Over the last five years, the Gorillaz have sold millions of albums, garnered numerous awards and released several groundbreaking music videos.
Not bad for a group of animated monkeys.
"Rise of the Ogre," a tell-all format autobiography compiled and narrated by Cass Browne, generates a virtual world around the four band members in which reality and fantasy merge. The cartoon characters, named "Most Successful Virtual Group" by the Guinness Book of World Records, integrate into the human world while compounding it with cartoon logic and mayhem. The result is a humorous virtual space in which long-held beliefs about the nature of music and presentation are contested.
Originally the conceptual project of British rocker Damon Albarn and cartoonist Jamie Hewlett, Gorillaz have evolved into a multifaceted, collaborative network of artists with a common goal to prove that people can still be creative in the shadows of a homogenized music industry.
The book begins with the members' back-stories. The Gorillaz consist of bassist and bandleader Murdoc, a Satanist metal-head with a palpable rock ego, singer and keyboardist 2D, a soft-spoken virtuoso savant, guitarist Noodle, a teenage Japanese girl trained in elite sonic warfare and drummer Russel Hobbs, an American whose body is possessed by a dead rapper.
Murdoc spent years in shady heavy metal clubs around England, utterly convinced of his own genius, before deciding to start a more ambitious project.
After numerous destructive run-ins between himself and 2D - in which the latter was used as a crash-test dummy and lost both his eyes - the two decided to start a band. Russel was kidnapped from a record store, and Noodle arrived in a FedEx crate from Japan.
The group discusses everything from their lifestyle to fighting to song inspiration. 2D explains that they wrote some of the lyrics for their 2001 self-titled debut by randomly tossing word-magnets at a refrigerator.
"We threw a lot of ideas around and then whatever phrases stuck, we kept."
"Rise of the Ogre" is as much a visual product as it is a literary one. The pages are crammed with imagery and graphics. Candid backstage and studio photos show the band members collaborating with artists such as D-12, Ike Turner and Dennis Hopper, and sections of the book overflow with album art, magazine covers and video stills.
The Gorillaz are often criticized as a mere attempt on behalf of Albarn to escape the pressures of being a public figure. After years of performing as the front man for the indie-rock group Blur, Albarn was tired of the social emphasis on musicians over music.
Albarn and Hewlett are discussed only in passing in the book, though, as producer/collaborator and group "stylist," respectively. The band members note friction from the get-go.
"The first thing Damon said to Murdoc, pointing down at his boots, was, 'Your Cuban heels are crap. Look, mine are the proper sort,'" said Russel, regarding their first encounter. "I think Murdoc was a bit humiliated. He's very proud of his shoes."
Albarn and Hewlett explain their motives for creating Gorillaz.
"By removing the egos of the creators it allowed far more space for the work itself to breathe."
And the work does breathe. Murdoc, seemingly his own entity, constantly derides the two for taking intellectual credit for Gorillaz.
After their first year working with the Gorillaz, Albarn and Hewlett appeared in several magazines and interviews, bruised and battered from collisions with the cartoons. Whether their condition is a symptom of the mental strain or of physical haphazard is decidedly ambiguous. Gorillaz was taking on a life of its own.
Certainly, the Gorillaz have received criticism for their very nature. It is difficult for a journalist to treat a cartoon band that only performs projected on a screen and only conducts interviews over the phone like a valid musical group. Despite an impressive history by industry standards, the band is often dismissed as a gimmick.
According to the Gorillaz, these assessments miss the point of a band with unlimited control over its own image and packaging.
"Accusing us of being a gimmick is a bit like accusing Jesus Christ of having 'a bit of a messiah complex,'" Murdoc said.
"The Gorillaz: Rise of the Ogre" is an enlightening and extremely entertaining read for anyone vaguely familiar with the band. With a hefty price tag, however, this one may be for die-hards only.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
