Demon Days & The Dystopian Undercurrent of the 2000s
Romanticizing the early 2000s is an easy trap to fall into. Now that modern pop culture is essentially a nostalgia factory, every pre-COVID (or even pre-Trump) era is eligible for glorification, but the W. Bush years are particularly prime. They're recent enough to be actively remembered by most millennials and yet juuuust distant enough to be seen through rose-colored glasses. The people yearn so badly for mall punk that it's now a lucrative ecosystem of its own; even the biggest film snobs mourn the death of big-budget comedies; [insert comment on "indie sleaze" revival]; Neptunes/Timbaland worship has never gone out of style. If you cherry-pick the highlights, those years look pretty good from this vantage point.
But please, pump the fucking brakes. Enjoy 20-year-old cultural touchstones all you want, but don't allow them to re-cast the early 2000s as some abundant utopia. Is it that easy to forget how diabolical Dick Cheney was? Or how much discrimination even the most vaguely Arabic-passing person faced in post-9/11 America? Each generation 1960-to-present has felt, at one point or another, that the world is ending—and right now we arguably have more claim to that sentiment than our predecessors—but the 2000s' widespread bigotry, blind retaliation, and greed felt outright evil in an unprecedented way.
I was 10 on 9/11, and I was five months too young to vote for Obama in '08. Perhaps I feel so strongly about this decade because it was when I first became politically aware. That's natural, and so is the fondness I have for its contemporary media. Lifelong predisposition towards the music of your adolescence has been scientifically proven over and over again.
For all of the turmoil I sensed even at such a young age, I don't remember clocking much 2000s music as overtly political. American Idiot, sure. The Chicks' anti-Bush statement, of course. But pop music usually reflects its economic climate, and despite (or more accurately, because of) the oil wars, we were still in the pre-2008 boom times. The dominant vibe was unabashed excess: McMansions, bright yellow Hummer H2s, reality TV like The Apprentice, My Super Sweet 16, Cribs, and Pimp My Ride. A lot of that was and is still fun as hell—my affinity for that era's ostentatious Southern rap begs me to cite the parade of tricked-out cars in Rich Boy's "Throw Some D's" video here—but even if many of my favorite bangers reflect their larger surroundings, I'm not out here posting this clip and captioning it "TAKE ME BACK."
In 2005, album sales had dipped from their pre-Napster peak in the late '90s, but the music industry hadn't yet cratered. Today, it seems crazy that an album like Gorillaz' Demon Days, released 20 years ago this Sunday, sold eight million copies worldwide. It was dwarfed by blockbusters from Mariah Carey, 50 Cent, Coldplay, and yes, Green Day, but it still handily outsold every album by Damon Albarn's original band, Blur. It was inescapable (especially its Grammy-winning single "Feel Good Inc."), but overall pretty weird as far as pop music goes.
Demon Days was a formative album for my friends and me. "Feel Good Inc." initially pulled us in, but it was the savvy marriage of underground rap, electronic, and alt-rock, as well as the ambitious thematic gestures, that made it a fixture during late night Halo sessions fueled by 12 packs of Safeway's Mountain Dew knockoff. I registered that the album was creepy and cinematic, and that might've even been the main appeal, but I never grasped just how paranoid and dystopian Demon Days is until a recent listen.
Billed as a "virtual band" and arriving with built-in lore, Gorillaz is an inherently silly project. There are diehards who read deep into the backstory that Albarn and his co-creator, veteran comic book artist Jamie Hewlett, crafted for the cartoon characters that pantomime the musical performances and starred in the instantly iconic early music videos, but I never gave that much thought. The aesthetics were cool. It seemed like an interesting idea, but not interesting enough for me to learn that, for instance, guitarist, keyboardist and occasional vocalist Noodle is canonically a 10-year-old martial arts expert from Japan. I didn't even know that until I looked it up just now. I never would've looked it up at all if the songs didn't slap.
In reality, Gorillaz' music is made by Damon Albarn and a diverse rotating cast of collaborators. I personally don't need all of the flashy cartoon artifice, but I can see why he did. He was a Britpop legend looking to divorce himself from the reputation and expectations he'd built in the '90s in order to dabble with different genres. “It was a risk: Damon singing reggae,” Albarn told Q magazine in 2001, “But 2-D singing reggae is fine," referring to the cartoon lead vocalist. Were it just the solo project of an aging white Brit, Gorillaz couldn't pull off borderless eclecticism so smoothly; rendered semi-anonymous, Albarn was able to skillfully navigate his vast rolodex.
Gorillaz' self-titled 2001 debut was star-studded enough. Dan The Automator, the producer behind two definitive alt-rap classics, Dr. Octagonecologyst and Deltron 3030, was on board for the entire album. Fellow Deltron member Del The Funky Homosapien, as well as Cibo Matto's Miho Hatori, Buena Vista Social Club's Ibrahim Ferrer, and Talking Heads' Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, all had cameos. Demon Days leaned further into hip hop, with an ascendent Danger Mouse (fresh off his infamous Jay Z/Beatles mashup) taking Dan's place as moonlighting producer, and a who's who of left-field legends like De La Soul, MF DOOM, Pharcyde's Bootie Brown, and Roots Manuva getting songs to themselves. But there's also Neneh Cherry, Ike Turner, Happy Mondays' Shaun Ryder, and oh yeah, Dennis fucking Hopper. That ensemble is as confusing now as it was then.
Demon Days is too loosely constructed to be considered a true concept album, which is the case with every Gorillaz album, no matter how detailed the off-record backstory. That's understandable—imagine how difficult it would be to get DOOM and Dennis Hopper on the same page. On my recent listen, none of that mattered. I was bowled over by the overarching sense of barren dread.
I've listened to “Feel Good Inc." a million times. I hear the iconic cackling, I see the song title on my screen, but I never think about just how unsettling it is for a company to be called “Feel Good Incorporated." Apparently, Albarn was inspired by the “dark satanic mills” in William Blake’s “Jerusalem,” hence the recurring "windmill" in the chorus. He sticks to the theme in his opening verse, forlornly singing about a "melancholy town where we never smile," but you'd be forgiven if you miss that once Trugoy the Dove starts rapping about "Lining 'em up like ass cracks" and not stopping until you're "cheddar-headed."
That absurdity worked perfectly for the Gorillaz' image, previously defined by Del The Funky Homosapien's cartoonish turn on the first album's "Clint Eastwood." On surface level, Trugoy's lyrics may seem like a distraction, but I think his performance adds a gallows-humor angle to Demon Days' constant despair. In particular, the line "We gon' ghost town this Motown" is rich for interpretation.
Demon Days is most on-topic when Albarn is the only featured vocalist. "Last Living Souls," "O Green World," and "El Mañana" all come in the first half, and together they function as something of a thesis statement. There's still nothing resembling a linear plot, but they're all eerie songs about the loss of a more functional, fruitful society.
I envision Albarn giving his chosen collaborators vague guidelines when writing their lyrics, and then being content when each artist followed those ideas down whatever rabbit hole they landed on. Imagine a less austere version of Kanye's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy boot camp. Whether it's DOOM rapping about the death of rap on "November Has Come," Roots Manuva rapping about.. I have no clue... on "All Alone," or Bootie Brown's rapping about PTSD on "Dirty Harry," there's a pervasive mood. In the event of an apocalypse, or at least a rupturing of society, people would react differently. That's why I think Demon Days is a more effective concept album than a version of it that attempted to stick to a more defined storyline.
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While listening to Demon Days with fresh ears a few weeks ago, wandering around some of Queens' more desolate corridors, I began to think about it as part of a larger trend in the early-to-mid-2000s. Gorillaz is an enigmatic project in many ways, but Albarn was far from the only musician conjuring up dystopian visions with a vibrant-but-dark blend of pysch-pop/rock and hip hop. The aforementioned Deltron 3030, released in 2000, is a much more focused and traditional concept album, and it just so happens to include Albarn's first collaboration with Dan and Del.
I'm not going to wade too deep into the weeds of Deltron 3030's actual concept, but suffice to say that it is set in a futuristic, fucked-up world. Del, a veteran of the Bay Area's '90s underground, spits bars that split the difference between a mad scientist, an Afrofuturistic Marxist, and a galactic battle rapper. Dan doesn't stray too far from the type of beats Del was attacking as a member of Hieroglyphics, but he gets spacey and synthy with his b-boy imaginings of Wendy Carlos or Vangelis soundtracks.
Something about trippy blends of avant-garde soundscapes and warped, booming breakbeats seemed to strike a chord in the early 2000s. Deltron was by no means the progenitor nor the epicenter of this phenomenon—there are clear links back to '90s trip hop, grimy New York rap, and even perhaps Sly & The Family Stone's paranoid 1971 classic, There's A Riot Goin' On— but far-flung corners of various hip hop, electronic, and indie scenes all tapped into it. With a couple decades of distance, I look back on this weird niche of music that was dark, beat-driven, and sci-fi-inspired, but also often pop-fluent, as an essential undercurrent to the hedonism that defined the 2000s.
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Perhaps no one in rap history has been saddled with the word "dystopian" more than rapper/producer El-P. He got his start in Brooklyn's '90s underground and founded the now-legendary Def Jux label in 1999, but he's now best known as one-half of Run The Jewels. A few years ago, I wrote extensively about his 2002 solo debut, arguing that its grim outlook is more indebted to New York's actual hellishness than any imagined alternate reality. His work with Company Flow and Cannibal Ox also used dark, futuristic sounds to cast legitimate concerns in sharper relief. Mr. Lif's 2002 debut I Phantom, produced entirely by El-P, is an actual concept album, but its racial, social, and political concerns are a bit less hypothetical than Deltron's.
The El-P album that actually lines up with the 2000s continuum that I'm attempting to establish is 2007's I'll Sleep When You're Dead. Like Demon Days, it employs diverse guests in service of cross-genre experiments—members of El's immediate underground rap circle like Lif, Aesop Rock, Mr. Len, Cage, Tame One, Camu Tao, Slug, and Murs show up, but so do The Mars Volta, Chavez's Matt Sweeney, Glassjaw's Daryl Palumbo, Cat Power, and goddamn Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. El's local identity is still a crucial component, from mentions of "Mayor Doomberg" to near-constant sonic callbacks to late '80s touchstones like Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions, but it's married to a more fictitious framework. On "Habeas Corpses (Draconian Love)," for instance, El plays a guard on a prison-transport spacecraft that falls in love with one of his inmates.
It makes sense that independent rap acts like Deltron and El-P were able (and inspired) to address real-world turmoil by jumping down sci-fi rabbit holes. The fact that this aesthetic spilled over into the mainstream is more surprising. Given his success with Blur, Damon Albarn essentially had carte blanche when he inked Gorillaz' contracts with Parlophone in the UK and Virgin in the US, further reinforced by the unexpected commercial performance of the 2001 debut album.
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In 2006, Demon Days producer Danger Mouse joined forces with Atlanta singer/rapper Cee-Lo Green, a veteran of the beloved group Goodie Mob who had recently released a couple of unsuccessful solo albums. Neither one was a household name, but once a demo of a collaboration called "Crazy" started gathering buzz, the duo were quickly scooped up by Downtown Records. Released under the moniker Gnarls Barkley, "Crazy" became (I would argue) the iconic song of Summer 2006. It may have only finished at #7 on Billboard's year-end list of singles, but it charted in 24 countries, and its nine-week reign at the top of the UK Singles Chart made it the country's longest-tenured #1 in over a decade.
Is "Crazy" really that dystopian though? Its relatively sunny, aggressively catchy sound masks lyrics about madness and megalomania, but I'd hardly call it a transgressive piece of music. I bring up Gnarls Barkley not so much for their one true hit, though it is rather disturbing as far as pop smashes go, but for the album that arrived shortly afterward. Just like Demon Days, I think Gnarls Barkley's St. Elsewhere is an album whose weirdness and darkness was overshadowed by a hit single.
Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo both said they were inspired by late-'60s music, the former citing garage-pysch band The 13th Floor Elevators, the latter name-checking Sly Stone. Accordingly, St. Elsewhere isn't nearly as indebted to hip hop as either of its creators' past work ("Feng Shui" might be its sole legit "rap song"), but their shared fluency of the genre is audible even when they're covering The Violent Femmes. Yet again, this is a case of musicians in the 2000s putting some of the most confrontational, transgressive, political, and druggiest sounds in conversation with each other. St. Elsewhere song titles like "The Boogie Monster," "Online," "Necromancer," and "Storm Coming" indicate a much deeper darkness than is detectable on "Crazy," and if you still need convincing that this album fits alongside the aforementioned dystopian opuses, look no further than my favorite track, the glitchy, hopelessly depressed "Just A Thought."
That drum programming, man. If I had to name one common thread in all four albums I've highlighted thus far, it's the drums. "Dirty Harry," "Battlesong," "Up All Night," "Storm Coming"—all of them are built on booming, glitchy breakbeats. The 2000s finally saw mainstream hip hop move away from the samples of '60s and '70s R&B and funk beats that were the bedrock of rap's first two decades, and honestly, that shift towards digital programming is responsible for most of my all-time favorite hip hop production. But just as '80s beat looping was a counter-current to the live instrumentation of the time, this reimagining of classic breakbeats functioned as a creative alternative to prevailing trends.
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The last album in my unwieldy dissertation on this quasi-trend has almost nothing to do with hip hop. It makes St. Elsewhere look like a Mobb Deep album. It is, astonishingly, The Flaming Lips' 10th full-length, 2002's Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots.
If you know one song from this album, it's "Do You Realize??" It's not even a fraction of the hit that "Feel Good Inc." or "Crazy" were, but it's some acid-fried Oklahoma City weirdos' miniature version of a pop crossover. I'll be frank: even my most acrobatic prose couldn't link "Do You Realize??" to anything else in this essay. I'll be even more frank: I think it sucks.
Thankfully, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots contains 10 other songs, and they all starkly contrast the stoned wonderment of that whimsical hippie unity anthem. Yoshimi is a capital-C concept album, as you might've guessed from a title that sounds like the name of a mecha anime's season finale. It's just as apocalyptic as everything else here, and it also has an extremely loose premise: for some reason, the fate of humanity hinges on a young Japanese girl with a black belt in karate defeating neon-hued robots, she tries and fails within the first few songs, and the rest of the album is spent ruminating on death.
These themes partially explain why I'm choosing to include Yoshimi here, but the key connective tissue lies in—yes, you guessed it—the drums. The Flaming Lips had been around for over 15 years by the time they released their first true-blue critical darling, The Soft Bulletin, in 1999. On it, they strayed away from a live-band setup, most notably in the doctored treatment of multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd's drumming. The beats knocked in ways they never had on Flaming Lips albums. On Yoshimi, Drozd leans further into booming electronic grooves.
To my knowledge, this dude had no real ties to hip hop or even trip hop. He is, however, an insanely talented musician, so much so that I will fight anyone trying to argue that Lips singer Wayne Coyne is the band's leader. The low-end pulse and rhythmic dexterity of Yoshimi is an anomaly in indie-psych music, and while I enjoy its synth-heavy instrumentation and even most of Coyne's forlorn performances, the beats are what ground it as well as elevate it.
Without doing any research, I'm confident in saying that Gorillaz, Deltron, El-P, Gnarls Barkley, and Flaming Lips are all no more than two degrees of separation from each other. For all of my initial hand-wringing about the shittiness of the 2000s, it was a pretty fertile moment for cross-genre pollination. This loosely defined amalgam of hip hop, psych, and depressing futurism was never a scene, and has never been codified by a subgenre buzzword. Maybe I'm the only one who senses a commonality between all of this stuff.
I always like thinking about the perfect song choice for a flashback scene in a movie or TV show, the kind so blatant that it's accompanied by bold overlayed text that lets you know what year it is. There are infinite possible reinterpretations of the 2000s. Some would certainly call for "My Humps" or "Sexyback." If I was seeking the most realistic depiction, though, I would go for "Feel Good Inc."