Day 242: Gorillaz – Plastic Beach
I know I’m whanging on about the weather an obnoxious amount, but it was 22 degrees here in Glasgow today. 22 whole degrees Celsius! That’s 72 degrees Fahrenheit for those of you who use the inferior system. I googled and the usual average temperature in April over here is highs of 12 degrees, I can’t believe I’ve managed to get a tan here at this time of year. Anyway, I was in the market for another sunny weather album while I hunted for a sunny weather hangout spot, so I went for Plastic Beach by Gorillaz.
Album cover courtesy of Parlophone
Gorillaz, as I’m sure you know if you’re reading music dork blogs, is a virtual band that was cofounded by Blur’s Damon Albarn and illustrator Jamie Hewlett, who also co-created the comic book Tank Girl. Hewlett had broken up with his partner so he moved in with Damon Albarn, and while they were living together, they came up with the idea of an animated band where Hewlett does the character design and Albarn does the music. They’d watched too much MTV together at the peak of the boy band era and they said they thought “let's make a manufactured band but make it kind of interesting.”
Plastic Beach was released in 2010 as a concept album of environmental themes that Damon Albarn dreamt up when he was outside his coastal home, looking at all the plastic waste that was in the sand on the beach. He also visited a landfill in Mali and was inspired by the ecosystem he’d seen among the garbage:
This is part of the new ecology. And for the first time I saw the world in a new way. I've always felt, I'm trying to get across on this new record, the idea that plastic, we see it as being against nature but it's come out of nature. We didn't create plastic, nature created plastic. And just seeing the snakes like living in the warmth of decomposing plastic bags. They like it. It was a strange kind of optimism that I felt.
The resulting album is a pretty insane cacophony of pop, electronic and hip hop, with a stacked list of artists featuring on it: there’s Snoop Dogg, Bashy, Kano, Mos Def, Bobby Womack, Lou Reed, De La Soul, Gruff Rhys, Yukimi Nahano and Mark E. Smith, along with the Syrian National Orchestra for Arabic Music. There’s not a single stinker on it, instead you find yourself completely entranced in this dreamy junkyard snake concept album that feels like it’d still be modern if it was released today.
I didn’t expect to like it as much as I did. Maybe there’s a bit of lingering nostalgia from listening to Gorillaz as a youngster that stirs something in me when I listen to them, or maybe they’re just that good. It’s probably just the second one, I guess the fun part is that you’ll never know for sure. I’d have a lot more poetic to wax about this album on a better day, but not today. It’s a rare 10/10.