Are the Gorillaz Post-Modern?

Reject False Icons: Gorillaz and Postmodernism 
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A cartoon? A cult band? A political collective? Damon Albarn having a laugh? What exactly is/are The Gorillaz – and what can they teach us about popular culture and post-modernism? Four cartoon characters, two puppets, one big screen, two choirs, dancers, backing singers, stars including De la Soul, Roots Manuva and Shaun Ryder, and most importantly a group of musicians in the mysterious anonymity of shadows, recently played a string of one-off gigs which reportedly will never be repeated.

The Gorillaz’ live performance of their Demon Days album lasted five nights at the Manchester Opera House. Tickets sold out in just over an hour, leading to blackmarket sales of up to £150 a ticket.
But whilst the names of lead singer/keyboardist 2D, bassist Murdoc, lead guitarist Noodle and drummer Russel are familiar to music fans, Dan Nakamura (replaced by DJ Dangermouse for the Demon Days album), Miho Hatori, Tina Weymouth and Jamie Hewlett are not as well known. Not so co-creator Damon Albarn, whose popularity in 90s’ Britpop band Blur doubtlessly contributed to The Gorillaz’ slogan ‘Reject False Icons’.

So how can The Gorillaz help us to understand the concept of postmodernism? Postmodernism is at once both an aesthetic style, something we can recognise in media texts, and also a state of cultural being, the way we are. Culturally, postmodernism is a three-pronged fork: sociologically it describes the way society is increasingly characterised by consumerism, information technology, and globalisation psychologically it describes audiences’ increasing ability to navigate and communicate in the technologically driven modern world, but also the resulting changes to our sense of identity philosophically, it suggests that ‘absolute truths’ are non-existent, and questions the concept of ‘reality’.

A high concept band?

Gorillaz is a high-concept collective of artists and musicians... (MTV)...the band’s high concept shenanigans... (NME) True pop art, as high-concept as a Warhol soup can, but it works (The Rolling Stone) So what is ‘high concept’? High concept doesn’t refer to the band at all, but rather the marketing of the band. In simple terms, The Gorillaz are a collection of musicians, making music in a generically eclectic style, almost anonymously. But anonymity doesn’t sell. Not even in a media market where music snobs reject ‘manufactured’ pop and pseudo-individualised music is the music alone ‘enough’.

What to do? Bring in Jamie Hewlett, animator of (amongst others) the cult Tank Girl franchise, to create cartoon characters 2D, Murdoc, Noodle and Russel. This solves the immediate problem, because now music bosses have something to put on the CD covers, posters, T-shirts and in music videos, which is all very useful because they like to make money. But what about all those audiophiles who want to see live music? Not to worry; stick up a big sheet to hide the musicians, and project the characters on to it. That’s the ticket. Literally. Between 2001 and 2005 that’s exactly how The Gorillaz performed in sell-out shows, as ‘virtual personalities’ serving audiences with pop music from outside the shackles of the cult of celebrity. In theory, this separates the music from the far more saleable star persona but, in reality, audiences became fans of fictional characters; the ‘high concept’ shifted their interest into the profitable realm of cult fandom.

	Experimental – or an economic investment? But are The Gorillaz really all that experimental or innovative? Is it really a risk to create animated characters when animations are some of the highest grossing films of all time? Even for The Gorillaz’ target audience, whose edgy sensibility might reject the Pixar/Disney formula, Tarantino’s recent Kill Bill regenerated interest in the Japanese animé that informs Hewlett’s creations. The band’s acceptance speech at the 2005 European MTV Awards showcased some of the holographic technology that the band have promised for a 2007 tour. Offering audiences the spectacle of pioneering technology in the information age (Postmodernity?) is hardly an economic risk. And just as Albarn brought to The Gorillaz a fan base that has, as he has himself, matured from Britpop, Hewlett brought his own fanbase, from 90s’ cult comic strip and film, Tank Girl, and if there’s one thing cult fans are willing to do to illustrate their fandom, it’s spend money. Far from being original, The Gorillaz simply cut up the pieces of established styles and genres, to create something new, a technique known in postmodernism as ‘bricolage’.
NME’s Peter Robinson illustrated the band’s boardroom appeal in a review of The Gorillaz earlier this year If you were to invent a pop act right now, where would you begin? Well, human beings take too many drugs and start boo-hooing when they don’t get their own way, so you’d create something, like a cartoon character, to front the whole shebang. You’d do something to make sure The Kids’ parents didn’t understand the appeal – it’s the punk rock way, after all. And since we live in such modern times, you’d promote this new pop star not through conventional channels like the gig circuit or CD:UK, but through some semi-interactive platform, to star with the world’s most-can’t-get-out-of-your-headable tune, and once the entire project reached critical mass, whack out a single. Congratulations: you’ve just invented the Crazy Frog.

He certainly has a point; but surely the Crazy Frog’s not quite as political as Hewlett and Albarn’s alter egos. Tracks on their recent album include the social commentaries ‘Kids With Guns’ and the obscurely named ‘Fire Coming Out of a Monkey’s Head’. The music video for ‘19-2000’ features the characters being bombed and bombing, and ‘Dirty Harry’ features 2D in a soldier’s uniform, complete with helmet and dogtags, dancing to entertain a group of children. Perhaps most bizarrely for a band which is supposed to be about the music rather than the image, Albarn began a 2001 acceptance speech for Best Dance Act with:

"F*** the music,’ going on to say, ‘See this symbol? It’s the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Bombing one of the poorest countries in the world is wrong. You’ve got the voice, use it." A focus on the fundamentals of the music was a characteristic of modernist music, and The Gorillaz are about a decade too late for that bandwagon. In postmodern music, the cultural image surrounding the music, which reverberates through film, television, and other media, is all that matters. With star personae, technically innovative graphic arts and a pseudo-political voice, it looks like The Gorillaz have got all bases covered.

Reject False Icons
Having fronted Blur in the 90s, Albarn knows better than most about the superficiality of fandom. Screaming audiences have become commonplace since Beatlemania in the 60s, and this has accelerated, leading to groups created in music bosses’ boardrooms along the principles of ‘image now, music later’. The Gorillaz’ slogan, Reject False Icons, appears to confront this trend; challenging the audience to care about the music, rather than the performer. This is quite a feat for former fans of Blur, or fans of any other musicians who represent themselves, as the audience’s pleasure in identifying with musical icons – the essence of conventional fandom – is swept away. For generations Marxists have critiqued the way Capitalism commodifies popular culture, packaging desirable social identities in purchasable pop acts; Albarn’s role in The Gorillaz reinforces their argument: he is lead vocalist, but not front man, identities which are usually one and the same.

The Gorillaz’ virtual identities – including a 10-year-old Japanese guitar prodigy (Noodle) and a Satan-loving ex-convict (Murdoc) – appeals to audiences’ interest in the fluidity and diversity of identity popularised by Freud, in a playful, pleasurable way. This problematising of identity and reality, along with the band’s eclectic mix of hip-hop, punk and dub reggae genres, are prime characteristics of postmodernism, according to influential thinker Jean Francois Lyotard.

The ‘anything goes’ sensibility of postmodernism is certainly recognisable in The Gorillaz. Live artists perform alongside the animations; many contributors are simply ‘moonlighting’ in The Gorillaz alongside their roles in other bands (Shaun Ryder), solo acts (Neneh Cherry), films (Dennis Hopper) or equally anonymous masked acts (MF Doom). Whilst a fictional animated band might seem a shrewd move in an industry where bands are notorious for fall outs, diva demands and drink or drug problems, The Gorillaz website gives a full run down of the band members’ trials and tribulations. Murdoc, for example, has been in prison for ripping off a Mexican whorehouse, Noodle is one of 23 children trained as part of an elite military team, and good natured front man 2D is constantly battling bullying from Murdoc.

So if ‘anything goes’ in the postmodern world, who’s to say what’s good and what’s bad? Money. Here is where the postmodernists and Marxists differ. For the postmodernists, in the absence of any aesthetic criteria, profit becomes the criteria of worth. For the Marxists, such mass appeal is exactly the opposite, a marker of cultural triviality.

Performance
In their music videos, The Gorillaz always appear as fully animated characters, conforming to all the conventions of the medium, including scenes where they are playing instruments and others where they are acting out a story. The artists collaborating with The Gorillaz, however, are often ‘disembodied’ in the music videos; De la Soul appear on screens in ‘Feel Good Inc.’, and Shaun Ryder appears as a decapitated head in ‘Dare’. Such representations serve playfully to question the concept of realism, as the cartoons become more fully rounded characters than those depicted using photographic realism.
This technique was reversed in the band’s recent live performances, where the musicians remained in shadows and the collaborating artists took to the spotlight at the front of the stage. Until November 2005, the musicians always played from behind the curtain, enigmatic enough to generate cult interest and providing music fans a unique selling point to demarcate The Gorillaz in a genre-flooded market.

For five nights in November, The Gorillaz revealed themselves, in a series of highly publicised gigs at the Manchester Opera House. This event, trailing the Manchester International Festival of film, theatre, visual arts and science in 2007, challenged further the nature of what The Gorillaz actually is. Until now, they have been an anonymous band, playing popular music from behind the mask of some animated characters. At the Opera House, a setting known for high cultural theatrical performances, The Gorillaz played in person, albeit in shadows, to a packed auditorium, where the audience sat down.

The performance featured the band, two choirs and a set of violinists and cellists; a total of 80 musicians including guest appearances from Shaun Ryder, Ike Turner, De la Soul and Roots Manuva. Rather than a traditional support act at a live gig, a big screen played a comical animation, and two life size puppets of Murdoc and 2D MC’d. The programme was made up of four prints of Hewlett’s artwork and a letter of introduction from the Festival director, Alex Poots. This spectacle of popular music and performance drawn from an eclectic mix of genres and visual arts, in the beautiful architecture of the Opera House, and the context of an international arts festival, blurred the boundaries between what we might understand as high culture and popular culture in the contemporary arts.

Identity
Do The Gorillaz really exist at all? There are musicians who play, but they remain nameless, and more importantly in the visually-dominated twenty-first century, image-less. There are cartoons projected onto giant screens, but we all know cartoons can’t play music, however accustomed modern audiences are to suspending disbelief to enter fictional narrative worlds. The Gorillaz conduct their own interviews – Albarn claims that the group don’t like it when he speaks for them – and when they win awards, they accept with fully animated acceptance speeches. So surely the band does exist in their own right – how could a fictional band win ‘Best Group’ at the 2005 European MTV awards?
Whilst the characters can’t be matched to the musicians like-for-like, there are some obvious similarities. Lead singer 2D visually resembles lead vocalist and co-creator Damon Albarn. American hip-hopper turned drummer Russel may represent the original producer of the band Dan Nakamura, and guitarist Noodle may be influenced by Miho Hatori. Visually at least, bassist Murdoc seems to have no real-world referent.

But it may be exactly this ambiguity of identity that appeals to fans of The Gorillaz, as increased cultural fragmentation has led to the consideration of the self as socially constructed and subject to change, rather than ‘fixed’. The Gorillaz’ primary target audience (late teens and twentysomethings) are the demographic group which experience perhaps the greatest changes in cultural identity, in many cases ‘trying on’ different cultural personae, complete with different styles of dress and interests in music. Such a transformation is evident in Albarn himself; he has metamorphasised from a retro-tracksuited attention-seeking Britpop heartthrob to an unlikely popstar, complete with growing waistline and receding hairline, hiding in the shadows. In The Gorillaz, however, looks don’t matter. And for those listening to their CD, or watching Hewlett’s animations in their latest video, whether The Gorillaz really exist doesn’t really matter either.

So are The Gorillaz Postmodern?
The Gorillaz are arguably an expression of postmodern culture. Sociologically, they use the media of information and communication technology to critique the marketing practices of the music industry, whilst marketing themselves. How ironic.

Psychologically, they illustrate how audiences enjoy the hybridity of cultural forms and genres, and respond to the fluidity of identity represented, accepting and adapting to the new relationships of fandom between artists and audiences. They blur the boundaries of high and popular culture, once considered fixed, by placing popular music in a high cultural context just as the great surreal artist Marcel Duchamp might place a urinal in an art gallery. Philosophically, they pose questions around the nature of representation, performance and existence, as they play with modes and expressions of realism.

But as The Gorillaz attempt to transcend classification, perhaps it’s pointless to pigeonhole them into the label of ‘postmodern’. In many ways they are, and in many ways they are not. For the casual listener, they are another band playing catchy tunes with a sometimes pseudo-political voice. But for the real fan, who in being a fan of The Gorillaz has to come to terms with what ‘being a fan’ actually means, The Gorillaz offers much more than just good fun.