How Gorillaz Play with Self-Presentation

Kyle York

Gorillaz are not real. As we all know, Gorillaz’ band members—2-D, Murdoc, Noodle, and Russel—are animated characters. Their early video album Phase One: Celebrity Take Down shows the four as dark silhouettes wielding scythes, ready for a coup of celebrity culture. But what sort of coup is happening here? I think it’s this: Gorillaz are the personas of bandmates without the illusion that these personas are authentic.

Bands, just like other celebrities, face the challenge of being both appealing and authentic. The whole risk of authenticity, though, is that one’s authentic self might not be appealing to people. Authenticity, after all, is supposed to be a mode of self-presentation that reflects one’s unique and true self—the self that does not conform to the social order to gain acceptance. But, of course, celebrities do need to be appealing (at least usually).

One, therefore, must be appealing without making it seem like one is interested in being appealing. Otherwise you’re a poser. This paradox had become more apparent in the 1980s and 1990s. As the philosopher Hans-Georg Moeller has pointed out, the 1980s was a time that began to reflect on the self-contradictions in the supposed naturalness and authenticity of 1960s hippie culture. After all, if the hippies were all supposed to embody individual authenticity, why did they all look the same? If they were supposed to embody pure naturalness, why did they have a particular style?

Moeller suggested that the fashion of punk musicians was, in reaction to this, self-consciously artificial and cultivated. Nonetheless, authenticity was an important value to them. The punk is diametrically opposed to the poser. Their selves were both self-conscious and self-expressing creations. Gorillaz represent another step in this dialectic. In what Moeller calls our present profile-based culture, Gorillaz have been particularly successful in turning the public profile—the public self-presentation of one’s persona—into a canvas of artistic creation. There is no pretense of authenticity. Gorillaz’ backstories and lore are as cartoonish as their visual style, like the story of how Noodle joined the group when “a FedEx freight container from Japan was delivered to their doorstep and out jumped a mysterious amnesiac 10-year-old wielding a Gibson Les Paul.” Even 2-D’s name calls attention to his artifice.

Gorillaz’ rebellion against the norm of seeming authentic is in many senses liberating. Their self-presentation, to some extent, uses irony to resist a phony standard of forced authenticity. Once free, however, the challenge is to not become trapped within the sort of irony that made this freedom possible. Moeller thinks that we ought to stop criticizing the behavior of people profile-based culture in terms of authenticity, since it doesn’t aim at authenticity. Perhaps we ought to judge profile-focused people less harshly, living as they do under the pressures of profile-based culture. But that doesn’t mean we ought to endorse the norms of profile-based culture, and there seem to be many good reasons to want to be authentic. One of these reasons, Søren Kierkegaard thought, is that someone whose only “occupation consists of preserving [one’s] hiding place” with irony risks not having a self at all. Although irony is an effective attitude at revealing hypocrisy and inauthenticity, it does not itself stand for any values or meanings.

And indeed, Gorillaz is not just an embodiment of profile-based culture. They’re also a satire of it. We know that the public profiles of artists are, at best, cartoonishly rendered versions of their true selves. This form of satire, though, allows for showcasing as much as hiding. By making the public profile a self-conscious artwork, Gorillaz’ creators Damon Albarn and artist Jamie Hewlett have allowed themselves to fall into the background. This invisibility also allows for seamless incorporation traditions and styles into Gorillaz, from hip hop and synth-pop (Demon Days, Plastic Beach) to alternative rock and traditional Chinese music (D-Sides, Monkey). As a result, I think, we can relate to Damon and Jamie through their artwork and the autonomous aesthetic worlds they create, including the aesthetically delightful Gorillaz themselves.

Kyle York is currently a Ph.D. student in philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Kyle’s work has appeared in The Journal of Social Philosophy, The Journal of Value Inquiry, and Philosophy Now.

Suggested Readings:

Wallace, David Foster, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13:2, 1993.

Möller, Hans-Georg, and Paul J. D’Ambrosio. You and Your Profile Identity after Authenticity. Columbia University Press, 2021.

Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/Or: A Fragment of Life. Edited by Victor Eremita. Translated by Alastair Hannay, Penguin Books, 2004.