Truth is Stranger than Fiction: Demon Days at 20

"The war is over" said the speaker with the flight suit on / Maybe to him I'm just a pawn so he can advance. Remember when I used to dance? All I wanna do is dance."

How did rock music die? Who killed it? Why am I writing off all the moderately successful pop bands that think they're rock because they have an electric guitar? All great questions. All great questions with multitudes of answers, but one thing is apparent: sometimes there’s a bright, shining light of a star and sometimes they come in unexpected packages. 

Being a rock music fan born in the 2000s is accepting you missed each and every good or great album the genre has produced. I’m not a pessimist about rock music - I don’t think it’s dead, I think it’s dormant -  but I would also be lying if there isn’t a prickle of jealousy that shoots through knowing there has been next to nothing to show for a genre I love so deeply in the years I’ve been alive. The most you get is a half-assed release from a legacy artist that is just above a coked-out 80s disaster but far beneath any truly classic work, and the genre's titans seem to fade faster each year. Rock music, for as long as I’ve been alive, has been on its last legs. There has been nothing that stands the test of time in my years… unless we’re talking about Demon Days.

An album like Demon Days is once in a lifetime for sure, but I don’t think I can name one rock album of the past 20 years more important, genre-defining, or as brave. When you see an album like Demon Days against the backdrop of its contemporaries, with the foresight we have now, it's hard to ever see it as an underdog contender. When you look at rock music of 2005 you see heavy hitters releasing, but each release is marred by three factors: being done by a legacy artist, a rock revalist group, or turning towards pop-punk [empathsis on pop]. Releases that are good, but nothing that screams rock music in the truest sense of the word, something that pushes boundries and takes risks without fear of backfire. It's safe, it's sanitized, it's like any other year of rock music since. Demon Days stands apart from this generalization. It's not safe. It takes steps artists with much more to lose would never dare step. It's perfectly aware of its vision and taking it to the extreme. It harkens back to when The Stones made Exile on Main Street or The Beatles with Sgt. Pepper - albums that defined the genre without worrying about how well they fit in with popular trends of the time. In some ways, yes, I am calling Demon Days the Sgt. Peppers of its day, but in others I would argue it’s much better. I know, another young kid here to tell you Gorillaz is a stroke of genius, but it's the rock band of my generation and I get to mythologize them as much as I want! If I have to hear one more bullshit claim that glam metal was a genre with any merit, you can sit and listen to the fact that a hip-hop infused passion project with cartoons that are vehemently anti-war is, at the very least, some of the best rock music we have today. 

To understand the importance of this piece of work, and perhaps Gorillaz as a whole, we must first understand the state of rock music when they were introduced to the world: pretty goddamn bad. Rock music became too safe after its first few decades. While proclaiming it would never grow old, it found itself hiding in old tropes and tired ideas, lacking any innovation to push anything forward. The genre was so dominant for so long because it was timeless, its own loose and undefinable lines making it so nothing could grow all that stale. Different sounds and ideas blending together into one great, amorphous fact of rock music. There was always something moving forward, a new idea that blasted on all cylinders of success, people were willing to be challenged in some ways they would never be now. In the late 90s this was ruined, in those years had rock become a sanitized product that was brought “back to its roots.” The problem came right there: there was no artist chewing their way out of the cage of mediocrity, out of the idea that rock music was to be one thing. Rock music was so successful for its blend of different genres, how each artist came with a rich and unique tapestry of influences pulling from each and every facet of music. Look at your titans of the early 90s rock movement: Nirvana went back to punk, but spun their own webs with it. They pulled from the political rock of Neil Young, the attitude of Johnny Rotten, and the power of the trio like Cream. They didn't sound like any of these artists, because they took the ideas and made them part of their new ones. Oasis was the same - The Beatles influence was so strong Noel Gallagher once said they were more than a band, they were a way of life - but they had new ideas. The lyrics were not comparable to anyone else at the time, there was an edge to the music, there was something new and worthy within how they infused what they longed to go back to. But, when you get bands like Creed, or Nickleback, or Daughtry you have people that long to go back with no direction on why. They don't challenge anything, which is fine, but when the genre became stale, it became barren. The shift to R&B, pop divas, hip-hop greats - rock and roll stopped progressing and its offspring carried its torch.

In 2001, a disillusioned Damon Albarn and struggling comic artist Jamie Hewlett would give reaction to this shift in rock music. As early as 1995, Albarn had been struggling with the idea of being a public persona. Being the frontman of hugely successful Britpop band Blur, he was treated in the way we see all too commonly in teen stars. He was prepackaged, never taken seriously, stuck with trying to be a good figure yet ultimately remaining a deeply flawed person. When writing Blur’s 1995 album The Great Escape, this came to a head. His lyrics were all about the stupidity of fame, sexual perversions, every kind of person he seemed to hate, chief amongst them himself. No one seemed to acknowledge this fact though, he wrapped his fears in the same candy-coating he had been for nearly 5 years, yet anyone who was actually listening could tell there was something deeply, if not disturbingly, wrong with his engagement to fame. Two years later he would go on to say Britpop, the genre that he helped popularize and define, was “dead”, and switched to a more alternative and experimental sound that lended to Blur’s successful self titled 1997 album. By the time the album was released, he was a heroin-addicted, ex-teenybopper star who had effectively ruined every relationship in his personal and professional life. He had moved in with Jamie Hewlett, the creator of Tank Girl and contributor to Deadline magazine, someone who also didn’t particularly like him. The idea for Gorillaz comes from this bachelor pad, when the duo would sit in front of the television and realize everything was so mind-numbing and pointless. 

 "If you watch MTV for too long, it's a bit like hell – there's nothing of substance there. So we got this idea for a virtual band, something that would be a comment on that." - Jamie Hewlett, 2010

Suddenly, cutting through the noise of the underinspired slop being trafficked through "butt-rock" stations, you had a glimmer of hope shining through. On an MTV that once felt like hell, there was suddenly an idea that you could mine something from. The sounds incorporated from the music were a hodge-podge of the popular music of the time. A certain indie-alternative sleeze was sheened on top of the permentaly strung-out vocals, the electronic sounds that never made the music feel manufacted but aided in it's attempt to question the state of music as is, a hip-hop backbeat that helped the music feel modern in a

The video of Clint Eastwood

timeless way. The band's first big single really helps highlight all these points, Clint Eastwood, 24 years later, still feels like a fresh and unique twist on so many sub-genres. Del the Funky Homosapiens verses being lore-heavy yet not alinating, the repitation of the seemingly meaningless I got a sunshine in a bag / It's coming on. It's a phenomenal introduction to a band, one it's hard to believe was truly the world's first. Their first release cast a very large brush stroke, but what became apparent from their early days was that there was something special within the idea of Gorillaz. The first album acted as a test-trial in some ways, seeing how this crackpot idea from two dissipated artists upset with the landscape they were being forced to navigate would land with the average listener. Especailly the crowds that had become too comfortable with the new, safe sounds of rock and roll. What set Gorillaz apart during this time was being created from the idea of rebelling against the norm, infusing a stale genre with new sounds, ideas, and stories: rock music was shocked back from its brink in such a way that it hadn’t seen since the world was tuned into Smells Like Teen Spirit. 2005 would see the band “re-unite” for a follow up, creating what can only be understood as the most important rock album of the past twenty years. Demon Days, at first glance, is an incredibly well-written, produced, and conceived piece of music and storytelling that blends all the things great about the first record into one of the most air-tight sequel albums in history. Under the glossy sheen of a danceable, catchy album, however, you have a just as tight commentary on capitalism, war and its affects on children, the environment, the humanity lost when silence prevails over speaking up. And it’s delivered to you via a distorted vocal from a cationic blue-haired…. guy? Well, yes. 

The fictional band and their creators [R to L]: Noodle [guitar], 2D [vocals], Russel [drums], Murdoc [bass]; [center] Damon Albarn [musican] and Jamie Hewlett [artist]

There was something to be proven with Demon Days. Jamie Hewlett admits that one of the factors behind making a second album at all was to showcase that the idea wasn’t a gimmick, that there was genuine merit to be had when it came to Gorillaz and their messaging.The album cycle started with the tagline Reject False Icons, with listeners

encouraged to graffiti the phrase over advertisements and

celebrities. The whole premise of Gorillaz was centered around this idea in some ways, to take the importance of celebrity out of the equation of art, with the characters acting as the stars and Albarn and Hewlett as side-characters in the grand scheme. The album cover itself also plays with the idea of identity core to the band, an homage to The Beatles final album Let It Be. In the book A Brief History of Album Covers by Jason Draper, he describes the decision to invoke The Beatles reference as deliberate, invoking the idea that The Beatles ended up having to caricatured themselves, just as Gorillaz was doing now to rock stars of the past and present. The idea of being bought and sold comes up a lot throughout the album, echoed particularly loud on what can only be

described as one of the greatest singles ever released, Feel Good Inc. See, a good song is a song that is good upon first listen, sounds nice and goes down easy. A great song is one where the longer it sits, the more you listen, the more you think about it, the petals start to open, revealing parts that are so good they’ve slipped between the cracks. Then there’s Feel Good Inc. A song so popular it was played on mainstream pop radio. An experimental, electronic, hip-hop fusion track that starts with loud abrasive laughing and should only really work in context of it’s album, was being played alongside Mariah Carey and Kelly Clarkson. A song with a lyric that focused on isolation, cult like mentality, and featured Damon Albarn, infamously horrible on American charts, scoring a Top 40 hit for beat-boxing through a megaphone. I cannot stress enough how insane this is. 

The song capitalizes off the success of what made Clint Eastwood resonate so well: the mix of alternative music, catchy hooks, and a sprinkle of hip-hop. Feel Good Inc. starts with a hearty laugh cutting through the silence, catching the attention of the listener better than any riff, lyric, or words ever could. Adds a layer of mystic around the song, while not making it seem overly serious, before immediately you're catapulted into Damon Albarn beat-boxing. He works on a beat that conjures the idea of the McDonald's jingle in a reference to the album's themes of rejecting the idea of commercialism that had begun to seep into music. His vocal is distorted, through a megaphone, creating distance even further then there already was. He sings the line, So while you fill the streets, it's appealing to see and you won't get undercounted 'cause you're damned and free, bringing attention to the people who ignore everything going wrong in an attempt to save themselves and not be dared to care for the collective. The pre-chorus lends to the familiar sounds of Albarn, a catchy hook taking place in a dreamy landscape, built around a nonsensical lyric that derives meaning from the literature around it: Windmill, windmill for the land, turn forever hand in hand. Albarn had referenced Animal Farm in the 1995 Blur song Country House, where he compares the hedonism within the house when counteracted with the idealistic setting (It’s like an animal farm, that’s the rural charm of the country) - he used with Feel Good Inc. calling back to the way George Orwell used windmills as a signal of totalitarian governments. De La Soul is then featured for perhaps one of the greatest collaborations of all time. Maybe it’s my love of the classic Me, Myself & I and old school hip-hop, but their inclusion here bridges the outlandish nature of Gorillaz with the fun and quirky sounds of De La Soul, and it works so beautifully. The original chorus becomes the backing track to be rapped over before a short instrumental break - one featuring the strumming of an acoustic guitar, adding yet another unexpected factor to such a modern song. 

The video for Feel Good Inc.

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The heart of Demon Days does not land with it’s genre bending, nor it’s diverse soundscape, not even that there isn’t a bad song nor verse through its fifty minute runtime. The risks don't end with the sonics of the album, they travel all the way through the core and message being delivered through the album: speaking out against the Iraq War and the people in power funding it.

Rock music is political music. Great rock music says something. It dares to say something. You don't become a rockstar by doing nothing, speaking for nobody, and letting a world that finds itself spiraling into a further and further into hell suffer in silence. Whether you speak to the political turmoil or lift up the youth living through your work, you are making a conscious and important choice that will forever inform peoples thoughts of the time. Each decade has pillars of the youth and political revolutions that were rockstars, people whose names are so synonymous with the public's engagement with this time they appear in history textbooks and remain touchstones of what an artist could do today. Joan Baez and John Lennon in the 1960s for their activism fueled by their fame, Neil Young and Roger Waters used their music to warn agaisnt the horrors of the

world. In the 1980s, artists like Bono carried the torch, and by the 1990s it was a dying breed, the artist who stands for something. Of course you had Eddie Vedder and Sinead O' Connor, but these people were written off time and time again when they did make statements, musical or otherwise. Gone were the days of that being an expected facet of rock music, actual rebellion and questioning of the powers that be. By the 2000s, one of the most turbulent and easily accessible decades to take a stand, it seemed that only one man did. What’s endlessly fascinating about Damon Albarn and his musical output is how he’s always been an outspoken and political person (being raised by hippies and all), but his early music doesn’t dive into that at all. He speaks to vignettes of British life, a tongue and cheek reference to mundanity and boredom with life, but never anything that would perk your ears or eyes to the horrors of the world outside his pop-music landscape.

Demon Days is his direct and razor sharp critique of the Iraq War and the people in power who funded it as it destroyed millions of lives. Green Day may have labeled George Bush as the American Idiot, but Gorillaz was there to dig their nails into the scab, daring to ask the world what exactly would be left if such imbeciles continued their bullshit.

The video for Dirty Harry

Dirty Harry has a backing vocal sung by a children's choir, who sing I need a gun to keep myself among the poor people burning in the sun / But they ain’t got a chance, I need a gun because all I want to do is dance. The video follows the groups virtual singer, 2-D, as he leads the children in a distractive sing-along after a helicopter crash. El Mañana is sung with a detached, melancholic vocal, Don’t stop the bud when it comes / It’s the dawn, you’ll see, money won’t get there / Ten years passed tonight, you’ll flee, with the accompanying visual being that of the band’s kid guitarist, Noodle, being killed in an act of brutal and unnecessary violence. Kids with Guns paints an image of innocence being co-opted by violence, Turning us into monsters, it's all desire. Whether taken as a critque of immature politicans or drafting is up to the listener. All these songs talk of the children who are often forgotten when wars commence. The ones who don’t understand what is happening, who will be conditioned to believe this uncertainty and terror is normal, and the ones who are killed as a result of these wars. Whose deaths are seen as tragedies, yet ones perceived as inevitable when in the pursuit of money. On Every Planet We Reach Is Dead, the opening line is I lost my leg like I lost my way, so no loose ends / Nothing to see me down, how are we going to work this out? and on O, Green World the chorus says I’m made of you and you of me. The environment is presented to the listener as people often are, being descrided as an extension of each and every person who speaks of it. Songs likeWhite Light and All Alone talk about vices fallen into by the common folk as the world seems to collapse. When looking back at Feel Good Inc., the town full of people who don't smile and ignore the rest of the world begins to feel less dystopian than it should. The album doesn't tell you war is bad. You know war is bad, whether you acknowledge it or not. It asks you to think of the long term effects transpiring that we'll have to live through. 

On Fire Coming Out of The Monkey's Head, a largely spoken word poem spoken by Dennis Hopper, introduces us to something the bridges the whole album together. The story of the Happyfolk worshipping a mountain named Monkey, living in blissful ignorance to violence and horrors of the world, until the Strangefolk come in to steal from the moutain, drilling holes into it, stealing from what was once upheld with so much respect. The ending lines There's nothing you believe you want / But where were you when it all came down on me? are directed to 'a little town in the USA'. As the other songs tackle each of these ideas with precision, the enviormental, immoral, and inhumane aspects of war, Fire Coming Out of the Monkey's Head gives you the option to chose your own answer to what it's referencing out of those. Is the mountain a discussion of Earth as a whole, how something that was once so beautiful and presevered is now being destroyed for selfish reasons? Is it a commentary on how innocent people are effected by the decisons of governments who steal from them in the name of war? Is it a meditation on colonization of indigenous land and the adverse affects that has on the world at large?

Reading reviews of the album from its release, people wrote Albarn off for being pretentious on the album, that his questions about the world were “corny, ranting, and hysterical.” The issue comes when looking back at the album five years later, ten years later, now twenty years later, he wasn’t saying anything that wasn’t true. In most other generations, a plea to peace with a simple acoustic guitar would suffice, or one great song that really encapsulated the anger felt by the powerless would be enough to be seen as a savior. But this was 2005. This was not a generation that would gain anything from someone pandering to ideas they already knew about the world. Why should someone with a platform - someone with a pseudo-mask to hide behind and nothing to lose - sit quietly and let the world live with its horrible decisions, never once touching protest in his art? When politicians wouldn’t listen to the people, they couldn’t really ignore the radio too, could they? As they justified death, violence, and destruction of poor and innocent people in pursuit of lining the pockets of the top 1%, never once having to think about who that affected as they knew their towers would protect them. There is no understanding to be offered if you can’t see how bad you are being screwed over by people who would treat you like dirt if it meant a drop of oil. If they kill others, why would they protect you? To be looked at and told you were in jeopardy and paying for a war that would never, ever benefit anyone - how do you find yourself in a moment where you want to help others understand something happening right before their eyes? Maybe someone made those songs, songs that pandered to these braindead lackeys, but that wasn’t what anyone who really had something to say was going to do. 

Why must Damon Albarn bend a knee to make everyone else more comfortable? Why must his ideas, again, get trapped under the expectations of other people who never took him seriously anyways? This was not by a hippie. This was not an album meant to appeal to others who had yet to realize the real world. 

When Albarn did picket in the streets with the people, he was viewed as a celebrity as opposed to a concerned and protesting citizen. It’s sad that the only way a critique could be leveled was through layers and layers of disposition, but it’s even worse that no one seemed

On the cover of The Sunday Review, 2003

to pick up on how important each facet of this

was. The experimentation that makes it feel as fresh today as it did back then, the commentaries wrapped up in a danceable beat, and, most importantly, that rock music will always be at its best when it is speaking to something. Still today we see a dissonance between considering Damon Albarn a genius of modern music. It’s odd. To create an album like Demon Days, from an idea like Gorillaz, he would’ve already had his ticket punched if this was a normal case. We still cower at his ideas being larger than life, his commentaries on the world that everyone else is afraid to make, the experimentation that doesn’t always pay off. If anything, he became the reigning star for his second decade rather seamlessly when most artists show the scars of changing times. The idea he’s not digestible gets in the way, he’s a pretentious asshole who is so aware of his talent you question at points how he ever has enough time to make so much work when he spends so much time praising his own mind. He is the rock star that is needed for this time: jaded, cocky, a bit too knowledgeable of what happens when everyone else just stops caring what can happen in a world that changes too fast. 

Damon Albarn was willing to give an aggressively 21st century answer to an aggressively 21st century problem. In response to a senseless and evil war in pursuit of oil, he begged the question: what Earth are you leaving behind? What will the children think as they grow up in this world? What effect will unchecked violence have on the humanity of the rest of the world? These aren't light questions - Demon Days isn't a light album. Then again, these are not easy times. Life was hard and getting harder. There’s something so dystopian about the fact that there can be no distinctly peaceful or direct answer to the atrocities being committed in the name of greed. There was nothing anyone could say that wasn’t ruminating on the destruction that comes when there is division and suffering being perpetrated.

However, the album ends with the title track, a positive note in a unique way. It's so hard for a good soul to survive / You can't even trust the air you breathe, 'cause Mother Earth wants us all to leave / When lies become reality you numb yourself with drugs and TV / Pick yourself up, it's a brand new day - don't burn yourself, turn yourself around to the sun. Demon Days isn't meant to scare the listener. Gorillaz was created to combat the loneliness that creeps in when it feels like the world aims for isolation over understanding. Demon Days offers that acknowledgement to those who are willing to listen, that humans simply aren’t built for the world they are forced to be living in. That fear, anger, disappointment, and seclusion are reactions to a world as opposed to vice versa. A commentary to the disillusioned youth that couldn’t bear to hear one more comment about the inevitability of violence against the world they were soon to inhabit. Pretentious. Dramatic. Overblown. And yet it still stands as the defining marker of a genre that became too scared to do anything it was originally built upon.

The rebellion of rock and roll was lost once the stars became aware of just how marketable they could be if they were silent. On the culture, on the war, on the world. If they said nothing, they didn't have to risk anything. Writer Angus Harrison wrote of Gorillaz standing as the great politcal artists of their time saying, "It makes sense in many respects for a world as ugly as ours can be, it would take cartoon characters to draw the real picture." It must not be lost on anyone that critiques of world governments came through the guise of a cartoon character, as they were easiest to accept from the mouth of someone who wasn't real. Afterall, they could take the risk - their existence was a risk. As I said, my life has been marked by the very slow, very sad dissapperence of genuine rock music. While most older folks can boast that they shared a world that was learning the lessons set into stone by thousands of albums through their life, I'm more than content with having Demon Days be the one that stands for mine.

When rock music became bastardized, it was a simple fix. All it took was a vision, effort, and a little bit of humanity delivered through rock’s most staged personas.

Damon and Co. performing the title track of Demon Days at the Apollo Theater in 2006: