White Flag

White Flag
White Flag (Escape To Plastic Beach Tour, with Bashy & Kano)
White Flag (Africa Express live 2016, with Bashy)

"I went down to the studio... I spat on another track which they ended up changing and I didn't end up on... he got me into the studio again and me and Bashy come down and we heard the beat and he told me the concept of the album "Plastic Beach"... and we just got together and put some lyrics to it. He already had like a National Orchestra on it for, like, Arabic music... and it's come back to, you know, two MC's going back to back on it and it's really just a mad, diverse track and just a mad contrast between the music and the rapping on it."
- Kano

"(The intro to) "White Flag" was recorded in Beirut in March 2009... (I kidnapped Bashy and Kano) and dumped them on the beach and held a mic up to them and this is (what) they spit."
- Murdoc Niccals

"White Flag", the second track off of "Plastic Beach", is a joint track starring UK grime rappers Bashy and Kano. It remains to be one of the more underrated tracks in the band's catalogue of albums   and is a very good example of how Gorillaz are excellent at breaking down the genre barrier most musicians are afraid to cross.

Damon Albarn had worked with the two rappers before, having them both on several Africa Express gigs he was doing around 2008. However, Damon has always had the closer working relationship to the more famous rapper of the pair, Kano. The first of their many collaborations on record is the fist pumping London anthem "Feel Free", which ended up being so good that a lyric from Damon Albarn's chorus on it ended up becoming the title of the album it was made for, "London Town".

With the pair creating a wonderful single for one of Kano's records, it was obvious that the two wanted to work together again. So, when Damon Albarn was recording the album that eventually evolved into the third Gorillaz record, "Carousel", Damon invited Kano over to the studio to collar on a track. Like most of the guests who Damon invites to work on a track, Damon played Kano a series of instrumentals asking him to choose one to rap on. The track Kano recorded for "Carousel" remains unknown and the track might not have even made it on to the final product of "Plastic Beach". However, once the album became a Gorillaz project, Damon invited Kano and Bashy to 13 Studios to record on a track he made that he thought the duo would be perfect for.

The intro to the song was recorded in Beirut by the National Orchestra For Arabic Music. Just like with the album's in-house orchestra, sinfonia ViVA, Damon recorded an album's worth of material with them. However, the Middle Eastern elements of the album were soon abandoned in favor of more cinematic and electronic sounds making "White Flag" the only track to survive from these sessions. The intro is calm and relaxing with a driving percussion beat, only a band like Gorillaz would then have two grime rappers spit some rhymes over this.

The beat on this track is one of the best instrumentals on the album, the beat takes influence from many different areas of reggae (which is a genre that Damon seems to want to include at least one track of per Gorillaz album). The drum machine and synths Damon play suggest vague dancehall influences while the in and out bass playing of Paul Simonon fits in perfectly among some of the dubby bass lines Junior Dan played on the first record (he might have even original played on this track as Junior Dan once said that he was invited to play bass on a couple of "Plastic Beach" tracks but none of his recordings were ever utilized on the album). As the song gets more chaotic, the synths schizophrenically beep, bubble and buzz as if a contestant has chosen the wrong option on a game show and his penalty is a trial by fire. But what are Bashy and Kano talking about on this track?

Bashy and Kano felt uncomfortable about rapping on this track because of how complex and experimental the beat was. The two of them had never done something like this before, and on top of that, both Bashy and Kano had just caught a whiff of a nasty flu that was going around. But despite being sick, the duo deliver an awesome performance that ties into one go the album's ideas. In order to explain the amount of mainly guest anchored songs from the "Carousel" sessions that would appear on the third Gorillaz record, Jamie Hewlett came up with the concept of having the band's fictional bassist Murdoc Niccals send his cyborg duplicate of guitarist Noodle out to kidnap artists, so they could appear on the new Gorillaz record. So in "White Flag", Bashy and Kano rap about their first reactions to waking up on the strange colorful island located in the middle of nowhere known as Plastic Beach. Bashy is mainly confused ("I ain't lost and this ain't shipwrecked") and is in horror of all the garbage the island is made out of ("This ain't Atlantis, are you sure? I nearly suffocated when I touched the shore." "I don't wanna be left sleeping from all the diseases I am breathing"). But soon, Bashy bumps into his rapper friend Kano ("and up the road, you'll never guess who I saw"), and Kano thinks he just woke up after a wild night on the beach ("just found it Nemo", "VIP", "hi little day, sex on the beach, wanna try for a baby?"). However, once the two realize they have no escape they decide to remain calm and just go with the flow. Make peace with it, "White flag? white flag". Soon the dub infested beat merges with the Syrian orchestral intro forming a peace between genres of many different kinds. Maybe Gorillaz are, in a way, kinda like musical diplomats, using their songs as negotiation in order to make peace between different musical camps. It's all just one thing, ya know? It's all just music. The song ends with the band and their many guests (both captive and willing) just chilling out on Plastic Beach, "no war, no guns, no corps", at least for now...

On the "Escape To Plastic Beach Tour", the song featured an extended intro from the National Orchestra Of Arabic Music, who toured with the band just to play this one song. When it came top for Bashy and Kano to come out, the band went ape shit (pun intended) on the groove. Cass Browne and Gabriel Mauris Wallace pound on the song's tight beat adding a looser element to it, Paul Simonon plays the bass dutifully dubby just like on record, keyboardists Mike Smith and Jesse Hackett go wild on the buzzing synths and the Arabic orchestra even improvs on top of the rap section. Damon Albarn would spend the course of the song waving a giant white flag around the stage, taking a break from being the bandleader and just having a jolly, good time. The song was revived for future Africa Express shows where the electronic beat was stripped and featured many African rappers struttin' their stuff on top of an orchestral groove. Bashy even came out once to do with them (although Kano surprisingly never returned to the Africa Express shows to do it with him). It remains a mystery to me that the song has yet to be revived on the band's current "Humanz Tour" as Kano was there to freestyle on "Clint Eastwood" at the band's "Demon Dayz" festival in the UK, and Bashy made a cameo in the animated video for Phase 4 single, "Strobelite". If I were to make a guess, I would say that the band haven't played it with them because of the lack of Syrian musicians on the tour, which detracts a lot of weight from the song (but they have played pre-recorded loops of strings for some of the"Demon Days" tracks on the tour, so the true reason why they haven't played it, remains a mystery). Damon Albarn continues to have a great recording history with Kano, recording two more tracks with him for his grimey records, the melancholic "Deep Blues" and the driving "Bassment" (which was not only another Kano/Damon collar that managed to get a lyric from it as the title of Kano's then record, "Method To The Madness", but Kano often did a verse from the song on "Clint Eastwood" while on the "Escape To Plastic Beach Tour").

Now this song is one of the more disliked from the "Plastic Beach" record, and I think this is because the first Gorillaz album track (aside from "Rock The House") to not feature any Damon vocals on it. However, I think this is undeserved because while Damon's vocals are a huge part of the Gorillaz sound, the beat is clearly his work mainly with it's genre defying combination of hip hop, reggae and world music. "White Flag" is one of Gorillaz best tunes from this era and manages to do something that not a lot of Gorillaz tracks in the future, which is keep the idea that the track is still made by the animated characters without the usage of Damon's vocal presence as 2D.