The Force of Environmental Lyrics in Pop Songs: The Case of Gorillaz’s Plastic Beach

ABSTRACT

This article examines how compositional and performative strategies impact the potency of environmental song lyrics on Gorillaz’s album Plastic Beach. The quality of songfulness is implicated as a primary obstacle to lyrical force. The literary function of fictionality is put forth along with the Bakhtinian concept of literary polyphony as key strategies by which lyrics are reinforced. Plastic Beach employs a large cast of contributors, engaging several voices in a fictionalized reflection on plastic pollution. These features support the potential of lyrics to exert political force, while residing in tension with distracting effects of catchy pop grooves.

KEYWORDS:

• Songfulness
• fictionality
• polyphony
• song lyrics
• climate

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. A visual media presentation may be a more appropriate way to gain a full overview of the multimedia aspect of Plastic Beach. A good example is the video “The album that almost killed Gorillaz” by user Lady Emily on YouTube.com. A video accompaniment to the album including official music videos as well as unofficial concept videos can be accessed via Archive.org (see Gorillaz, “Gorillaz Plastic Beach [Video Accompaniment]”), and a short documentary with behind the scenes footage from the recording sessions can also be accessed (see Gorillaz, “Making”). The visual accompaniments to the album reveal more creative experiments with the theme of artificiality than the ones that are explored in this article. For instance, the visual story shows an evil android doppelganger Noodle, and how Russel became a giant by swimming in a polluted ocean. War and violence provide a complementary aesthetic that connects the plastic theme of Plastic Beach to the war theme of Demon Days, ensuring a continuation of the Gorillaz fictional narrative across several albums. A point I would have liked to include in an analysis of this material is the link between Rancière’s concept of “police” and the Gorillaz characters’ adverse relationship to the military-industrial complex.

2. Attali’s concept is a plausible inspiration for the metaphor of “noise” later employed by Rancière, but where Rancière uses noise as a metaphor for that which is not yet perceptible, Attali’s concept describes a disruptive presence within the current order. For a detailed overview of Rancière’s use of sonic metaphors, see Nickleson.

3. There is an actual Morse code on the song “Glitter Freeze,” translating into the letters P-L-A-S-T-I-C B-E-A-C-H. The beeps on “Sweepstakes,” however, are only similar to Morse signals in their frequency and duration, without any discernible pattern translatable into letters.

4. The collaboration with De La Soul is symbolic. The group has a legacy of pioneering what I have called polyphony in this article, through their revolutionary use of sampling, something Gorillaz also uses here to add even more inflection on an already polyphonous composition.

5. Samutina may still be correct in her assessment that the relocations provides the potential for utopia through creation of an unrestricted collaborative community.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Håvard Haugland Bamle

Håvard Haugland Bamle is a Ph.D. Research Fellow at the University of Agder, currently working on a dissertation about climate change and song lyrics. He has previously written several articles about indie folk music and is involved in a project on political song as part of the Song Lyrics Research Group based at the University of Agder, Norway.