Gorillaz - The Sad God

I do love music of almost all genres. Gorillaz is no exception to that rule. But I had fallen out of keeping up with what Damon and Jamie were doing. So imagine my surprise and delight when I notice they dropped a new album titled The Mountain. Heavily Indian inspired and a celebration of the myriad of performers who worked with Gorillaz over the years, both living and dead. It’s a powerful album.

And I think my favorite track is The Sad God. What a song. I know it’s the outro track to the album, but I feel like it’s one of its most moving. It kinda pulls at your soul. It tugs at something deep inside and is relentless in its messaging. So let’s talk about that.

The song, as sung primarily by 2-D with a bridge by Black Thought, appears to be from the perspective of an unnamed god. Most of the lyrics are sung in couplets following the same basic structure: a gift then a betrayal. The god gave forth gifts to humanity, who in true fashion took those gifts and perverted them. The god is forced to watch its children corrupt and squander these amazing things it hands out. The sadness of the god is mourning, because it knows where this is going to lead and yet it still holds a hope mankind won’t make that mistake.

You can see it in the opening verse:

I gave you love to fill old glory

I gave you dreams, you wrote the story

I gave you white sails to reach the sun

I gave you atoms, you built a bomb.

The god gives humans all good things and instead of using them to better their lives, they turn them into war or death. Think on it a moment…the god gives “love to fill old glory.” Love as a driving force for civilization. To create and build. Each line is a gift given to man to help them create something. And then the last line hits like a train. “I gave you atoms, you built a bomb.” Complete with the classic falling nuclear warhead sound effect in the background. God gave us the fundemental particles of the universe, the wonder of creation…and we took that and made a weapon of destruction. It is the most direct (and incredibly hard to miss) statement made and it’s just the first verse. This god gave us things to build and we decided to use them to destroy.

The song continues with the god mourning its loss of faith and its departing from the world it created and lost to humanity’s corruption.

Now there is nothing and I have gone

No more mountains, no more song

No more prayers sent up into space

Only screens left to see your face

Oof. The god leaves because what is the point? It can hand out more gifts and watch them be perverted as well. But instead chooses to leave. I feel this section is a direct jab at our over reliance on electronic technology in the modern world (again, it isn’t being subtle about it). Again, the last line summarizes the overall tone of the verse. We no longer look at one another directly. Everything we do, including you reading this, is via a screen filtering it for us. And what happens if that fails? There is no longer a ‘god’ there to help us. That god, however you want to interpret it, has left. The only thing left to us is a simulation of what was.

Look at how certain political groups have determined for us what is right or wrong to read, view, listen to, etc. If we were to ever lose access to the internet, a very massively large chunk of humanity is doomed. So much of what we do is linked to computer tech that we’d be lost without it. I make no secrets about my political thoughts (and niether do Gorillaz and if you think otherwise you’ve not been paying attention to their music for the last twenty years). I very much dislike the right-wing ideology of exclusion. I’m sure there are going to be righties who claim otherwise but you guys are worried about what the genitals of the person going into a bathroom are. And only if they are dangly bits. You never seem to freak out if a trans male uses the men’s room. Ever.

Ahem. Tangent. That’s a rant for another day. My point, that admittadly got lost, is should we ever experience an apocalyptic level event that removes our access to our screens, that will be our downfall as a species.

I’m gonna admit I dislike rap. I get there’s a technique to it, but I’ve never really enjoyed it. And I get that Damon seems to really enjoy it. I don’t at all. So the first few listens I’d kind of ironically turn my brain off for Black Thought’s verse. But bits and pieces broke through and I have an idea what he’s trying to convey. There’s a bit of an uplift here, a counter to the god of the song, a bit of hope for humanity that the god is not seeing. But also I kinda feel like this verse just goes on for a bit too long. It makes up a majority of the lyrics of the song.

Yeah, I got the intel through the inkwell

You do well when you think well

And people are more likely to try to give you hell when you bring hell

It ain’t got to begin well, but it’s all well if it end well

And then well, a man’s still gotta mean well and intend well, even in hell

So we’ve a cascade of “well” wordplay that brings some actually brilliant imagery to the song. “intel through the inkwell” returns us to knowledge gained through writing. Not typing nonsense on a screen (I know, ironic) but actually written and shared wisdom. This follows into the idea that mankind really needs to be better, because it doesn’t matter if we are here or in hell, if we do nothing but hate on one another we aren’t going to survive. We need to help one another, which is in stark contrast to the god’s observation that we are doing the exact opposite.

You were dating misery’s friend of a friend, girl

The guard fell

And light broke through the hard shell of an incel

Trapped inside of a statue

Scratched vinyl in a back room

Accumulating in the vacuum

And ruminating in the bathroom

This section seems to be talking about a person so bitter and resentful that even the smallest sliver of hope or kindness coming from that is something to behold. They are a broken shell of what they used to be. “Trapped inside of a statue” evokes an image of being trapped in place, frozen in time, unable to move forward. “Scratched vinyl in a back room” describes something that was once beautiful now marred and scarred. Ending with the subject just walled off from everything and brooding on their own in isolation.

This section is describing the current state of the titular sad god. I was thinking it meant people in general, but it honestly desribes the sad god perfectly. Like a person just getting out of a bad relationship, they have walled themselves in and are brooding alone, broken, defeated, and devestated at what their creation has wrought. Could it refer to humanity as well? Sure. We could lay claim that each verse pushes the idea that humanity is stagnating more and more as time moves forward and certain groups stymy progress, but I really feel this is meant as a commentary on the god’s giving up on humanity.

Just an illustration in a tattoo

Blood moon, blue black moon

Even if they let me into heaven, I would pro’ly just move back soon

That Dracula Nosferatu, ooh, la-la Sasson

But now we are back to humanity and some more brilliant wordplay. The first line references surface level decoration. “Beauty is only skin deep” is how the saying goes. Tattoos are meant to be permanant, lasting forever. But an illustration of one on the skin will just disappear. And then we get the wham line. Even if they let me into heaven, I would probably just move back soon. Humanity has decided they don’t want the paradise this god has made. They’d rather have what they’ve created themselves, even if it involves twisting and perverting the gifts that same god gave them. But what I think is even more telling, the humans don’t understand that this was meant to BE their paradise, their heaven. And they squandered it and made their own gods. the last words of that last line? Sasson Jeans made a really infamous commercial in the late 1970s. The new god is commercialism.

Les Miserables, one little nod at you and I got you

Type shit to lay a clap track to

I can’t say it ain’t factual

“The master remained natural”

Should be the answer when they ask you

Of my advantage

The paradise you were handed

Like a pair of dice

And I’m living with uninhibited, unlimited terabytes of—

I’m gonna go out on a limb and say this whole section is the god’s response. Les Miserables is primarily about the suffering of people, and their eventual redemption. The god sees this and realizes humanity is doing this to themselves without realization. But instead of turning back and explaining to them, it stays on the sidelines and observes. Neutral, maybe a little cold. This god handed mankind a paradise, taking a chance on them, and lost. Now it is surrounded by unlimited terabytes of…what? Noise? Content? A flood of useless information that we cannot possibly keep up with, that overwhelms even the god itself. And it never stops. We are melting our brains with useless pointless videos and chats and hate rants (YES I SEE THE IRONY) and it never ends. And it’s never going to end.

Whew. Like I said, that verse takes up a huge chunk of the runtime and it’s so tonally different than 2-D’s section that I often found myself ignoring it. But when you sit down at look at it…yea. A lot to unpack. but let’s finish this up.

I gave you blue skies

Sweet fallacy

I gave you poppies for malady

I gave you white cells, you weaponized

I gave you garlands, you closed your eyes

In paradise

We’re back to 2-D as the Sad God giving us the final lines of the song. Lamenting all that it has given us and how we’ve just turned it around backwards. And I’ve seen this section interpreted many ways. I’m going to describe one way I’ve seen most often, then I’ll throw my take in the mix.

So the first way I’ve seen it interpreted by others. This is the god admitting the beauty and gifts it bestowed were a lie from the start. A false hope. It’s a god, it must be omniscient so it knows what humanity is going to do, right? It handed out all these gifts and we instead turn them into drugs to get high, weapons of war, and then turn away from this god in anger because of it, making us hypocrites. Bombs, drugs, jeans, rampart consumerism, screens instead of faces… And this is the paradise we are left with. Or rather, the paradise mankind has made for itself.

I dislike this take. It makes the god the badguy out of spite. Because why would a loving god allow us to do all this with the gifts it gave us? Well, you have two options: because the god is NOT loving or because the god doesn’t care. Niether fits with the first half of the song, in my opinion.

I prefer to think this is the god finally admitting to itself that giving humanity all these things was a mistake. “I gave them these beautiful things, they will use and honor them for the betterment of all.” Sweet fallacy. The god thought things would turn out great if it never intervened, if humans saw the beauty it sees. It was wrong.

The opening verse backs this up. It’s a back and forth of “I gave, you wasted…” but then we get the closing verse where the god finally admits “I was wrong to think this would work.” Humanity was flawed from the start…but so was the god. And if the god made humans (no indication but lets assume so) then that flaw would carry over. The god was blaming humans for their wasted potential, up until the last verse where it finally blames itself and its own shortcomings.

Then the last two lines, the ones that I tend to tear up at each time. A lot of people seem to think the whole garland closed eyes exchange is humans turning away from the god and to their own paradise. I think it’s the god mourning the death of humanity as a whole. The god is grieving a child it saw grow, make mistakes, and ultimately die. “I gave you life, I gave you gifts, I watched you grow and struggle and make mistakes but you lived nonetheless. And now I am watching you, my creation, my children, die and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.” But that peace, that celebration of life, is the true paradise the god wanted for humans from the start. Where ever their soul lies, hopefully now it has found what it is looking for.

And it fits with the theme of death and rebirth the whole album follows. It’s no secret both creators lost their respective fathers within weeks of one another. Watching someone you care about deeply die knowing you cannot prevent it, despite everything you tried and every remedy you offered to them is the theme behind the entire song. It’s a song about grieving as much as it is a commentary. My folks are getting older. I’m getting older. Death is something that I am quickly finding I cannot just ignore any longer. This song is a reminder of that.

And, of course, this is a personal interpretation. The great thing about Gorillaz is while a large chunk of their lyrics are very obvious in their meaning, there is an equally large chunk that is not. Everyone can come up with their own ideas. If you’re willing to discuss it civilally and without getting heated, I’m always open for chatting about the various meanings we apply to songs.