Plastic Beach by Gorillaz (2010)
Out on the mail route, phone battery is a limited resource. My dogshit Sony phone can handle an 8 hour shift with %15 left to get me home, but overtime kills it. Hell, sometimes the phone just crashes partway though and I can’t navigate or call my supervisor or anything. These battery issues have lead me to abandon streaming altogether. No spotify, no YouTube Red. MP3 files loaded directly onto the phone! My cellphone is an ipod touch with GPS.
My collection of albums has grown over time, but at first I had only a few mp3 files saved locally on my phone. These initial files were multi-hour video game music playlists. I know what that sounds like, but trust me– Alf’s Video Game Bangers series is awesome! It’s funky EDM, mostly, good for keeping me on my feet during a long day on the mail beat. I listened to Alf’s compilations on repeat, but after a month of vocal-less gamer beats, however, I craved something with more substance. For some reason, I downloaded Gorillaz’s Plastic Beach. Given the choice between more VG music and Plastic Beach, I decided to listen to Plastic Beach. A lot. I listened to it over and over again and quickly fell in love.
“GORILLAZ AND THE BOSS DOG, PLANET OF THE APES!”
– Track 2: Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach (Ft. Snoop Dogg)
Plastic Beach is a black sheep from a band that has always produced strange albums. For first time listeners, the album sounds really discordant. The first track opens with an orchestra alongside Snoop Dogg ushering the listeners into what he calls “the World of the Plastic Beach.” The next son, White Flag, strikes a completely different tone, with bongos, flutes, a violin and then.. British rap? I absolutely hated that transition on my first listen, but there is something catchy about White Flag. When the two singers get going, alternating “White Flag, White Flag!”
“No Castaway, No Survivor! I ain’t lost and this ain’t shipwrecked!”
– Track 3: White Flag (Ft. Bashy, Kano & The National Orchestra For Arabic Music)
On my first few listens to the album, I didn’t really understand its meaning, besides a lot of mentions of plastic. After getting over its overall strangeness, however, I started listening to the lyrics more and realized that the entire concept is hitting the oceanic climate disaster/imperialism nail very hard. Snoop Dogg is asking kids to gather around, telling them that while the world feels so hopeless, “it’s like wonderland.”
“Drinkin’ lemonade in the shade, getting blazed with a gang of pilgrims”
– Track 2: Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach
The next song opens with admittedly oriental sounding music and a depiction of a castaway on a tropical shore. The singers describe coming upon a beautiful paradise, and agree not to bring guns or war. No feds, no rent, no stress, either. It represents an inversion of the typical Robinson Crusoe narrative, where the lost sailor inevitably chooses to colonize this beautiful little place he has come upon. Rather than making enemies with the natives, the Gorillaz castaway comes in peace waving a white flag.
“Hi, little lady // Sex on the beach, wanna try for a baby?”
– Track 3: White Flag (my favorite line from the song)
Of course, paradise doesn’t last in the real world. The next song, Rhinestone Eyes, introduces this concept of “factories far away” making things with “plastic power.” It is also more of a “traditional” Gorillaz song, very listenable. It has cool talking lyrics like their previous hit Clint Eastwood. The next song, Stylo, keeps it moving with awesome beat with some rap and chorus that gives way to some pure poetry vocal solos from 2D and Bobby Womack. Electric is the looove~! If it’s love, it’s electric!
“Your love’s like rhinestones, falling from the sky.”
– Track 4: Rhinestone Eyes
Superfast Jellyfish gives us a criticism of fast food complete with commercial samples. Reminds me of MF Doom. The song is loaded with energy and has some extremely memorable lines. The repeated assertion that “The sea of Radioactive, the sea is Radioactive!” is snuck in there too, hauntingly.
“All hail King Neptune and his water-breathers
No snail thing too quick for his water-feeders
“Don’t waste time” with your net
Our net worth is set
Ready, go many know others but
We be the colors of the mad and the wicked
We be bad, we re-brick it
With the twenty-four hour sign
Shower mine habits
While you dine like rabbits
With the crunchy, crunchy carrots
(Oh that’s chicken)
Gotta have it super fast!”
– Track 6: Superfast Jellyfish (Ft. Gruff Rhys & De La Soul)
Empire Ants is next with an addictive opening beat underneath some elegiac singing. I really only get interested in this song when Yuimi Nagano starts singing after the bridge. The female voice is more welcome than 2D’s sad verses, though the actual lyrical content is kind of disturbing. Nagano sings:
“Little memories, marching on
Your little feet, working the machine
Say will it spin, will it soar?
My little dream, working the machine
Soon, like a wave, empires will fall
And closing in on you, they’re going on.”– Track 7: Empire Ants (Ft. Little Dragon)
We are likened to a colony of ants building a vast empire, but my personal headcanon is a little more disturbing. I always heard the lines about “little feet” as a reference to the actual children that keep our production going. There are a lot of little feet, child labor, making the little plastic things that we buy and then throw into the ocean.
Empire Ants gives way to the song Glitter Freeze, which is just a ton of noise that I happen to like. I like electronic sounds and heavy synthetic sounds, and I also know this taste was acquired. This song might annoy the shit out of the uninitiated.
The next few songs represent the peak of the album. Some Kind of Nature, track 8, has our singer musing about a material, some kind of plastic, that he can wrap around his lover. Next up, Melancholy Hill, which everyone has heard. That song reached far beyond the confines of this weird album. A few songs later, we get the titular song Plastic Beach, which is on-par with Melancholy Hill IMO.
“It’s by the light
Of the plasma screens
We keep switched on
All through the night while we sleep”
– Another not so subtle social critique in Track 11: Broken
Plastic Beach (track 13), brings it all together. The song opens with an image of the “only whale” watching ships pass by before exploding into an awesome repeated verse:
“It’s a Casio on a plastic beach, it’s a Casio on a plastic beach
It’s a styrofoam deep sea landfill, it’s a styrofoam deep sea landfill
It’s automated computer speech, it’s automated computer speech
It’s a Casio on a plastic beach, it’s a Casio”
– Track 13: Plastic Beach (Ft. Paul Simonon & Paul Jones)
I like to think that the whale is the last survivor in a polluted, plastic strewn ocean. The beaches themselves are plastic. In fact, the island paradise described at the start of the ocean is at this point a floating island of trash composed of multicolor styrofoams and wrappings.
The next song, and one of the last, hits me the hardest:
“I’ll wait to be forgiven, maybe I never will
My star has left me to take the bitter pill
That shattered feeling, well, the cause of it’s a lesson learned
‘Just don’t know if I could roll into the sea again
Just don’t know if I could do it all again,’ she said—it’s true”
– Track 14: To Binge (Ft. Little Dragon)
I had a long as relationship that I poured my entire self into, and then it was over. I don’t know if I can roll into the sea again. The thought of doing it all again makes me feel very tired. I don’t know what it is about music, but a song has the power to capture a feeling that one has felt for a long time but never put into words.
“I’m caught again in the mystery
You’re by my side, but are you still with me?
The answer’s somewhere deep in it, I’m sorry that you’re feeling it
But I just have to tell you that I love you so much these days
Have to tell you that I love you so much these days, it’s true”
– Track 14: To Binge (Ft. Little Dragon)
The album is functionally over at this point, but there are still two songs left to usher the listener out of the door. Bobby Womack comes back for a grandiose song about love and the movement of time and the tide. Lost at sea. The final song, Pirate Jet, I always forget about. It comes on as the last song and then leaves. We’ve left the taps running for a hundred years, you know. Water’s gonna rise.
The project is kind of sad in a catchy way. It talks a lot about love that doesn’t work out, oceans filling up with plastic, and makes fun of us for watching TV and eating fast food. All that is wrapped up in an experimental Gorillaz foil. Genre? A quick look at a Reddit thread gives me “Zombie Hip Hop, Psychedelic Surf Rock, electronic/experimental rock, Pirate Pop. I don’t think the Gorillaz have a genre, but Plastic Beach is definitely a Gorillaz album of all time!
I won’t do ratings, as I don’t think I have listened to nearly enough music in my life to accurately rank anything. I will say, however, that Plastic Beach is probably my favorite Gorillaz album (but not by far). It was released in 2010, and the songs have only grown more timely. When I was listening to this album repetitively, Massachusetts was going through a drought and my own home suburb of Middleton Massachusetts was literally burning. The smoke from the wildfire carried all the way down to East Boston where I worked and settled upon the city in a cold haze. The reefs are dying, too. Great islands of plastic continue to form in the Pacific Ocean. Bits of plastic have been found to be embedded in our very bones. And worse, it is coming to light that plastic itself might be a toxic material, slowly poisoning us.
Will we find another pristine coast to escape to, another planet perhaps? Or have we shipwrecked ourselves on toxic shores?
