After two top-selling albums created under the guise of a cartoon band, artist and designer Jamie Hewlett and Blur's Damon Albarn followed Gorillaz with, no shit, Monkey. The simian in question is the lead character in Journey to the West, one of China's oldest and most endearing stories, a tale originally written in the late 16th century that's considered one of the country's four great novels. Oh and, with the help of director Checn Shi-Zeng, Albarn and Hewlett adapted it into a modern opera.
On paper these ideas-- audacious, uncommercial, completely uncool-- should bomb. But Albarn has always had a conceptual bent to his projects, and after successfully acting as a conduit between African and Western music, heading a supergroup that actually worked, and the shock success of Gorillaz, it might be time to stop underestimating him. Albarn's detractors, granted, have plenty of ammunition-- after years of tabloid celebrity at home, he's aimed to turn himself into a panglobal everyman, a process that raises specters of cultural tourism and inauthenticity. Yet even if one were to sniff at his musical output, it's difficult to locate the mercenary or imagistic motivations in issuing low-key compilations of African music on his Honest Jon's label or attempting to tackle Chinese opera-- where's the superficial reward there?
And yet despite being relatively leftfield to the British public, this collection of Anglo-Sino music, Journey to the West, debuted in the UK top five. With African music en vogue throughout the West, and with the possibility China could dominate this century, Albarn's cultural eye seems more prophetic than exploitative. In any event, one listen to Journey-- a record that, even by Hewlett's admission you might only want to listen to once a year-- should dispel the notions that this is some sort of token nod.
Wisely choosing not to release a soundtrack of their actual opera, Albarn and Hewlett (in conjunction with the UK Chinese Music Ensemble) have instead re-arranged and re-articulated the production's music for this CD release. The project still has the feel of an accompanying piece, with titles referencing the dramatization of the Chinese story and plenty of incidental music, but it also works on a satisfying level as an experimental work or as art-pop. Written in the rigid five-note pentatonic scale that dominates many ancient folk musics (including China's), the record is inherently offkilter to those accustomed to more backbeat-oriented rock. Albarn leans heavily on electronic tones, giving the record an agile sound even at its darkest.
It's also surprisingly easy to locate Albarn's melodic gifts within these songs, whether in the more passive tracks or underneath both the guttural vocalizations of "Confessions of a Pig" or the languid tones of "The Living Sea". Some of the more interstitial tracks bear more obvious Albarn touches-- the panoramic "Sandy the River Demon" or the electro-noir of "O Mi to Fu" could fit on a Gorillaz record, while "I Love Buddha" lightly recalls the knees-up oomp-pa instrumentals that colored Blur's Britpop-era work. The set works best, however, when it hews closest to Western pop-- the stirring "Heavenly Peach Banquet" could actually be a blog hit, and "Monkey Bee" bears the fingerprints of many of the modern art-rock bands we champion.
This ability to weave his stylistic tics into his now heavily collaborative projects functions almost as breadcrumbs for those still willing to follow Albarn from record to record. Rather than writing from the perspective of a band-- or a brand name, as he arguably did with Blur-- his more exploratory instincts and nimbleness have lately come to the fore. In a sense, Blur threatened at one point to run headlong into self-parody and it seemed at the time (and still does) that it was guitarist Graham Coxon who most deftly steered them away from that dead end. If so, perhaps it was a lesson Albarn absorbed, and relatively outside of the public eye-- either by hiding behind the mask of Gorillaz or working with others, he now seems more free to carve a musical identity rather than a celebrity one. (Ironically, this was a frequent complaint I heard about The Good, the Bad & the Queen project-- a record that, to my mind, remains sorely underappreciated because its tones, pace, and tenor was closer to an Albarn solo record than the work of its creators.)
Albarn wound up moving from articulating the decay of Great Britain on GBQ to exploring the roots of an ascendent cultural and political force, and the resulting album is often difficult, completely unexpected, and at time precious; with increased spins, it becomes a rather settled, even comfortable, listen. "If you don't know it now, then you will do," Albarn warned on GBQ's "History Song", and one gets the same feeling from Monkey-- that while this is likely to be an introduction to the unfamiliar for many of those who buy it, we'll all become much more versed in Chinese culture over the next two or three decades.
