GalacticMu

In some seriously old news, Gorillaz is amazing.

Sometimes all it takes to backhand some sense into me is a little drivin’ around in the old car, listening to some tunes.  And it hits me: this is a fucking fake band!  I’m no rube - I don’t think cartoons are really playing the music - but luckily Halcyon was in the car and responded to my dumbfounded “This is a FAKE BAND!” with understanding.  His answer: “It’s like Idoru, I know.”

It helps to break things down to their base components: what we have is a massively successful (with multiple top 10 hits in the US, UK, Japan and Australia) band represented by cartoons.  Not just successful: uniquely excellent.  Not derivative.  With some of the best music videos made in the last decade.

And they’re cartoons.  They aren’t real.  They aren’t intended to be real.  It is rock, made rockstarless.  What in conversation seems a gimmick in reality gains a gravitational pull that defies grokking - people don’t care.  People aren’t listening to their radios going, “No, fuck this, who are the band members?  Who is playing the drums?”  My mother (truth) loves Gorillaz and when I told her there was only one known band member and they were all - whoever they were - represented as cartoon characters, she didn’t blink.  She wanted to know what Noodle looked like.  Admittedly this is the woman that cultivated me, so such a reaction has biological precedence, but still.

This doesn’t even venture into the delight of seeing Jamie Hewlett continue to make art.  As a girl half-raised on Tank Girl (comically speaking - the other half was raised by Elf Quest and Silver Sable - fuck you, let’s take it outside), Hewlett is solely responsible for my having crushes on kangaroos and now monkeys.

Don’t look at me like that.