Jumpsuits & Teleporters

Guest Review: A Live Performance by the Gorillaz

This post was written by Jonathan Yoerger. We saw the Gorillaz live at the Patriot Center in Fairfax, VA on October 11, 2010. This is his review of the experience.

The Gorillaz have re-written pop-stardom. Now, live shows are projected and the human musicians are nothing more than silhouettes; guest artists are placed in the spotlight rather than the creators. The author is not dead, just in hiding. As writer Andy Gately comments, “the band’s overall desire to stay out of the spotlight and shift the emphasis to their music… Throughout the film, the group’s disgust with fame, celebrity culture, and the pop idol hype machine bubbles to the surface through a wry comment here, a stinging barb there. The portrait that emerges is one of a collective of like-minded artists who are adept at meme warfare and are having a blast using the toys of our image-driven culture to both critique and enrich it in the very ways they see it as impoverished, both spiritually and imaginatively.”

Zero in on the aesthetic mastermind behind the whole project, Jamie Hewlett, who planned all the animations and visuals to play on the current international tour, Escape to Plastic Beach. It was the animated characters that walked on stage first. A tour-de-force walked about, but the stage was projected and the band was animated in 3D. Chaos took place, the band got in a fight, the performance was doomed until… Boom! A quiet orchestral bit took over, a distant boat horn blew, and the story of Gorillaz’s new Plastic Beach began. The real musicians took their place humbly below the gargantuan screen, backlit and sillhouetted by block letters: G-O-R-I-L-L-A-Z.

Credit: Andrew Markowitz (via).

In a sense, the visuals were too good. The audience forgot to look back at the live band. A giant Philip Guston-esque hand would flash on the screen, as blood red ink marks would take its place. A choir of animated childish heads sang the kids selection from “Dirty Harry”. More amazing was a video in which the screen stayed yellow for the entirety of the song, in the final stanzas the yellow went white and a bottle dropped into view. Collectively everyone realized that for the past three minutes they had watched beer being poured down a sink and had not even known what they were watching. At this point, the familiar was gone. We were in Hewlettʼs world.

The collaboration with Middle Eastern musicians and their aesthetics resulted in a moving east-meets-west breakdown that accomplished more social change than a political protest. Unfortunately, old videos were used occasionally, stealing the suspense of the linear experience. But when soul singer Bobby Womack dragged a stool on stage and sang his traumatic ballad underneath a screen of Vietnam wartime scraps being pushed into the Pacific Ocean (see above video) the real-life met the fiction of the Gorillaz making their own Plastic Beach. It was not a concert, it was not even an experience—it was a nightmare, it was a war, it was a toy box, an other world. And just like the world we live in, it was fleeting.