Before the early 2000s, if you heard the term "virtual band"
something like "Alvin and the Chipmunks" or "The Archies" would come to mind.
That comic pop fusion has been around since the '50s
but the potential of that creative concept wouldn't be fully explored until 2001
when former "Blur"' front man Darmon Albarn and "Tank Girl" comic book artist Jamie Hewlett
would collaborate and release their debut, self-titled album, Gorillaz.
The idea to put together this animated band arose from their frustration
with the MTV generation, the faces of the music industry becoming the
celebrity without substance.
So if the music was going to be manufactured, they wanted to do it properly
from the ground up.
And with these four characters,
(2D, Russel, Murdoc and Noodle)
they could strip away the celebrity of it, making the face of the music into these caricatures,
parodies of what they were seeing so much of within the industry.
There's a quote from Roger Morton in their book
"Rise of the Ogre" in which he says,
"In a world where everything is a virtual copy of itself, where there's nothing but image,
wherse publicists have publicists and where celebrity is bleakly industrial,
it's inevitable that 'image' starts to collapse on itself..."
Gorillaz set out to shatter that myopic idea of what pop music is or should be.
It became this experiment to deconstruct genre using these four musical archetypes
as a conduit to explore everything from hip hop, trip hop, britpop, J-Rock
to orchestral, electronic, jazz, folk and opera.
There's always a higher conceptual theme to each Gorillaz album,
but the individual songs themselves are radically different in tone, atmosphere,
instrumentation and lyrics.
I'll give you an example from their album "Plastic Beach",
something a bit folksy, ethereal and calm.
Empire Ants, Gorillaz: "Oh joy's arise,
the sun has come again
to hold you."
And now, at the complete opposite end of the spectrum.
"Little memories, marching on.
Your little feet, working the machines."
And those were both part of the same song.
Those constant musical shifts drive
the album's momentum and keep you on your toes.
You never expect what's coming next.
This need to over categorize music,
putting everything in neatly labeled boxes,
is detrimental to the exploration factor when acquiring your musical taste.
And this happens mostly when you're young:
you find a few genres you like and you get stuck in that labeling trap.
One of the most common things I hear when discussing music with people is,
"Oh, I don't listen to country,"
or, "I listen to everything but rap."
And that's a result of constraining their tastes to a vacuum.
They wrestle with monikers to try to describe every detail.
You can't discredit an entire spectrum of music because you weren't into a bit of it.
Genre and sub-genre categorization allow for more refined searching and trying to
find music with specific characteristics or artists in similar fields.
And categorization is just part of human nature,
but it's also human nature to combine and merge and collaborate
and sometimes adulterate, but that's all part of the experimentation process
and we need more cross-pollination between musical styles and cultures.
I grew up listening to Gorillaz and that erosion of genre boundaries opened me up
to appreciating so much more music and that's something very important to learn
when you're young.
Jamie Hewlett: "A quote from Liam Gallagher in The Press
was snagging off Gorillaz was, 'Oh, it's for kids,
it's a fucking kids band.'
And I thought that was probably the coolest thing ever said about Gorillaz
because I want it to be for kids.
The sort of eight to fifteen year olds, 'cause they're the ones who don't care who's behind it.
They don't know who I am, they don't know who Damon is.
They think it's Gorillaz
and so they buy into it the way they should, you know...
When "Clint Eastwood" came out, it went in the top five
and it was in there amongst all this sort of teeny bop crap and yet,
the kids are listening to that so
they were listening to sort of music influenced by dub and reggae and hip hop, and thinking it was cool.
I think that it worked."
Jamie and Damon were able to completely disappear by an artifice of this
animated band and the music took full advantage of that freedom,
utilizing a constantly rotating roster of guest performers, anyone from Snoop Dogg and Bobby Womack
to Lou Reed and the Syrian National Orchestra.
The music is constantly evolving even within the albums,
and the animated element of the band isn't just a gimmick or a distraction.
Those visuals can live on their own, and so can the music,
but the marriage of those two together opens a whole new world of narrative driven songwriting.
Artists like Kanye and Beyonce have experimented with visualizing an entire album
with music videos and these large performances,
but that doesn't have the same reach as something like Gorillaz.
When you hear Damon Albarn's vocals, the fact that you picture 2D singing them is something uniquely special
and that's what makes Gorillaz so deserving of
a double platinum selling album, nine Grammy nominations and a GQ Band of the Year award
to a band that doesn't actually exist.