Filed under: design of a decade, lists, music | Tags: 2001, damon albarn, gorillaz
[I should have written this post in February. Must do better, self!]
1. Gorillaz, Clint Eastwood
The most surprising thing to me about Gorillaz, Damon Albarn’s conceptual animated hip-hop project, was that I didn’t actually hear about it until I saw the Clint Eastwood video on MTV. At the time I was a huge Blur fan, a pretty big Cibo Matto fan, and hung out on a lot of Britpop mailing lists. And nobody once mentioned that Damon Albarn and Miho Hatori were starting an animated hip-hop side project with Del The Funkee Homosapien and the guy that made Tank Girl. Nobody. So I was dumbfounded when it happened, but also amazed.
The great thing about Clint Eastwood in retrospect is that it led me, and a lot of others, out of indie-snobbery. In the early nineties everybody from Giggles to Kirsty MacColl threw guest rappers on their songs, but that was a brief trend and by millennium’s end rap-rock crossovers had grown much more macho. (Linkin Park’s debut album was released eight months before the Gorillaz album, for instance.) Not to say that Gorillaz was especially feminized, but no one else in hip-hop (or even in modern rock, for that matter) would let a woman sing lead on a single, never mind getting Tina Weymouth to sing backup. And actually it’s Noodle, Hatori’s animated alter-ego, who saves the day at the end of the Clint Eastwood video. So, maybe there was a hint of progress there.
Clint Eastwood is also total stoner music, something I was pretty oblivious to at the time of its release, despite Albarn’s languid, congested delivery and all the references to sunshine in a bag. Actually, the whole album is pretty trippy; from the chanting opener Re-Hash to the moody dub of Dracula to the very concept of an animated band, Gorillaz was targeted at the potheads in a way that totally escaped my then-straightedge ways. (Though I suppose marijuana is the most basic common ground between otherwise divergent modern rock and hip-hop communities.)
The idea worked. In the US Clint Eastwood got up to #3 on the modern rock chart at #6 on the dance club chart. It was also Albarn’s first appearance on the American Top 40; the song peaked at #32. (The follow-up, the Hatori-sung 19-2000, would get up to #34, and their biggest hit would be a few years later with the #22 Feel Good Inc.) And while in retrospect I don’t necessarily think it’s the best song of that year, it’s still a great one.
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