Global A Go-Go: It’s all about the Albarn

Damon Albarn on the Go-Go

“There is no science without fancy, no art without facts”- Vladimir Nabokov  

I’ve overheard in the Boston coffee shop talk that true originality is impossible in a post-modern world. ‘Everything has been seen and heard,’ the pseudo-intellectuals drone. ‘So all an artist can hope for is a general truth.’ Such a theory is the philosophy of a lazy mind. One true gift that each human is granted is the gift of existing in a time and space that no one else has seen. The lazy artists speak in generalities of our world that leave one unrooted – they don’t define a scene. Vanessa Williams may vibrato on and on about saving the best for last, but it’s the back seat of Jack and Diane’s car that we’ll connect with the most. The best artists know that truth is found in the details of specific location and time, and they exploit setting to create a deep bond with the audience. One composer in particular, Damon Albarn, is creating some of the most poignant music of our generation by rooting the audience to location.  

Blur, arguably Albarn’s most notable band, was so deeply rooted to the sounds of London that they fought a turf war for pop ascendency (mostly through the Britpop press). Music lovers over the world were feuding over Oasis versus Blur for the bragging rights to the throne of Britpop. Blur won, of course, but the point is that Blur connected with their audience because they defined the time and space of England through the 90’s. From “London Loves”:  

               London loves  

                (the way people just fall apart)  

                London loves  

                (the way we just don’t stand a chance)  

                London loves  

                (a speeding heart)  

And Blur isn’t just about what it means to be alive in London, but under the guidance of Albarn and lead guitarist and lifelong chum, Graham Coxon, they were handing out tickets to explore what it would mean to be in London at the turn of the millennium. From “End of the Century”:  

                Sex on TV, everybody’s at it.  

                The mind gets dirty as you get closer to thirty  

                […]  

                We all say, “Don’t want to be alone”  

                We wear the same clothes ‘cause we feel the  same  

                Kiss with dry lips, when we say goodnight  

                End of a century, oh it’s nothing special.  

An echo perhaps of Blur inspiration Ray Davies, who at the end of the 60’s, traded power chords for harpsichords and went off in search of the village green,turning on dirty old London with this verse from “Oklahoma, USA”:  

                All life we world but work is bore  

                If life’s for livin’ what’s livin’ for?  

                She lives in a house that’s near decay,  

                Built for the industrial revolution  

                But in her dreams she is far away  

                In Oklahoma, USA  

On Albarn’s 2007 concept album, The Good, The Bad and the Queen, he is still exploring England, but ten years later – a time when there is an incomprehensible war happening both at home and abroad. Church bells and organs littler the album paying a melancholic homage to a lost countryside, and a slight offering of hope for redemption. From “Herculean”:  

                Standing on the dark canal  

                By the gasworks  

                Celebrate the ghost gone by  

                When all love hurts  

                And the medicine man here 24/7  

                You can get it fast in Armageddon  

                Everyone on the way to heaven  

                Slowly  

The album takes us on a trip to the lost green fields of Goldhawk Road, to remembered melody under the Tilbury lights, and by doing so, the audience not only journeys to a foreign land, but also we also glimpse the struggles and political issues of this particular time and space – which coincidentally aren’t so different from American issues. We find the universal themes within a specific time and place, which makes the work thematically powerful.  

But don’t think that Albarn limits himself to his birth country, or even to realistic times and places. “Monkey: Journey to the West” is an operatic stage adaptation of the 16^th century Chinese novel Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en. Albarn mastered the Chinese pentatonic scale and wrote the score of the story that tells of a monkey in search of immortality. In the production, Albarn evokes the experience of Chinese culture and influences by composing with the pipa, the gu-zheng, and the zhongran. He even created a klaxophone, which he used to mimic the sound of car horns on a cacophonous Chinese street. The titular Monkey has a whimsical, heavenly adventure, which inspired Albarn to use harps and mandolins. Monkey has battles and fights too, which inspired the use of electric guitars.  

This is by no means an all-inclusive review of  Albarn’s work. He’s taken us into the fictional psychedelic world of Gorillaz, and the 2005 Africa Express is exactly that – a musical express train through Africa. But wherever he’s taking us musically, his mission seems to be to make us travel companions on his odyssey through an ever-expanding world.