Orchestral Intro/Welcome To The World Of Plastic Beach (Visual)
Pirate's Progress/Welcome To The World Of The Plastic Beach (Escape To Plastic Beach Tour)
Well, here we go, here is the intro to the flawed but brilliant concept album, "Plastic Beach", the first Gorillaz album to come out after what was supposed to be the group's farewell in 2006. It's a great track that contains 2 parts and one of the few tracks that seemed to come to it's full realization in terms of production.
Let's get started, shall we?
Pirate's Progress
"I needed something other-worldly to open this record. This album's been a while in the making and this needed to be The Big Reveal."
- Murdoc Niccals
The album was meant to open with "Pirate's Progress", a four minute orchestral piece done completely by the album's in-house orchestra, sinfonia ViVA. It was a beautiful and soothing piece and would have been a subtle way to ring in the band's return (as Murdoc stated in the quote above).
At the tail end of the track, it included an orchestral version of the instrumental to the track "Pirate Jet". Now this is important to the album because "Pirate Jet" is the album's grand finale and part of the song's power is that it would have tied up the album using a part of what would have been the album's intro melody, making the two tracks bookends of sorts. Where as "Pirate's Progress" is relaxing, "Pirate Jet" is chaotic and unstable. However the record company forced Damon to fade the track down to under a minute and a half, leaving the intro to only be a shadow of what it was supposed to be. This decision is part of the reason why a lot of the fanbase don't understand the point of "Pirate Jet", but we'll get to that underrated piece of music later.
"Pirate's Progress" would end up becoming a bonus track on the digital version of the record, and it's edited release as "Orchestral Intro" would end up contributing to the album's many flaws during a listen. When played live, it would be played in it's full glory as the intro to the show, often ending with Damon ringing one of his giant bells to stop the song (the giant bell would become another one of his instrumental obsessions during Phase 3, along with the vocoder and weird synthesizers like the "horn" preset on his omnichord and, of course, the doncamatic).
Welcome To The World Of The Plastic Beach
"This is a proper soundtrack: brass-laden, pimped out, plastic funk, mixing the organic with the plastic to form something new and shiny."
- Murdoc Niccals
Transitioning from the intro, is the sound of a brass band revving up. This brass band is Chicago's Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, who act as the album's in-house brass band (another drawback to the label's rush of the production, some of these guy's features on the record never made it to the final stage). Soon Damon Albarn lays down a simple drum machine loop, while cinematic synthesizers sustain throughout the record filtered in all sorts of effects such as "wah wah" and the journey begins.
A voice reveals himself as the sort of narrator (or guide) of this track and that is rapper Snoop Dogg, who drops his name along with the Gorillaz name (accompanying the names with a reference to another simian themed project, "Planet Of The Apes"). Underneath him and the synths is an awesome bass riff which is later joined by a funked out drum riff revealing to us this album's tragically under utilized rhythm section (again, the label): bassist Paul Simonon of The Clash and Damon's own The Good, The Bad And The Queen; and soon to be Gorillaz veteran, drummer Gabriel Mauris Wallace. Soon Damon's synths mimic Paul's breathtaking bass riff and the song is a blaze, becoming one of the funkiest joints Gorillaz had ever put out to date.
Now Snoop Dogg doesn't exactly have a perfect record when it comes to his releases. Don't get me wrong, the guy has made some very good albums, but a few looks at some of his more recent stuff (both musically and in other media) will leave you holding your nose. However, Snoop Dogg really delivers on this track making it one of his best performances of the 21st century. His lines are always followed by Damon Albarn smoothly delivering vocoded 2D soul vocals, "oooooooohhhh, just like that, yea" making for a perfect storm of electronic G-funk smarmy Snoop Dogg has the exact sort of skill set for.
After about a minute of the band just jamming out to that superb instrumental, Snoop delivers his first line, "The revolution will be televised". It acts as a sad response to Gil Scott-Heron's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised", the world is no longer fighting the media and powers that be, it instead revels in the artificial things we have all around. It's a sad reality, he compares the world to "Wonderland" saying that all the artificial plasticity is a curious thing to him. However despite his optimism and relaxed tone, he encourages you to fight like Mr. Scott-Heron once did, "swim with the sharks", "turn the wheels up, real tough". While you do that, he will revel in this artificial world of Plastic Beach, Point Nemo he was taken to, "drinkin' lemonade in the shade, getting blazed with the gang of pilgrims. Yea, just like that"("pilgrims" meaning the ones who discovered the land, so in other words he's getting high with 2D and Murdoc, who discovered the beach and took all the album's guests to it).
Now why is Snoop telling you to fight even though he is clearly enjoying the superficiality of it all, cause as he says he's a complicated guy, "like math". I mean, are we really gonna expect Snoop Dogg, the man who has advertised pretty much every project known to man and has guest starred on many different manufactured TV shows, to tell us to fight the system and the corporations that run it? No because he lives off of that stuff, but that doesn't mean he sees all that's wrong with it. In a way, maybe he's gaming the system, or maybe I'm just overthinking all of this and Snoop Dogg just got really high and spit these lines on the track, who knows. Soon Snoop Dogg delivers a somewhat off putting reverb laden cackle as the beat comes back in full force, joined by frantic synthesizers and a electric guitar line (also played by Damon using a slide) that's constantly ascending in pitch until it becomes an almost ear piercing siren type sound. As the track fades out, Snoop says "welcome to the world of the Plastic Beach" which not only welcomes us to the album's fictional journey through the Gorillaz new HQ but says how in the age we live in with all that is around us being superficial, the whole world is kind of like a plastic beach in a way. Life imitates art, kinda eery, don't ya think?
The duo of songs was used to open to "Escape To Plastic Beach Tour", where the song's funk groove was expanded upon with the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble doubling Paul Simonon's bass and Damon Albarn adding in some smooth "wah wah" soaked clavinet lines. Cass Browne doubles Gabriel Mauris Wallace's drumming making the song more intense in certain parts (especially during the outro where the menacing guitar comes in). What's weird about the live shows however is that despite Snoop Dogg being there to guest on a mashup of the band's"Clint Eastwood" and his own "Drop It Like It's Hot" at certain points during the band's tour, he never came out to do this song with them (I mean they were able to get him to shoot a video for it, so why wouldn't he play it live with them? It remains a mystery.) Production wise (excluding the orchestral intro), "Welcome To The World" is one of the few tracks that perfectly combines the organic and electronic instrumentation without stripping too much of the organic elements out of the final mix. It remains to be a powerful opener for the record and one of the best tracks from this era of the band's work.
A voice reveals himself as the sort of narrator (or guide) of this track and that is rapper Snoop Dogg, who drops his name along with the Gorillaz name (accompanying the names with a reference to another simian themed project, "Planet Of The Apes"). Underneath him and the synths is an awesome bass riff which is later joined by a funked out drum riff revealing to us this album's tragically under utilized rhythm section (again, the label): bassist Paul Simonon of The Clash and Damon's own The Good, The Bad And The Queen; and soon to be Gorillaz veteran, drummer Gabriel Mauris Wallace. Soon Damon's synths mimic Paul's breathtaking bass riff and the song is a blaze, becoming one of the funkiest joints Gorillaz had ever put out to date.
Now Snoop Dogg doesn't exactly have a perfect record when it comes to his releases. Don't get me wrong, the guy has made some very good albums, but a few looks at some of his more recent stuff (both musically and in other media) will leave you holding your nose. However, Snoop Dogg really delivers on this track making it one of his best performances of the 21st century. His lines are always followed by Damon Albarn smoothly delivering vocoded 2D soul vocals, "oooooooohhhh, just like that, yea" making for a perfect storm of electronic G-funk smarmy Snoop Dogg has the exact sort of skill set for.
After about a minute of the band just jamming out to that superb instrumental, Snoop delivers his first line, "The revolution will be televised". It acts as a sad response to Gil Scott-Heron's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised", the world is no longer fighting the media and powers that be, it instead revels in the artificial things we have all around. It's a sad reality, he compares the world to "Wonderland" saying that all the artificial plasticity is a curious thing to him. However despite his optimism and relaxed tone, he encourages you to fight like Mr. Scott-Heron once did, "swim with the sharks", "turn the wheels up, real tough". While you do that, he will revel in this artificial world of Plastic Beach, Point Nemo he was taken to, "drinkin' lemonade in the shade, getting blazed with the gang of pilgrims. Yea, just like that"("pilgrims" meaning the ones who discovered the land, so in other words he's getting high with 2D and Murdoc, who discovered the beach and took all the album's guests to it).
Now why is Snoop telling you to fight even though he is clearly enjoying the superficiality of it all, cause as he says he's a complicated guy, "like math". I mean, are we really gonna expect Snoop Dogg, the man who has advertised pretty much every project known to man and has guest starred on many different manufactured TV shows, to tell us to fight the system and the corporations that run it? No because he lives off of that stuff, but that doesn't mean he sees all that's wrong with it. In a way, maybe he's gaming the system, or maybe I'm just overthinking all of this and Snoop Dogg just got really high and spit these lines on the track, who knows. Soon Snoop Dogg delivers a somewhat off putting reverb laden cackle as the beat comes back in full force, joined by frantic synthesizers and a electric guitar line (also played by Damon using a slide) that's constantly ascending in pitch until it becomes an almost ear piercing siren type sound. As the track fades out, Snoop says "welcome to the world of the Plastic Beach" which not only welcomes us to the album's fictional journey through the Gorillaz new HQ but says how in the age we live in with all that is around us being superficial, the whole world is kind of like a plastic beach in a way. Life imitates art, kinda eery, don't ya think?
The duo of songs was used to open to "Escape To Plastic Beach Tour", where the song's funk groove was expanded upon with the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble doubling Paul Simonon's bass and Damon Albarn adding in some smooth "wah wah" soaked clavinet lines. Cass Browne doubles Gabriel Mauris Wallace's drumming making the song more intense in certain parts (especially during the outro where the menacing guitar comes in). What's weird about the live shows however is that despite Snoop Dogg being there to guest on a mashup of the band's"Clint Eastwood" and his own "Drop It Like It's Hot" at certain points during the band's tour, he never came out to do this song with them (I mean they were able to get him to shoot a video for it, so why wouldn't he play it live with them? It remains a mystery.) Production wise (excluding the orchestral intro), "Welcome To The World" is one of the few tracks that perfectly combines the organic and electronic instrumentation without stripping too much of the organic elements out of the final mix. It remains to be a powerful opener for the record and one of the best tracks from this era of the band's work.
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