Feel Good Inc. is the most famous Gorillaz song – and the perfect example of Damon Albarn’s ability to connect with the masses with genuinely innovative and authentic creations.
A fierce but irresistibly catchy critique of the music industry and consumer capitalism, Feel Good Inc. was the lead single from the second Gorillaz album, Demon Days.
This highly politicised song hit No.2 in the UK singles chart, went Top 10 in 13 different countries, and remains a classic to this day – with over a billion views collected on YouTube to date.
Zooming over a hazy, oppressive post-apocalyptic landscape into the lofty tower that houses Feel Good Inc., the opening sequence of the song's video plunges you into a world in which mindless pop music is pumped out for profit by industry-manufactured cartoon characters.
The track’s title reflects the corporate drive for vacuous, mood-lifting music, a distraction tactic designed to line the pockets of investors. Lyrics like “You got a new horizon, it's ephemeral style/A melancholy town where we never smile” paint a doomed picture of this consumerist world, while the joyless faces of the cartoon characters (band members Noodle, 2-D, Russel, and Murdoc) show the disconnect between artist and creation.
This is the genius of Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s pioneering project. Gorillaz were true innovators: the world’s first animated band, portrayed onstage via holograms, pushing a completely fresh way of presenting artistic identity, with a unique, constantly-evolving sound blending elements of hip-hop, punk, reggae, folk, and various electronic genres.
Given all this, the huge commercial and cultural impact of Feel Good Inc. was never a sure thing.
Danger Mouse, the US hip-hop producer who worked closely with Albarn across the project (including on Feel Good Inc.), stated: “It was this really out-there record.”
In 2005, Danger Mouse had just come to prominence following the release of his record The Grey Album, which grabbed Albarn’s attention and prompted him to reach out.
Albarn later explained: “There was a lot of scepticism at EMI partly because [Danger Mouse] was in the middle of a potentially quite serious legal battle… and he was very, very untested. But he and I just hit it off.”
The pair recorded the track alongside a team of creatives at Kong Studios in Essex, where a spontaneous studio environment was reflected in the raw, fizzing energy of Feel Good Inc.
Danger Mouse later admitted: “I didn’t think that many people were going to get it. Given the way radio formats are set up in the States, I didn’t see any one song that could really fit in anywhere, and that always hurts a major label release.”
In reality, the quirkiness of Feel Good Inc. only aided its trajectory. People had never heard anything like it before.
The lead guitar line, thought to have been played by The Verve’s Simon Tong, is plucked on a flat, bended G string that wobbles and entices alongside pounding, buzzy looped drum pattern.
The exact origins of that percussion section are unknown, but it could easily be lifted from the same ’80s Suzuki Omnichord synthesiser that Albarn used to sculpt previous Gorillaz single Clint Eastwood. In that track, the iconic rhythmic backbone came entirely from a preset entitled Rock1, a brilliantly unexpected extension of the Gorillaz focus on parodying cut-and-paste pop music.
The thick, juicy bass line in Feel Good Inc. – consisting of two different octaves recorded together for a super fat, infectious groove – is one of the few examples of live instrumentation on the track. Meanwhile, Albarn’s lead vocals flow through a layer of scratchy distortion, and a similar effect is used for the crunchy featured verses delivered by hip-hop royalty De La Soul.
The New York group were originally supposed to collaborate with Albarn on the song Kids With Guns, but switched course “after a lot of weed and tequila,” according to rapper Maseo.
Speaking to Kyle Meredith With…, Maseo emphasised the importance of De La Soul doing “a collaboration where we both artistically show our flavour”. He described Albarn as “truly out there for artistic value” and added: “I got a lot of love for that. No idea is a bad idea until we try it — all egos are checked at the door.”
Speaking to Anthony Fantano, Damon Albarn described the tuneful talk-rap technique he employs in Feel Good Inc. as “my 2D Sprechgesang.” He explained: “It’s not rap, it's sprechgesang. It’s an arcane 18th century German form of rap. Feel Good Inc. was the beginning of it. I really enjoy it because it's an opportunity to say some quite bizarre things that I wouldn't necessarily be able to sing about.”
While Albarn’s lyrics are deliberately vague, the falsetto squeaks of “Feel good” with which he ends each line of the song’s groovy intro/refrain chime with a lightly masked sadness, highlighting the melancholy behind the mass market pop he’s critiquing.
Meanwhile, De La Soul’s Trugoy the Dove attacks the generic, exploitative practices of major record labels with lines like “We gon’ ghost town this Motown… With yo’ sound, you kill the Inc.”
The track’s chorus is more hopeful. Via the vessel of Noodle, Gorillaz explained in an MTV interview how this section was designed to be "more acoustic… to symbolise a different time and [to] reference the ‘dark Satanic mills’ that William Blake wrote about in his verse of Jerusalem [a prominent critique of exploitative British industrialism].”
Adding strummed acoustic guitar, vinyl crackles in the background, and floating, ethereal pads, this section hints at a more authentic form of pop music focused on conveying real emotion and offering hope.
Meanwhile, the music video, which transports Noodle away from the oppressive Feel Good Inc. tower and to the precipice of a floating island, matches perfectly with escapist lyrics like “Love forever, love is free/Let’s turn forever, you and me” – creating an expansive vision of the potential benefits of breaking away from a hyper-consumerist culture that is creating apathy in both musicians and listeners.
Still, when you reach the end of Feel Good Inc. there’s no suggestion that Gorillaz have made it through to the other side.
De La Soul’s grainy cackle – which booms out menacingly at the start of the track as the animated characters are pictured cooped up in their gloomy tower – re-enters the fold, and becomes increasingly unhinged.
Feel Good Inc. expertly interrogated damaging developments in how the modern music industry and broader capitalist culture operate. It communicated its ideas with catchy, inventive sonics that connected with the masses.
20 years down the line, its message is as relevant as ever.
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