27GENRE-FLUID ALTERNATIVE HIP HOP
Rap as one ingredient in a producer-led collage rather than the frame around it
WHAT IT IS / WHEN
Gorillaz — Damon Albarn (Blur) and comics artist Jamie Hewlett — launched in 1998 as a fictional four-piece band, which freed the project from genre expectation entirely. Each album is a curated guest list spanning rap, soul, dub, Afrobeat and electronic music, held together by Albarn's melancholy melodic writing.
SIGNIFICANT ARTISTS
Gorillaz themselves; the wider lineage includes DJ Shadow, Massive Attack's guest-vocalist model, Danger Mouse (who produced Demon Days), and Anderson .Paak's later collaborations. "Stylo" features Bobby Womack and Mos Def.
TRIVIA
Bobby Womack was 66, in poor health and had not made a significant record in years when Albarn brought him in for Plastic Beach; he sang until he physically could not continue, and the take on "Stylo" is that performance. The collaboration restarted his career — Albarn went on to produce Womack's 2012 comeback album. The song's video is a car chase starring Bruce Willis, playing himself, shooting at the band.
SONIC SIGNATURE
A single hypnotic synth-bass motorik pulse under a slow, four-on-the-floor kick, with everything else — Albarn's low-register verse, Mos Def's rap, Womack's soul screaming — layered on top of an unchanging bed. The mix is deliberately murky, drenched in tape saturation, with the guest vocal always the brightest thing in the field.
KEY GEAR
Albarn's toolkit is famously cheap and portable: melodica, a Korg MicroKORG, an old Casio, an iPad (Plastic Beach's successor was partly recorded on one), plus a real Rhodes and dub-style spring reverbs and tape echoes. Hewlett's visual identity does as much work as the instruments in defining the project.
RATIONALE & PRODUCTION
Albarn builds the bed first, then invites guests in and lets them do what they do — the record is assembled from sessions recorded in different cities and stitched. That accounts for the collage quality and also for the consistency: the glue is Albarn's mixing choices, heavy on tape emulation and a narrow low-mid focus that makes wildly different sources sound like the same room.
TRACKS IN THIS GENRE
Each control plays a ten-second excerpt of the track, taken from its catalogue preview clip.
- StyloGorillaz, Bobby Womack, Mos Def
- November Has ComeGorillaz, MF DOOM
- Feel Good Inc.Gorillaz, De La Soul