For Damon Albarn, its all a blur

With the new Gorillaz album coming out and with their impending Coachella headlining, it seems like a good time to reflect on Damon Albarn's musical contributions with his two successful acts, Blur and Gorillaz. I was recently relating to a friend how I though that Blur is an awesome band, possibly in a league with other seminal British acts like Radiohead, and even share similar themes of 21st century alienation and paranoia, yet were simple too obviously British and therefore not cool enough to break big in America. This implies that Americans have a fairly strict sense of what is cool, and that to embrace such an English aesthetic like Blur is to fall outside the boundaries of that cool.

Radiohead, on the other hand, don't seem to come lyrically from any geographical point; Thom Yorke is singing purely from his own disenchanted psyche, his own personal wonderland. Yet this leads to an inhumanness to the music, whereas Blur is all Essex flesh and blood, and therefore vulnerable to the scrutiny of American cool. Their masterpiece, Parklife, is a concept album ABOUT being English, among other things, and haunts the same emotionally desolate territory as OK Computer and Dark Side of the Moon, but because of the specificity of where the music comes from, carries a fun exoticness with it, as if your musical journey is both emotional AND physical.

If this was ever a problem for Damon Albarn, he has definitely rectified it with Gorillaz, for better or worse. With this group it appears Albarn has reverse engineered American cool, or at least built a sturdy copycat, made up of spare hip-hop beats, smoggy ambient drones and the occasional folky guitar strum. Like a miniature British invasion, Gorillaz is once again selling us our own music, and obviously having more success than any successful American rock band right now. Gone are the British doldrums of Albarn's parklife, replaced with fiery narratives of America's impending doom. But in Blur it was obviously Albarn was really LIVING those doldrums, whereas now he's simply the wizard behind the curtain, a ghost in the machine, safe from the turmoil he's mapping out. And of course we eat it up, our most narcissistic impulses being stroked, for who wants to hear the Great American Novel more than America? While Yorke is suspended in his psyche, his own world, Albarn is suspended in the music machine he's built, made from parts not his own, but if he doesn't do it, who will?

While Blur was personal and local, Gorillaz is international (or American, but in this setting America's devastation is the world's) and has our hero acting more as a central nervous system than human, simply holding it all together. If you can't live up to a standard of cool, you can always reinvent yourself, but its hard to keep it all in focus. Keep it sickly!