same problem in the UK”.
My jaw dropped when I heard those words fall out of his mouth. It was so unconvincing, but it worked to get out of the situation.
Yet, he’s also grotesquely wrong.
Britain at that point had only ever had 1 school shooting, the Dunblane massacre of 1996. America, in the 12 months running up to the 5 night run in Harlem, had 6 alone. This includes the Red Salt Lake shootings and even one over in Newark in New Jersey, a stone’s throwaway from where they were performing.
Damon lied to get out of this situation and it’s very telling that after Demon Days, the topic of gun violence is never mentioned again in the catalogue of Gorillaz albums. This despite the fact the problem has only intensified in the years since.
Why is this important to the sidelining of the band Gorillaz?
Ultimately, that show, like every show since their debut album, focused away from the band. Instead, we got black bodies on display, performing those words and songs, and not 2D, Noodle, Russel or Murdoc.
The virtual band had become a burden, something blocking his true vision for his solo project away from Blur. They never revisited the concept of the cartoon band in a live format. Instead, the Gorillaz show they delivered on the Demon Days Harlem shows was a bunch of incredibly talented people of colour singing the words of a White, Caucasian, middle-class British man.
And the band is called Gorillaz.
Although that situation is deeply uncomfortable, I don’t think Damon Albarn is a card carrying racist. I think his heart is in the right place. I just think he’s never really thought about his fascination with black culture or why he yearned to travel to far away places, to Mali, to his studio in Jamaica.
His story is a by-product of western white European colonialism. One that would discover and enslave these places we had no right to take. These songs, in the context of Gorillaz world, where the author is dead and all that matters is the content, are truly great works of art. Stripping that away destroys the art.
As I sit on my own Melancholy Hill, I feel a deep sadness for the characters and what might have been. I wonder if we will one day see them on stage, playing their instruments, fully synced up to the band, changing set lists every night, interacting with the crowd. What could have been…
Had Damon and Jamie stuck to their guns and really tried to advance the concept of bringing these characters to life, we could’ve genuinely experienced one of the greatest cultural phenoms of all time.
They’ve had over 20 years to achieve so many feats, but what we’re left with is a 60 year old Damon Albarn strutting around the stage like he’s still in Blur in 1994, when really we just want to see Gorillaz.
