GORILLAZ - "Dare"

(#1017, 10th September 2005)

It’s an irresistible coincidence that ten years after the “Battle Of Britpop”, Noel Gallagher and Damon Albarn met again at the top of the charts. Brought together in a moment of media heat, in 1995 they were the faces of a trend both men wanted to outgrow. Gallagher in a literal sense; Oasis needed to become bigger than any movement. Albarn in an aesthetic one. There was a restless, dissatisfied, magpie quality to his artistry that was concealed for a while by Parklife’s success. By the late 90s, “Beetlebum” and “Tender” his metamorphic urge was more obvious, but those records still landed as pastiches of more respectable alternative rock forms, cool-kid repudiations of Britpop. Gorillaz gave him the vehicle he needed to go further.

That wasn’t entirely clear upon the group’s arrival. Gorillaz in 2000 seemed like the very definition of a side project, partly because the British press only focused on the novelty of Albarn teaming up with flatmate and cartoonist Jamie Hewlett to create what seemed like an Archies for the Grand Royal era, a ‘manufactured band but interesting’. But look at the band from the perspective of producer Dan Nakamura, and Gorillaz slotted well alongside the conceptual hip-hop he’d already been making with Handsome Boy Modeling School and Deltron 3000; in fact the recurring presence of Del The Funkee Homosapien makes Gorillaz the third in a cross-millennium trilogy of alter ego concept albums.

Playful identity-switching was in vogue in underground rap at the time, an opportunity to get freakier and funkier; Nakamura was a regular collaborator of the chameleonic, filthy Kool Keith; Wu-Tang’s the RZA had announced himself as “Bobby Digital”. In that wider context a fake band of urchin cartoon monkeys feels like a next step more than a wild leap. Meanwhile Albarn and Hewlett were careful not to indelibly associate any of the four Gorillaz characters with specific musicians - the Blur singer was not quite ape greaser Murdoc nor even virtual vocalist 2-D. In fact if you wanted credible cover for a couple of English blokes teaming up with underground US talent to make a record steeped in hip-hop, you couldn’t have designed it better. Contrast Gorillaz with his slightly later Mali Music endeavour, where Albarn was happy to appear fully as himself, making a time-honoured trip to Africa to absorb and be transformed by local sounds, returning inevitably humbled and renewed. One of his great abilities as an artist is to know what pose to strike for what project.

Of course Gorillaz wasn’t simply an Albarn joint: Tank Girl creator Hewlett was also keen on new collaborations and directions, making the media switch to animation and getting stuck into the wild possibilities of a project that would have parallel virtual and real-world existence. Gorillaz was a bran tub of pop-culture tropes and cliches, a punk-pulp version of rock myths and legends given a ludicrous, knowing spin. Some elements of the band’s lashed-together lore felt like they were tilting into stereotype - a Japanese schoolgirl called Noodle whose broken English conceals a martial arts wizard? Still, Japan embraced Gorillaz as much as anywhere else: their debut album sold seven million worldwide, numbers Blur could only envy.

While Hewlett claimed a follow-up had always been the plan, that success made one inevitable. Back in 2001 it was hard to predict how long an afterlife the project would manage: seven “phases” visually so far, eight albums, built from an intricate mesh of cartoon lore and real-world exigencies. Gorillaz have become a long-term concern, a collaborative space where Albarn can explore pop ideas a conventional band format doesn’t fit.

Still, there comes a point where fiction meets its limit. From the beginning, Albarn was always the main presence on Gorillaz tracks, installing himself as a reedy, diffident hip-hop hook singer. If you find his voice grating - and I do - you’ll reach saturation point with this pretty quickly, and no amount of simian antics will help. The definitive critical word on Gorillaz came in 2021 from Twitter user @fixyourheartsor and the “Flimsy Steve” tweet, which was probably meant to be a warm reflection of an aspect their fans enjoy but for me nailed exactly what makes them an impossible proposition. As with fellow rock cartoons Primal Scream, the Albarn factor can be minimised by guests or remixers, jacking up the chance of a given track being good (the UK garage remix of “Clint Eastwood”, for instance). But the spirit of Flimsy Steve is never too far away.

“DARE” is one of the songs which keeps him in the margins, reducing Damon to a spectral backing moan behind Rosie Wilson (one of many Noodles) and giving the chorus over to an even more divisive vocalist. The video casts Shaun Ryder as a vast, disembodied head, issuing baffling, disconnected lyrics from inside some fantasy cartoon structure. It’s a fair translation of how he actually sounds on the track, even further adrift from melody than usual, a confused but unmistakable presence, no less arbitrary here than he was jogging along on “Amarillo” back in the Spring. The song’s title comes from Ryder’s thick pronunciation of “It’s There” but also feels like a joyful challenge - how are we getting away with this?

They nearly aren’t. The weirdest Number 1 of 2005, “DARE” is also one of the lowest-selling, scraping in for a week between Damon’s battered old rivals and the newest transatlantic juggernaut. Fluke it might be, but it deserves its position, a rattle bag of elements which somehow coalesce, partly thanks to the awkward but driving electro-funk groove Albarn’s come up with as “DARE”’s chassis. He talked about Gorillaz as a home for, in particular, beats which didn’t fit Blur, and “DARE” is a fine example.

If he’d sung it, though, it would have ended up sounding Blurrier than intended; Ryder is an inspired collaborator, his voice - fucked and wayward though it is - casting “DARE”’s beat as an update of the mutant grooves the Happy Mondays specialised in back at their beginning. As that band grew more confident they’d evolved a richer, sleazier sound, but their debut album had a hard, threatening quality, a feeling like you’d found yourself in the wrong club at the wrong time. Ryder’s belligerent bellow was a large part of that. 

Twenty years on, the sharp, aggressive Shaun Ryder who would slice through his songs to ask if you should be in here watching that, or tell you Jesus was a cunt, is long gone. In Blur’s first, cocksure major interview, a young Albarn sneered “We killed baggy”. Yet here is its ghost, a spectral moan from deep inside Gorillaz’ fictional machine, Ryder mumbling “never did no harm” as he warns of something else approaching. It’s there. What’s there?

It’s very good and very strange to hear him on a Number 1 record, even on this shabby form. It’s left to Rosie/Noodle to space out Ryder’s interjections, give the song some kind of more conventional shape while still leaving it a riddle, a scrap-built record which shouldn’t work but does. It’s our only encounter with Gorillaz, and our last - as of now - with Damon Albarn. Of his three number ones, “DARE” is the best, and the one he imposes himself on least. His work - Gorillaz included - too often feels self-conscious to me, a cold eye picking out trends and pulling them apart to see how they function like Bowie or Prince did, but without their way of infecting it with a personal weirdness; the best Blur songs face this chilliness head-on. On “DARE” Albarn imports someone else’s battered strangeness, and it’s one of his most successful and inscrutable tracks. A happy ending for Britpop? A more interesting one, at least.

7 out of 10