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Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach: Gorillaz and the Future

2012; UMR ESPACE et UMR LISST; Volume: 14; Linguagem: Inglês

10.4000/trans.577

1778-3887

Michael Larson,

Cultural Studies and Postmodernism

The music and artwork of Gorillaz have raised questions surrounding “the future” since the group’s formation. I categorize the themes of each of the three phases of Gorillaz’s production as follows : Phase One : Millennial Tension, Phase Two : End Times, Phase Three : The Overload. Gorillaz first phase faces the new millennium at the onset of a future already in decay, paying for the dead dreams of progress. The first phase of Gorillaz coincides with the turn of the millennium, what was to have been “the future.” But we find a landscape of environmental devastation, disease, famine, and expanding ghost towns. Phase two coincides with the “war on terror,” and Gorillaz portentously ask if we are “the last living souls” as the struggle to hold onto hope proves difficult. Phase three marks Gorillaz arrival on Plastic Beach, a riff on the gyres of garbage mounting in our oceans. The pressing theme is about holding on to love and desire in the face of world wreckage. Throughout this arc, the Gorillaz project thematically illuminates the anxiety and despair of our age through lyrical motifs and the story of the fictional band’s escapades, maintaining this sense of anxiety and tension while reaching for utopian promise in the dystopian night. Any possible future, it seems, must be built in the face of precariousness and catastrophe. The Gorillaz project expresses a utopian imagination in the midst of the dystopian potential of the present. I situate Gorillaz music and presentation in a critical, though aporetic, utopianism which seeks transformation by incorporating the harsh realities of the present. Plastic Beach emerges as a stage for the imagination of new creations and possibilities.