So why is Gorillaz’s on this best 1,000 albums ever thing?
One of the great things about music is when you hear a sound or style that you’ve never heard before, and it blows your mind a little bit.
This is an accurate way to describe how I felt when I heard “Clint Eastwood,” off the Gorillaz’s self-titled debut album, for the first time.
There’s a strange and wonderful and off-kilter vibe to “Clint Eastwood,” as there is throughout the album. It has a European-inspired feel to it, but there’s also a very Britpop thing going on (which makes sense, with Damon Albarn of Blur fame’s involvement), but then we also get the absolute best deployment of Del the Funky Homosapien’s talents that I’ve yet heard to date.
There’s also something about “Clint Eastwood” that’s burned into my brain with relation to the summer of 2001.
It was a very specific time in my life. I lived in San Francisco’s East Bay and worked the graveyard shift for a television station called TechTV located in SF. My now-wife and I had recently moved in together, and we were both on unusual schedules (she works in healthcare).
I’d commute into work around 1:30 a.m. and see people lining up to get into late night clubs as I blearily drove through the nighttime streets of SoMa. My job was producing the TV news “ticker” at the bottom of the screen during a live tech news show that ran from 6-8 a.m.
And so it was that I was in the news studio on the early morning of September 11th, 2001 when the planes hit the World Trade Center in New York City – the city I had moved from several years earlier (and grew up nearby in the Long Island suburbs).
Someone near me whispered, half-jokingly (and half out of fear, I’d wager), “What’s the tech angle on this?”
My fist curled up in rage and I wanted to hit him, but my body wouldn’t respond – I was in shock.
So much changed for so many in the United States and around the world that day. And what changed most for me was that I got laid off from my job within six weeks or so and eventually I went back to graduate school (after very nearly joining the State Department).
So my memory of the preceding summer is a little hazy for all of those reasons. It’s a time capsule for which “Clint Eastwood” and Gorillaz the album take on the role of soundtrack.
The entire album is an eclectic and deeply satisfying journey. It plays like artists at the top of their game who are just swinging freely and fearlessly and mostly connecting with musical greatness.
“Latin Simone (Que Pasa Contigo)” is a Latin and electronica-flavored minor masterpiece of a song, for example.
“5/4” would fit in seamlessly on the self-titled Blur album (#20 of best 1,000 albums ever), kind of a more upbeat “Beetlebum.”
Likewise for the fun, slightly thrashy “Punk.”
And “Dracula” is European late-night lounge music put through a bizarro-drowsy dub filter.
Some stats & info about Gorillaz
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? Alternative Pop, Alternative Rap, British Bands, Indie Rock, Rock Music
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – not ranked!
- All Music’s rating – 4.5 out of 5 stars
- When was Gorillaz released? 2001
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #181 out of 1,000
Gorillaz on Spotify
A lyrical snippet from Gorillaz that’s evocative of the album in some way, maybe
I ain’t happy, I’m feeling glad. I got sunshine in a bag.
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective review of what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.