Gorillaz' Damon Albarn Edited Out All References To Trump On Latest Release

[Initech]

For all the official guest stars that Gorillaz leader Damon Albarn corralled for the group’s fifth album, Humanz -- Pusha T, Vince Staples, Kelela and Danny Brown among them -- the most riveting cameo is unlisted: Noel Gallagher, former co-lead of Oasis, bitter ’90s rival of Albarn’s other band, Blur. Twenty years ago, Albarn and Gallagher were trading potshots as Britpop kings; in 1995, Gallagher famously wished Albarn would “catch AIDS and die.” But in 2017, both are pushing 50 and uniting on “We Got the Power,” on which Gallagher sings backing vocals. “We’ve got the power to be loving each other,” they declare, “no matter what happens.”

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For Albarn, who has kept both groups running concurrently since Blur reunited in 2009, Gorillaz’s animated presentation has allowed the group to come and go without aging (literally) or being tethered to one era. Yet Humanz (due Apr. 27 on Parlaphone/Warner Bros.) marks a return to the end-time themes that were front-and-center on 2005’s Demon Days, which Hewlett says was inspired by the Sept. 11 attacks. Albarn warned the world against Donald Trump rising to the Oval Office as far back as the fall of 2015, when he would add a “Don’t fall for Donald Trump / He’s such a chump” sing-along to Blur’s live performances of “Tender.” And indeed, the singer-songwriter says Humanz was inspired in large part by imagining, “What would happen if the world was turned, in some unthinkable way, on its head?” -- a reality borne out by the 2016 presidential election.

“Trump’s ascension was one of the sources of energy that we meditated on, when it was like, ‘Ahh, that’s ridiculous, that could never happen,’” he explains. Humanz is not a conventional protest album against the American president as much as a party record for the apocalypse that his reign might ultimately lead to; “The sky’s falling, baby, drop that ass before it crash,” Vince Staples proclaims on “Ascension,” which has peaked at No. 11 on the Rock Songs chart. The election was a clear catalyst for those overtones, although Albarn made sure that the lyrics to Humanz don’t give the president any specific credit.

“There’s no references to [Trump] on the record -- in fact, any time when anyone made any reference, I edited it out,” he says. “I don’t want to give the most famous man on earth any more fame, particularly. He doesn’t need it!”

Hewlett says that the group’s return with their first LP in seven years -- since they released Plastic Beach and The Fall in quick succession in 2010 -- was not the product of grand design, so much as bar talk between the Gorillaz godfathers back in 2014, after Albarn had just played a show in support of his solo album, Everyday Robots. “We went to some party,” says Hewlett, “and in a drunken conversation, he said, ‘Do you want to do more Gorillaz?’ And I said ‘Yeah, do you?’ And he said ‘Yeah.’ And I said ‘Right, then.’ That was the end of the conversation.”
http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/magazine-feature/7767690/damon-albarn-gorillaz-trump-reference-humanz

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