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Gorillaz in Our Midst by C. Bottomley The idea of masks is underappreciated in American music. Perhaps it's because modern life is complicated enough without rock stars going Jekyll & Hyde on us. Randy Newman sang about short people and now he can't go near a dwarf-tossing competition. Kiss are touted as purveyors of a painted leer, but the only thing they're disguising is how much of a joke they've become. So that means that every time I turn on "music television" - not the two esteemed channels that belong to the Viacom company for which I work, of course - I'm tempted to turn off again. Because everyone is trying to impress me with their earnestness. Except for Janet Jackson. She's just trying to remind me that she's just as good as she was 10 years ago. Everybody else is keeping it real, even if it takes several hours at the hairdressers to get a perfectly tousled look that signifies trouble, a la the anonymous blondes in Lifehouse and Fuel. At least Keith Richards wields the scissors himself and is willing to face the painful reality of the result. But there's only so much I can bear to digest about someone finding love, waking up in a cold bed, hanging on a moment, are bent (but not that kind of bent), come as you are wanna take you higher I'm a survivor blah blah blah. Give me fiction. Give me masks. Give me deception. Give me lies. In short, give me art. Jamie Hewlett is trying to oblige. Anybody who used to stand on tiptoe to reach the top shelf at their local comic shop might remember the English artist as the creator of the profane Tank Girl, a sort of Judge Dredd with cuter legs and a kangaroo chum. The book became a rather painful 1995 movie starring Lori Petty, and Hewlett's been in hiding ever since - you would too if your kangaroo were played by Ice-T. But he's since put ink to cel and reinvented himself as an animated bass player named Murdoc, the brains behind Gorillaz, the only working cartoon band currently in existence. Gorillaz ain't no Banana Splitz. Hewlett has drawn an entire world around his characters. To step inside their reality, wander through the band's excellent Web site or a related "fan site" that is just as dubious in its professionalism. Assisting Murdoc in Gorillaz are lead singer 2D, preteen Japanese guitarist Noodle, and drummer Russel, a public schoolboy haunted by dead homiez who become corporeal to bust a few rhymes. There's a real band dynamic, too. According to their press, Murdoc and 2D's love/hate relationship is not unlike that of Noel and Liam Gallagher. Since inadvertently blinding 2D in a car crash, Murdoc describes his front-poppet as "so dosed up on painkillers and suppressants that you can actually hear white noise if you get too close to his ear hole." 2D's black-eyed beauty inspired Murdoc to form a band. Magnificent Seven-style, he next discovered Russel working in a London record shop. Noodle responded to their ad for a guitarist by folding herself into a FedEx envelope. Now the quartet have released a great single called "Clint Eastwood" that actually lives up to their hype by sounding like Blur's Damon Albarn singing over an Augustus Pablo dub line with Del Tha Funkee Homosapien dropping quantum physics along the way. Wait a minute, that's because it is Damon Albarn. And, yeah, that's Del, too. Albarn shared a London apartment with Hewlett and agreed to the ruse of being the singer for his made-up band. "Pop stars rarely live up to expectations," he told Q magazine while I cried "Amen." "Ultimately, they all crumble into regular fragile human beings at the end of the day. Gorillaz is different. They'll never crumble into fragile human beings." The beats come courtesy of trip-hoppist Dan "the Automator" Nakamura, who's never met a concept he didn't try to take higher. He helped Kool Keith build the Dr. Octogon horrorcore rap persona, and in 1999 teamed up with Prince Paul and donned the world's worst false moustache to form the Handsome Boy Modeling School. At the rate he's going, Nakamura could turn into music's very own Lon Chaney. With Hewlett providing the graphics, the band never looks anything less than cool - even when fighting off an army of apes in the "Clint Eastwood" video. Nakamura has also enlisted A-list musical help from the Tom Tom Club, Cibo Matto's Miho Hatori and even Buena Vista Social Club sage Ibrahim Ferrer. It's certainly a far cry from the Archies, the first illustrated popsters to hit No. 1. The Archies were a late-'60s studio group created by Monkees Svengali Don Kirshner to provide the tunes for a Saturday-morning cartoon series. Much like Albarn/2D's doobie-doobie Dada lyrics, "Sugar Sugar" was dumb without credentials, even if it was written by the same guy who penned "River Deep Mountain High." "Clint Eastwood" has gone top 10 in England, where the music hall tradition still lets its heroes hide behind funny facial hair and costumes (see the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band sleeve for more on this subject). But it's unlikely to happen in the U.S. While 'N Sync are quick to turn themselves into comic books and toys, it has more to do with infiltration marketing than mental stimulation. This spring, for instance, we have to put up with the neutering of Josie & the Pussycats. Sly & the Family Stone at a slumber party (Sly was locked in the bathroom), Josie & the Pussycats were created by Hanna-Barbera, the team who first found fame with their work on ... The Archies. Dressed in form-fitting tiger-skin outfits, Josie, Melody, and Valerie were as much about solving crimes as they were about rocking out and putting hair on pre-pubescent fanboy chests. The group played sellout gigs in space in 1972, despite never landing a hit in the top 40. In the film, les girls are sadly three-dimensional, played by Rachael Leigh Cook, Rosario Dawson, and Tara Reid. While the latter clotheshorse is best known the fiancée of TRL's Carson Daly, the plot finds this Blink-182 with pierced navels discovering they're being used to control the youth of America with tuneful fluff. The story line wasn't terribly compelling when it was first used in 1967's Privilege (buffs will recall Manfred Mann's Paul Jones as the rock god). But that doesn't mean it's any less prescient. Hold on...I think I hear Justin Timberlake telling me to tell you that perhaps no one's as sincere as they seem after all. And to stop now. |
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