The 2001 song Damon Albarn has never topped: “That can only happen once”
There might not be a bigger career change in music history than Damon Albarn‘s pivot into hip-hop.
Traditionally, rock and roll and hip-hop have never got along. The latter took the place of disco upon its emergence in the late 1980s and ‘90s, offering a staunch alternative to the gritty traditionalism of heavy rock. They supposedly represented two different cultures, never more obvious than at Glastonbury in ‘08 when Albarn’s Britpop counterpart slandered the inclusion of Jay-Z as the headliner.
While he may have been his adversary, Albarn was supposed to stand alongside Gallagher in that regard and continue flying the flag for rock and roll. Through the enduring change of music at the tail end of the ‘90s and into the millennium, where drum machines awaited, it needed to be either Oasis or Blur that kept traditionalism afloat.
But with the odds stacked against him, Albarn managed to switch sides without any of the sort of gimmicks one would align with the change. The journey from rock god to hip-hop experimentalist feels destined to end in red-faced embarrassment, but through the anonymity of Gorillaz and the textural innovation of this electronic sound, he created a world where the limits of Britpop were stripped away.
Immediately, this felt like the project Albarn was always destined for. Blur fans may have struggled to accept it, but something about his hushed vocal approach felt more at home in the dystopic landscape of Gorillaz than it did in the vibrancy of Britpop and from the very outset of that self-titled debut album, Albarn showed what he was capable of.
It was no more celebrated than in ‘Clint Eastwood’, the seminal track that has famously been analysed for its wild simplicity. Building the melody off a Casio preset, Albarn managed to prove that nearly anything can be the basis of an innovative musical idea.
“It came from switching on the Suzuki Omnichord, and the first preset was the beat,” he recalled cheekily, “That can only happen once: [you take an] electronic instrument and the first thing you play you use, and it becomes a massive hit. As a result of that, in the preceding 20 years, I’ve bought a lot of electronic instruments, hoping that that eventually would happen again. I mean, maybe we just peaked early!”
It feels like the blueprint for what many could call the best chapter of Albarn’s career. Sure, it seems bizarre to claim that and put the success he enjoyed with Blur firmly in the rear view mirror, but what he has achieved ever since that 2001 debut album with Gorillaz has been wildly innovative and crucial for both the development of hip-hop and electronic music.
While he may not have actually topped ‘Clint Eastwood’ as he modestly outlines, he has backed it up. Gorillaz haven’t always fired in the right direction at every time, nor have Blur or the untouchable Gallagher brothers, but no one has seemingly achieved what he has in performing the great genre pivot.
