All Hail King Neptune And His Water Breathers

Gorillaz “Superfast Jellyfish”

The conceit of the Gorillaz has always involved animation, but Plastic Beach is the first Gorillaz album that actually sounds something like a cartoon to my ears. Even aside from the Saturday morning breakfast cereal commercial in the intro, the very sound of “Superfast Jellyfish” implies the aesthetics of animation — a certain bounciness, a roundness to the lines, an extremity of character, a boldness in the color palette. It’s all very stylized and smooth, and the inherent silliness of the music blurs with its more serious themes, not to dilute those ideas, but to make them less shrill. It’s basically a song about how commercial culture damages our bodies and the environment in the interest of convenience and cheap thrills, but it’s not argumentative or even particularly judgmental. It’s mostly just an illustration of how easily important things become abstracted by distractions. (Like, say, seductive advertising, or cartoon images of natural life that disrupts or confuses our understanding of actual reality.) The song itself is an abstracted distraction full of big hooks like the perky yet emotionally illegible chorus by Gruff Rhys, and smaller, stickier bits of phrasing in the rapped verses by De La Soul. (“While you dine like rabbits on the crunchy crunchy carrots, gotta have it!”) It’s a very carefully balanced piece of music — it could easily just topple under the weight of its own stylistic absurdity and high concept, but instead it wobbles and bops with the charm of perfect pop.

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