Gorillaz are a band born out of resistance. In their music video works, the band exist solely as animated characters, disguising the true identities of the members.

Gorillaz was conceptualised by Jamie Hewlett and Damon Albarn (of 1990’s Britpop band Blur) in 1998 as an artistic protest to the banal and passive generation of MTV-style music video domination (Cookney, 2017).

MTV, founded in 1981, is widely understood as being responsible for popularising the music video, which in turn forced musical artists into commercialising themselves in new ways. Many artists embraced music videos, and many resisted, refusing to dilute their musical artistry through commercialised visualisations. In a 2005 Wired article, Hewlett explained that “when you watch MTV for too long, it’s a bit like hell – there’s nothing of substance there. So we got this idea for a virtual band, something that would be a comment on that.” Gorillaz was created to mock the emphasis on the visualisation of artists in music videos, an emphasis which MTV is responsible for creating. David Cookney elaborates on the concept of this emphasis, explaining that ‘the content of music videos has been perceived as relegating the aural component to secondary place via the argument that insists that the world is somehow becoming increasingly visual’.

In the music video for Dirty Harry, Gorillaz utilised tropes of popular music videos of the past to create a storyline. There is a thirty-five-second introduction before the track begins, which is a similar technique used in other famous music videos popularised by MTV, such as Thriller by Michael Jackson, to create a narrative for within the music video itself. Gorillaz were able to utilise elements of what they were resisting against, whilst keeping the visual identities of the band members anonymous.

In the creation of Gorillaz, Hewlett and Albarn also embraced the visual nature of music television and used it to their advantage by creating a completely digitally animated band. Gorillaz was something that had never been done before. They believed that the music videos being produced and promoted on MTV were all recycled versions of each other, and creating an animated band was a direct reaction to this as something original and progressive.

Although Gorillaz was created in resistance to MTV, the band would potentially never have been conceptualised if it weren’t for MTV existing in the first place. Art has always been born out of protest, and the inception of Gorillaz is a modern instance of how resistance can create something artistically ground-breaking.

References

Daniel Cookney (2017) ‘“Vimeo Killed the Video Star: Burial and the User Generated Music Video”’, in G. Arnold et al. (eds) Music/video: histories, aesthetics, media. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 255–267.

Gorillaz (2005) – Gorillaz – Dirty Harry (Official Video). [online video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLnkQAeMbIM&list=PLL7vW8w4akoRe-GbfvyEVrNDmvRa75RDy&index=4&ab_channel=Gorillaz [Accessed 02/11/2024]

Wired Staff, 2005: Keeping it (Un)Real. Available at https://web.archive.org/web/20200929124734/https://www.wired.com/2005/07/gorillaz-2/?pg=1&topic=gorillaz&topic_set=. [Accessed on 02/11/2024]

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