At the same time Blur was crumbling around the turn of the century, Albarn’s interests were spreading out. Several things had happened in Albarn’s career over the course of the ’00s, all of them parallel transformations that eventually solidified his status of a prolific musician and producer, not just Blur’s wayward frontman. Damon Albarn was Gorillaz, and that was it. But when the third Gorillaz album Plastic Beach arrived, 10 years ago today, the project was at its peak. It’s one of those things you take for granted until you step back and remember just how mystifying a trajectory it is. Still: Damon Albarn went from being one of the foremost artists of the ’90s Britpop craze, a genuine celebrity and an adored songwriter (in the UK, at least), to a man who began making quirky, genre-agnostic music behind the veneer of a couple cartoon characters - and the latter project went on to completely overshadow the former (in the US, at least).
Throughout pop history, there have been plenty of drastic reinventions - artists who, rather than just adopting a new identity to explore a new sound, reemerged with a completely different set of thematic concerns, a completely altered ethos. Twenty years on, the existence of Gorillaz still seems somewhat implausible.
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