Gorillaz
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celebrate 10 years as the world’s greatest (not quite) fake band by bringing the humans onstage / by Jess Harvell
included not only a full score by Albarn and extensive design work by Hewlett, but also a cast of that even millionaire musicians now use Twitter. But dozens, all performing kinetic kung fu routines in there’s something kind of sad about it, too. It seems mid-air while singing Albarn’s songs. When you there’s this new, unfortunate guideline to success: Pop have to hire an acrobatic director, an aerial director and a martial arts director for a project, you’ve stars have to appear normal. They have to pursue the traveled far from recording demos in your bedillusion that they’re not all that different from their fans, thanks in part to the pseudo one-on-one intimacy of room while your buddy sketches alongside you. “I think what we learned on that project was the internet. You can no longer be an alien who rides a unithat anything’s possible,” Hewlett says. “You can corn and lives on a castle atop a rainbow. You have to shop go from making a pop record to doing an opera. If at Whole Foods and watch HBO on Sunday nights. you can put up an opera where you’ve got loads of Chinese kids flying around on wires, fighting one Rather than crafting over-the-top fantasy perso- another and singing at the same time, with animations and bizarre costumes, then anything is possible, really.” nas, pop musicians often play up their everyperson Monkey was a cartoon come to life, a direct outgrowth of Albarn and Hewlordinariness, with Lady Gaga as the exception that proves the rule. These days you’re more likely to ett’s main work-in-progress: Gorillaz, the first true comic book band, aimed get that kind of glitter-covered, sparkler-twirling, as much at grownups as kids, silly but also snotty. It’s a band that can revel in I’m-really-from-outer-space vibe at an Of Montreal its own excessiveness, including but not limited to killing its own members gig. (Or a Dimmu Borgir concert.) Cartoonish specand then raising them from the dead, because none of it’s real anyway. That’s tacle isn’t the only way to present pop, of course, but the draw. Albarn and Hewlett may hold the copyright, but every Gorillaz fan it’s always been one of its most entertaining uses, knows the band’s “real” members are 2D, Murdoc, Russel Hobbs and Noodle, especially if the songs are just as strong. The over- the infamous, iconic characters designed and animated by Hewlett and brought blown comic book aspect of the music—the back- to life by Albarn’s songs. These four cartoon nogoodniks may not ride unicorns, flipping acrobatics and the guitars that look like toy but they’re definitely not normal. They may use Twitter, but they’re more likely ray-guns and the explosions-upon-explosions—can to crash a rocket into the side of Whole Foods. feel in jeopardy these days. Albarn and Hewlett have developed Gorillaz through a multimedia barrage— Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, U.K. rock star music videos, animations, DVDs, TV specials, a heavily interactive website— and former underground cartoonist respectively, with a vibe that owes much to the knowing zaniness of classic Warner Brothtwo old friends and also one of the odder pairings ers cartoons. And their working methods sound very similar to the hothouse in modern pop, do not shy away from spectacle. In conditions that produced the Looney Tunes, where the animators and writers 2007, they produced Monkey: Journey to the West, were crammed into a tiny space on the studio lot dubbed Termite Terrace. an opera based on the ancient Chinese myth. It “We share a studio in West London, sort of like Gorillaz HQ,” Hewlett says. [ ]
here’s something silly and charming about the fact
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