At a time when pop music seems to be getting phonier every day, no one — not even Heidi Montag with her new plastic face and Triple-D’s — is more surreal than Grammy-winning electro group Gorillaz. They’re cartoons.
Formed in 1998 by Blur frontman Damon Albarn and “Tank Girl” comic co-creator Jamie Hewlett, Gorillaz insist on appearing only as the animated characters 2D (vocals and keyboards), Noodle (lead guitar, vocals), Russel (percussion) and green-skinned bassist/bandleader Murdoc Niccals. In concert, the musicians perform behind a screen on which their characters are projected.
On Tuesday, the band releases its third album, “Plastic Beach,” a quasi-concept album about a floating island of trash. Niccals — the cartoon, likely with the help of Hewlett — found time to further confuse us about the album and its epic collaborations.
Is Plastic Beach a real place?
I like to leave the whole thing a little misty in the mind of the listener. Imagine looking down a telescope at the end of the pier. Way off in the distance is a little island, green and pristine. From back here it looks like hope. At the moment it’s empty, it’s clean and it’s naive, but it is filling up with CDs, books, tires, rubble, boxes, folders, tanks, canoes, plastic packaging — everything’s just washing up, and spilling forth. Not even King Canute [the patron saint of Denmark] can turn back a tide like that.
What do the all-star guests bring?
They represent different elements of a story, like triggers. Snoop is the master of ceremonies, hosting the introduction. Bobby Womack is the oceanic voice of soul love and street politics. Mos Def is the sassy, hip New York rapper. Lou Reed is the wizened old New York curmudgeon.
Will any of them be animated in videos?
I don’t think there’s enough peyote in the world to make that happen. Still, you never know.
How was working with Lou Reed?
He ordered everyone out of the studio. Me, too. At one point, he even tried to have himself kicked out, but he’s smarter than that. I just waited until he was up and running, getting his groove on, and then I crawled back in, under the mixing desk where he couldn’t see.
Apparently Lou Reed is one of the only people to refuse to appear on “Sesame Street,” so it’s quite a coup that we got him on this. It was him or Oscar the Grouch. I think the best man won the job.
You’ve described “Stylo,” the first single, as “crack funk.” What’s that?
Crack funk is something I came up with after a few too many rum ’n’ cokes. Bobby Womack cut the theme of one of the greatest blaxploitation films ever made: “Across 110th Street.” This song definitely borrows some of the grammar of that style. “Across 110th Street” is a song and film beamed from a city in distress: New York in the 1970s, when it was a dark place, glamorously decayed, on the verge of AIDS and the crack epidemic. [It was] about to commit a kind of hari-kari that led eventually to Giuliani and zero tolerance and money and 9/11.
Have I gone too far? It was just meant to be a cool phrase to describe a cool tune. Shoot me.
Tell us about your night with Mos Def at The Box.
Mos wouldn’t stop yapping about someone called The Boogieman. I thought it was just the cocktails talking, but Mos said he’s a dark entity, a black-caped figure made up of all the evil in the world. Turns out that Mos was right! We’ve got the Boogieman in our “Stylo” video. Anyway, some naked guy kept hassling us and a fight broke out. Mos spilt, but I stayed on and the thing just escalated. Some midget in a tux punched this clown out, and the stage act, some transvestite chick, burst into flames.
By the time they let the leopard out, I’d had enough and left. Is it always like that over there?