Thread: gorillaz meaning?

One of two things:

1 - The album started life as the soundtrack to the Dreamworks Gorrilaz movie, which was canned due to Hewlett/Albarn not liking the 'Americanization' involved, feeling that it ruined the 'feel' of the band. So it could well be in reference to part of the plot (perhaps not litteraly a mountain exploding, maybe corruption?).

2 - Albarn is a very left wing fellow, it's most likely a statement about supposed superior cultures interfearing with other ones (ie - the west and the rest of the world).

Well that's all I can think of anyway.

the meaning for this song for me centers around:

Here they played out their peaceful lives, *
innocent of the litany of excess and violence that was growing in the world below. *
To live in harmony with the spirit of the mountain called Monkey was enough. *
Then one day, Strangefolk arrived in the town. *
They came in camouflage, hidden behind dark glasses, but no one noticed them. *
They only saw shadows. you see, without the truth of the eyes *
the Happyfolk were blind... [/b]

the mountain called monkey is the animalistic aspect of human nature...that which must be surmounted to be fully human.

human in the sense of open and sincere (the type of people that need the "trip to the eyes" to truly connect with another individual).

so the happyfolk live in harmony with animal nature, innocent of the barbarians below...soon the greedy pricks take advantage of the naivety of the happyfolk and try to steal their "jewels".

this awakens the cruel animal spirit which the happy folk had managed to live peaceably with,and destruction ensues for all...

When I was reading Ishmael by Daniel Quinn I was reminded of Gorillaz on several occasions. There was even a line in a Gorillaz song which was a direct quote from the book, which I think must be significant. It's in Demon Days which must be significant since it's the title of the album:

Originally posted by Gorillaz
In these demon days
It's so cold inside
So hard for a good soul to survive
You can't even trust the air you breathe
Because mother earth wants us all to leave
When lies become reality
You numb yourself with drugs and T.V. - Ishmael quote
So pick yourself up, it's a brand new day
So turn yourself round
Don't burn yourself, turn youself
Turn yourself around
To the sun!

Now that I read it, it's definitely the same message. If you haven't read the book, the basic message is that humanity is killing the earth, and we have to turn ourselves around if we want to save our own lives as well as the earth. The main problem with our society is that it's based on consumerism, and we have an archetypal definition of happiness that is dictated by society to keep us consuming and growing. Ishmael, one main character, who happens to be a GORILLA (!!), relates to the other main character how uncivilized man lived in happiness, taking from the earth whatever he wanted because it would always come back, never was his time taken up by the distracting and unfulfilling tasks of modern society, never did he have to worry about war because there were no civilizations (ie no armies), and if there was a natural disaster the population might dwindle but nature's equilibrium bailed his ass out in the long run. He says that as a people we're dissatisfied because we've been trained to want MORE when we really want LESS; less work to do, less excess, less distraction, etc. So, in one sentence, Ishmael says humans need to "Turn themselves around" or get out ("because mother earth wants us all to leave").

I recommend the book even if you don't like this kind of philosophy. It's incredibly convincing, and it covers the evolution of society right from day one in the fertile crescent.


Anyway, Fire Coming out of a Monkey's Head isn't much different in message. It has a finer focus than Demon Days, however, concentrating more on the replacement of wild man with civilzed man. The happy folk in this song represent the bygone simpler lifestyle of humans, and the lifestyle that animals still lead today. Civilized man coveted the resources of the savage peoples that neighbored him, and inevitably expanded their borders, wiping out the indiginous humans that refused to join them. So, like in the song, happy folk were screwed in a fight against strange folk, and so they're no more. What they knew before they kicked the bucket, however, was that strange folk were defying the laws of nature and would eventually send everything to hell (which in the song, they did).

The main difference between the happy folk and the strange folk was that the happy folk were content to live in the shadow of the mountain called monkey, which pre-existed them and kept them protected from each other and themselves (the mountain seems to be a metaphor for mother nature). Strange folk needed more fuel for the fires they were burning around the world, and so they weren't about to let anything stand in their way that wouldn't fight back, and so they went right to the center of all the good in the world and mined it clean. Of course, in the long run the joke was on them, but they didn't realize what they were doing until it was too late to reverse it.

It's a pretty simple message but neat to think about, and I can't think of anything I could say to contradict it. The world is ending, it's just a matter of whether or not we care. We have this strange dream of travelling into space and seeking new places for our species to survive, but it's anything but practical. The only realistic solution to the approaching end of days is to restore global equilibrium, to not take more than we make. I just spent an hour doing infinite limits for calculus, and it reminded me of this. How the numbers work out on a large scale is dependant on the exponents rather than coefficients and constants which often make more of a difference on a small scale. You think of the numbers in a different way when the variables become infinity. When the variable of time approaches infinity in the equation of global equilibrium as it is going right now, the end result gets closer to negative infinity: the end, no more earth, no more anything.

All of this also relates to Nietzsche's idea of the ubermench. He said that the next evolution of humans would be a huge turn around, as big as the change from uncivilized man to civilized man. He said that the ubermench (savage man > modern man > ubermench) would understand that his role on earth was that of guardian, whereas now we're more of a plague. He would realize that he was not just a part of the human community, but the GLOBAL community, and his duties toward nature were just as important as his duties toward other men. The shape-changing guy in Waking Life also talks a lot about neo-evolution, his speech reflects a lot of Nietsche's ideas on the ubermench.