Damon Albarn-as-businessman is an interesting proposition. Alex James describes how he used to pay to get his band to see gigs like Pixies, back when he was the only one with a job; nowadays he pays to fly people like Martha Wainwright or Zane Lowe to Mali for cultural exchange. My impression is that he cares a lot more about cred than about sales, but his biggest talent (outside of musical composition itself) is pinpointing the zeitgeist, i.e. those involved knew Gorillaz would work in the same way they knew Parklife would work, but it was to prove a point, not make money. That mythical creature - the visionary CEO who can't read a balance sheet. XD But what else is EMI for.
There are Albarn demos floating around from '88, before Blur properly got started (everything is on the internetz these days). They could just as well have been demos for the first Gorillaz album, or even for Think Tank. XD; Which leads one to the boggling conclusion that Graham Coxon had been strangling Damon Albarn's whiteboi funk for fifteen years... There's a central paradox to Blur, which is that Albarn writes all the songs but has no bearing on the sonic identity of the band; when Graham leaves Blur stops sounding like Blur. "Damon Albarn", musically, is and always was a very amorphous thing, like David Bowie - but Bowie is in and of himself centrally fissured and enigmatic, and Damon (to put it mildly) has a well-defined and well-broadcast personality. So the only other famous artist you could compare him to is Madonna. XD Hence the accusations of calculatedness. But I don't think the shifts are calculated, even when they (lamely) affect his wardrobe choices or whatever... It's probably more useful to think of him as one of the great pop composers in the vein of Burt Bacharach, or Yoko Kanno (who also shifts styles with ease, and sings), and all the rest as externalized mental prep.
In a follow-up article to the autobiography's publication Alex James defined Blur's true professional identities - the ones they grew into - as composer (Damon), artist (Graham), writer (himself), and politician (Dave) respectively. That is, Graham is very much an artist in the Romantic mode, whereas Damon is an artist in the Classic mode, but the former is what yr basic Western person thinks of as Arrrt these days - especially in the sphere of rock'n'roll. The effect within Blur is absolutely charming, because Blur is skewed toward Myers-Briggs NT in a way that you almost never see with rock groups, so with "You're So Great" or "Coffee & TV" there's there's this individual NF voice that rises out of nowhere and demands attention, like the sound of a spoon clinking against a glass in a loud restaurant. In the greater landscape of indie it's a lot more of a normal thing.
Graham is a Purist, too, of a weird kind - he'll do most anything as long as it's something done by white dudes with guitars. XD That is, given that he is a white dude with a guitar no one would find it weird if it weren't for the fact that he was - is - in Blur. As such, he's the "Luddite fringe"... Peter Doherty just gave an interview where he said Graham Coxon ended up playing on nearly every track of his solo album, this ought to be RIGHT BIZARRE. Hopefully good. But bizarre.
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Date: 2009-01-09 08:43 am (UTC)There are Albarn demos floating around from '88, before Blur properly got started (everything is on the internetz these days). They could just as well have been demos for the first Gorillaz album, or even for Think Tank. XD; Which leads one to the boggling conclusion that Graham Coxon had been strangling Damon Albarn's whiteboi funk for fifteen years... There's a central paradox to Blur, which is that Albarn writes all the songs but has no bearing on the sonic identity of the band; when Graham leaves Blur stops sounding like Blur. "Damon Albarn", musically, is and always was a very amorphous thing, like David Bowie - but Bowie is in and of himself centrally fissured and enigmatic, and Damon (to put it mildly) has a well-defined and well-broadcast personality. So the only other famous artist you could compare him to is Madonna. XD Hence the accusations of calculatedness. But I don't think the shifts are calculated, even when they (lamely) affect his wardrobe choices or whatever... It's probably more useful to think of him as one of the great pop composers in the vein of Burt Bacharach, or Yoko Kanno (who also shifts styles with ease, and sings), and all the rest as externalized mental prep.
In a follow-up article to the autobiography's publication Alex James defined Blur's true professional identities - the ones they grew into - as composer (Damon), artist (Graham), writer (himself), and politician (Dave) respectively. That is, Graham is very much an artist in the Romantic mode, whereas Damon is an artist in the Classic mode, but the former is what yr basic Western person thinks of as Arrrt these days - especially in the sphere of rock'n'roll. The effect within Blur is absolutely charming, because Blur is skewed toward Myers-Briggs NT in a way that you almost never see with rock groups, so with "You're So Great" or "Coffee & TV" there's there's this individual NF voice that rises out of nowhere and demands attention, like the sound of a spoon clinking against a glass in a loud restaurant. In the greater landscape of indie it's a lot more of a normal thing.
Graham is a Purist, too, of a weird kind - he'll do most anything as long as it's something done by white dudes with guitars. XD That is, given that he is a white dude with a guitar no one would find it weird if it weren't for the fact that he was - is - in Blur. As such, he's the "Luddite fringe"... Peter Doherty just gave an interview where he said Graham Coxon ended up playing on nearly every track of his solo album, this ought to be RIGHT BIZARRE. Hopefully good. But bizarre.