Gorillaz and Media Hybridization in Contemporary Popular Music: Redefining the Boundaries of Storytelling by Creating Imaginaries
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5294/pacla.2025.28.1.8Keywords:
Music industry, augmented reality, transmedia narrative, music, digital platforms, imaginariesAbstract
The virtual band Gorillaz is one of the most paradigmatic examples in the music industry. Combining musical and visual projects, its creators, musician Damon Albarn and artist Jamie Hewlett, have incorporated image innovations and technologies to build a remarkable track record in the contemporary music scene. In 2023, they launched their latest album, Cracker Island, in which they apply social media’s narrative and identity potential to their particular storytelling. As in previous works, for this album, they have created a storytelling that jumps from the virtual world to the physical one, giving it a transmedia and hybrid nature. This research discusses such storytelling and its visual and symbolic resources with which the band expands and consolidates its unique imaginary. The methodological design combines a documentary review with narrative and visual analyses of various pieces developed to promote the album. The results demonstrate the existence of a unique storytelling and visual universe that connects with audiences and becomes a central element of the Cracker Island transmedia project, expanding the limits of the visual album. This work, in the vein of Plastic Beach (2016), Humanz (2017), and The Now Now (2018), expands the band’s imaginary, which, this time, is disseminated through all the media that the band has at its disposal.
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