Plastic Beach
I’m not one to do this, but it’s time for a promo:
Recently, I became aware of the fact that the band Gorillaz had released a new album, entitled “Plastic Beach.” I was instantly intrigued, and even more so when I noticed that the NOAA Marine Debris program had the album featured in one of its weekly newsletters. “What is so special about this album?” I thought…thinking that the album would be pretty awesome and that the title was just some bizarre coincidence.
No coincidence. Gorillaz have, through this crazy form of story-telling, carefully handcrafted each song to have a different meaning (and different sounds too…none of the 16 tracks sound the same!) with the central theme being the plastic debris problem facing all oceans today. What impressed me the most was just how accurate and detailed everything is. To name a few examples:
The cover image depicts a seemingly beautiful beach, located in the middle of a great expanse of ocean. Pan down under the water and we see that the entire island is actually made up of garbage found floating in the ocean.
Track 6 is entitled “Superfast Jellyfish.” Basically, it’s about fast food. And because we’ve emptied the ocean of all edible delights and polluted the water with chemicals and trash, soon there will be nothing left to eat except jellyfish. Fast-food jellyfish (gross…). The fact that Gorillaz nailed this issue on the head completely blew my mind.
I could probably gush more and more about how incredibly amazing this album is, but it’s late, and I have work in the morning. Basically, what I’m trying to get at here is that I’m eternally grateful for media, whether it be music, art, news…all these things can be used to get a message across to the masses. And what better way to tell someone about an issue than through the art of making music?
It’s extremely difficult to describe the way this album affected me in words, but I guess maybe that’s just what music does. It stirred up this passion to want to get this message out there, that there are a lot of problems facing the worlds’ oceans today, and we need to do something about it.
So check it out. Listen. Tell your friends.
HUGE thank you to the Gorillaz for making my day.
