We don’t cover music news on this site, but in the case of the Gorillaz, we’re willing to make an exception. Why? Well, because the Gorillaz are both the musical machinations of Damon Albarn and the characters created with Jamie Hewlet, co-creator of Tank Girl, and almost everyone who has been following the Gorillaz to some capacity knows that they are the only major concept band to be putting out hit albums. That’s right — with every Gorillaz album comes a new story about the band itself, as illustrated in the various music videos and online shorts.
So in case you haven’t been following the story so far, here is a brief summary of what you missed: After the success of Demon Days, the band split up due to bass player Noodle’s death while filming “El Manana” (see: end of the video), which itself had a fair amount of controversy surround it. Murdoc (guitar) claimed that the event was staged and that Noodle wanted to leave the band for a while, but there was no way to prove this and Kong Studios (the Gorillaz home) began to fall apart after she left. 2D (lead singer) disappeared to “become an actor or a model” and Russel Hobbes (drums) left to “[stitch] together his taxidermy army of undead animals.”
Murdoc, however — despite claiming that the event was staged — fell into a depression and attempted to hunt down Noodle to no avail. He claimed that he traveled to Hell in order to find her, but it was later revealed that he was just drunk a lot. However, he did manage to find a sample of her DNA, which he then used to create a cyborg clone of Noodle, dubbed Cyborg Noodle. It was then revealed that the destruction of Kong Studios was Murdoc’s fault as well, as he burned the studio down for insurance money in order to help him pay back a group known only as “the Black Cloud”, who he sold fake weapons to. However, he found and claimed Plastic Beach for his own (which itself is a giant floating pile of rubbish), and he, Cyborg Noodle and 2D (who had been captured by a new villain named the Boogie Man and brought to Plastic Beach for unknown reasons) record the new album. They then leave the island to recruit the various collaborators at some point, where they are pursued by Bruce Willis and the Boogie Man.
We later additionally learned that the real Noodle, now sporting an Oni mask (whose origin was never truly revealed) and facial scarring, is alive and that Russel, in his own search for Noodle, wound up swimming the entire way to Plastic Beach, ingesting pollution and toxic waste on the way and ultimately becoming a giant. Murdoc, 2D, Cyborg Noodle and the album collaborators return to the island while Russel and Noodle find each other in the sea, and the entire story all wound up in a never resolved showdown on Plastic Beach, as detailed in the storyboarded-but-never-produced video for “Rhinestone Eyes”, which featured pirate battles galore and the reuniting of the band against the dread arrival of the Boogie Man on Plastic Beach.
(If you want to know what happened before Demon Days, I’d suggest reading the Gorillaz biography “Rise of the Ogre”, which all the above quotes are taken from. That is, if you can find it for less than $500. It’s quite an entertaining read.)
Of course, now we have the video released today (seen above) from the Gorillaz and Converse, entitled “Do Ya Thing” and featuring a collaboration between the Gorillaz, Andre 3000 and James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem. And what does the video have? Note: I suppose these are all “spoilers”: 2D waking up in the Gorillaz’ London flat, with Noodle fast asleep in bed and Murdoc just as grumpy as ever (and seen recording a new Murdoc On The Wire). The Boogie Man sits downstairs without any conflict, and a new character (played by Andre 3000, assumedly) is hanging out everywhere. Oh, and the Gorillaz are getting evicted.
Continued belowYou would assume all of the events of Plastic Beach was just a dream, but then we see the crashed cop car from the “Stylo” video outside, Russel as a giant sleeping on the roof and Noodle’s flying island of death from “El Manana” anchored to the house, floating off in the distance.
So what happened? In Murdoc’s radio show, he reveals that Plastic Beach was a place where things happened (and he admits that he destroyed it), but there’s still a fair deal of questions as to what exactly happened between “Rhinestone Eyes” and “Do Ya Thing.”
Your guess is as good as mine, but ah, who cares! New Gorillaz music and Gorillaz music video!
