Going Ape…

Over the years, I’ve had a notorious tendency to either completely overlook—or be completely clueless—about bands that debut with a fair amount of notoriety or popularity; it’ll take anywhere from a few to several years for me to finally hear something by them, and if I like what I hear, I dive obsessively headlong into playing a game of catch-up on everything that I’ve missed up that point. Now, granted, some of that is more of a circumstantial necessity; consider, for example, my love of Led Zeppelin. I was born when they were at what was arguably their peak (1975), and was 5 when they broke up. I didn’t really discover them until I was 14 or 15, and since they were long gone, well, you see my point.

Then again, there are some groups that I’ll miss the debut of by several years, but are still around and pumping stuff out, and it takes happy circumstance for me to finally hear their music. Since I rarely, if ever, listen to the radio, god knows what I’ve probably missed. In this case, however, and this is a continuation of my previous post, 2006 was the year that I finally discovered…

Gorillaz

I’d been aware of the concept for a while—namely, that the band was completely virtual, comprised of four animated characters (Murdoc, Noodle, 2D, and Russel), and that Damon Albarn of Blur and Jamie Hewlett of Tank Girl were the creative forces behind everything. Due to the fact that they are animated, though, is what I suspect led me to overlook them…I had images of The Monkees taken to the Nth degree, with music that would be annoyingly catchy bubblegum pop (think of Christopher Cross’s “Caught Between the Moon and New York City” or Frank Mills’ “Music Box Dancer”).

It took a trip to an OSU game in Columbus with my best friend, Andy, to finally get me to hear the band. Andy, whose tastes in music are lackadaisically eccentric in some regards, had a mix CD he’d made in the car player, and during a brief lull in the conversation, I noticed that the song that was playing had a great, dub-influenced beat with a catchy vocal line in the chorus, and some good MC’ing for the verse. Andy was getting ready to mention something about our fantasy football league, but I asked him to hold a second while I turned it up and gave it a good listen. Needless to say, I was hooked—and yes, in case you, Constant Reader, are wondering which song it was, it was “Clint Eastwood”—by what I heard. I borrowed the CD that night to rip it onto my computer, and played the song ad infinitum on the ride home. Poor Andy, fearing a rehash of our freshman year when I’d play “Come As You Are” and “No Rain” over and over again, probably was glad he wasn’t living with me anymore at point, although he said he’d send me another song of theirs, “Feel Good, Inc.” Since I’m a sucker for anything that has a dub or reggae flavor to it, I probably didn’t have a chance in hell when I heard it.

Now that I’ve had a chance to listen to Gorillaz’ music and examine the concept of the band, I’ve realized that it’s a clever experiment in cross-pollination of music styles and influences, but without letting anything or anyone in particular really become the defining face or identity of the band. And since Noodle, Murdoc, 2D, and Russel are accepted and invested in by the fans and the performers as the personas of the band, it allows for a good deal of post-modernistic creative freedom and interplay. Del Tha Funky Homosapien, who’s awesome in his own right, is reborn as Del, the blue ghost rapper who inhabited Russel’s body (and was the protagonist for the videos of “Clint Eastwood” and “Rock the House”). “Double Bass,” off the first album, has a wicked dub feel—imagine King Tubby or Augustus Pablo with even thicker bass. “El Manana” has a huge trance/electronica feel to it. And that really WAS Dennis Hopper that I heard as the storyteller telling a dark fable in “Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head.” There’s a surprising depth and sophistication and variety to the music that’s created, and since the artists involved are labeled as collaborators of the four actual members, there’s no real space for any superfluous ego to develop or crowd things up.

I enjoyed the back story of the band itself too…it’s cartoonish (duh), but not in the sugary, Hanna-Barbera way that I’d dreaded. Murdoc’s a sex-obsessed Satanist, 2D is dumb as hell (due to being hit twice by cars that Murdoc was driving) and loves Dawn of the Dead, Noodle is an amnesiac super-soldier, and Russel is/was possessed by ghosts, not to mention owning the ultimate beat machine, something that was referred to as the TARDIS of music. It helps give the band members depth, which in turn helps the audience invest themselves in the subjective reality of Gorillaz rather than focus on the collaborators as the actual stars.

In other words, the music’s awesome.