Gorillaz – Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez (2020) – Digital Fascism, Transhumans & The Triumph of Cosmic Order

2020 has been a musical hunger year where most artists degraded their records to ‘products’ and delayed their releases because Corona stole the show, and the cash. Not just for the artists and crews, but also for fans it has been a massively fucked up year with no live culture and little new music being offered. But fear not, Gorillaz are here to save the year and give us a much needed album that works as unexpectedly perfect soundtrack to our times. Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez is not only proof that Damon Albarn is far from losing his vibe entering the fifth decade of his prolific musical career, but the album is counter-culture to both, the convenient gloomy and glitchy musical scores chosen for dark times, and post-modern artists’ refusal to be timely chroniclers of contemporary events and offer counter drafts to society within their art.

Song Machine is the perfect concept for 2020, a collaborative album with many of its songs having been written en minute and released throughout the year as web-series. Now being made available in album format, the collection kicks off with “Strange Timez”, featuring no other than Robert Smith. The last Cure album is 12 years old now, and we fans wanna kiss Damon Albarn’s ass for bringing our sweetheart back and giving us so much joy. Smith’s voice hasn’t changed a bit since the 80’s, and it’s hard to not imagine him making Love Cats moves while recording the song that grows into a monster hit after a few listens. The video visualizes Smith’s narrative perspective: he is the lipsticked man on the moon, no less, spinning around a world that’s gone crazy: “Strange echoes of Belarus / Where presidents pin badges on disconnected youth/ …/ Battle war of the worlds, surgical glove world, bleach thirsty world / I’m twitching in the grimy heat, I think I might be spinning / Here we go on degrading, no horse play, no diving / Cuttin’ glass with scissors, whilst the great leaders/… / Strange time (strange time) to be alive“

While most other artists seem to have turned into nurses this year, communicating little more than empty slogans like ‘Stay safe’, one can only respect the Gorillaz for their brilliance to chronicle the global coronavirus dystopia with its crude olympic vibes and the Trump lunacy in a line like „Battle war of the worlds, surgical glove world, bleach thirsty world“. All delivered within a metaphor rooted in Smith’s expressive “Spinning around”-chant, which is a simple but important reminder of the triumph of cosmic order: life goes on, and even the loudest and nastiest of us are destined to be less than footnotes, all hysteria doomed to end in galactic silence.

“In the valley (I heard there’s a shaman out in the desert)” – it is interesting that Beck is singing “The Valley of the Pagans“. The musician and second-generation Scientologist from Los Angeles just in 2019 carefully disavowed himself from the sect and identifies as Jewish again. His song is a cold acid fever dream set in celebrity lifestyle malaise and the monstrous outcome of its amalgam with Silicon Valley technology. It’s a wild swan song on Hollywood, the lie factory that has lost its monopoly on degenerate celebrity culture due to its very success in exporting this culture to all areas of American life, most recently the political life. Voting a TV-entertainer & social media addicted self-promoter along with his bleached Barbies and escorts into the highest office (“She’s a plastic Cleopatra on a throne of ice”) would logically be continued by a second term and then a Kardashian in the de-evolutionary American timeline. Don’t feel too safe now distancing yourself from the Trumps and Kardashians, since the transhuman condition (“She’s a haemophiliac / With a dying battery life”) has widely creeped into private lives and replaced them with virtual ones that are nurturing the same self-promotion, mainly through the echo chambers of social media providing constant confirmation (“And the world you created in your image is golden / Valley made of mirrors”).

“Momentary Bliss” featuring slowthai & Slaves runs in the same vein. It starts off as a Mac DeMarco Lo-Fi delirium and then turns into an irresistible punk chaos, a visceral rant in the pub that cannot be described but has to be experienced. “Your potential, you lack credentials /…/ You’re getting sold, you’re such a waste” – the song is a mash-up, tying the shallow bliss of social media likes to the dirty bliss of consuming the surreal rage and “Fake Lies” in the digital fascism of the far-right, because both things condition in the same way and create the perfectly dim and unsubstantial neo-human. Lou Reed’s skeleton shakes with excitement in his grave when slowthai hits you with a flower in what must be the most charming insult ever, “You deserve school dinners!“, before Isaac Holman from Slaves takes over to mourn over fakeness and loss of “Perfect little pictures of moments that we missed / We could do so much better than this“.

A major surprise on Song Machine is the heartbreaking ballad “Pink Phantom” featuring rapper 6LACK and – who? Is it Bowie? Is it Iggy Pop? You don’t believe your ears that it’s Elton John singing there after Damon Albarn and 6LACK had their verses. Never have we heard Elton sing more broken and eccentrically tender when delivering death-stricken lyrics with a neon-lightesque beauty „I tried to get to Atlanta / On a peach blossom highway / I’m tryin’ to put these puzzles out of mind / In a sky made of diamonds / Where the world fell silent / I’ll be waiting for you on the other side“. “Pink Phantom” is three musicians of three generations and different styles making one perfect song together.

Now, let’s talk about Damon Albarn’s voice, which over the years has developed into a uniquely flexible and precious instrument of its own. What Blur fans possibly heard first in the wild Afro-funk of “Music is My Radar” in 2002, was a harbinger of the things to come: total world music fusion and its organic manifestation in Albarn’s voice and his effortless intercontinental phonetics. Damon Albarn, crowned as Local King in Mali in 2016, by now has internalized a unique African rhythm and twang that he can switch on to supplement the beautiful trademark melancholia in his voice. “Désolé” featuring the Malian singer-songwriter Fatoumata Diawara is the irresistible heart-piece of Song Machine. Starting with the lines „Désolé, I’m a long way from land / Désolé, I don’t know what to do / Désolé, désolé, Try to hold on to you,“ Albarn’s words melt into an organic rhythm and are barely recognizable as English, fusing together perfectly with Diawara’s sensual and longing interpretation. It is impossible not to get lost in the pure sentiment of this song, and to groove and feel along with it.

The fundament of all solutions to our miserable condition is actually manifested in Albarn’s pan-continental voice and artistry. His song machine is a deeply human one that had a brush with cosmic unity. If I weren’t so tired of the competitive nature of 2020s global pandemic and the mind-numbing “WINNING!”-mentality that is bulldozing through our decade, I would talk about a total demonstration of songwriting skills and artistic abilities, and call Song Machine… the album of the year. An album where gleaming snapshots of strange times and moods perfectly flow together as one amazingly cohesive and addictive album. A most relevant record, which on top of all is being heard by millions of young people all around the world. I’ll call it a lifeboat instead.

by Saliha Enzenauer