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Demon Days, Gorillaz
Parlophone, December 6, 2005
Track Listing: 1. Intro, 2. Last Living Souls, 3.Kids with Guns, 4.O Green World, 5. Dirty Harry, 6. Feel Good Inc., 7. El Mañana, 8. Every Planet We Reach Is Dead, 9. November Has Come, 10. All Alone, 11. White Light, 12. DARE, 13. Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head, 14. Don’t Get Lost in Heaven, 15. Demon Days
“Are we the last, living souls”
-from “Last Living Souls”
News of her death came from someone’s—was it her husband’s?—Facebook page. Of course, anyone could confirm (if they wanted to) that it was indeed her husband who first posted the blurb about the car accident. It was a few lines above his previous post that had informed all, “I need to take a shit something fierce.”
“There was crack on the corner and someone dead”
-from “Don’t Get Lost in Heaven”
Three police cars, one fire truck, and an ambulance delayed his arrival to Best Buy. Two lanes were siphoned into one—annoying—so that debris could be cleared and victim(s) attended to. He might have seen the stretcher and the body covered by a sheet had his mind not been elsewhere.
He was finally making the purchase, just in time for the Super Bowl. He wondered just how different the big game would look on his new 65-inch 3D HDTV although truth be told (not that he would ever admit it to his buddies) what he was looking forward to most of all was the halftime show.
He was bummed that he could only invite three of the guys over this year, but it was a quota dictated by the maximum number of 3D glasses he could afford to purchase at this time.
“They came in camouflage, hidden behind dark glasses, but no one noticed them: they only saw shadows. You see, without the Truth of the Eyes, the Happyfolk were blind”
-from “Fire Coming Out of a Monkey’s Head”
To each other, the four men looked like blurry holograms as they each scanned a viewing path from room to TV and from TV to coffee table where they stabbed at a bowl of chips that wasn’t entirely in focus.
And so it was that Madonna’s elaborate halftime show was witnessed in sparkling, multi-dimensional clarity. They all could see the lip-synced performance in brilliant detail and all spoke afterwards in satisfied tones (if indeed they spoke at all).
“Is she, is she real, is she
Is she real, is she (it’s real)
Is she, is she real, is she”
-from “Kids with Guns”
He had known for some time how much she loathed face-to-face visits, but it wasn’t until she had said to him, “I wish all communication in my life was limited to text messaging,” that he realized the extent of what she had become. Now phone calls were blacklisted? They apparently required entirely too much time and effort. I guess you could say there was irony in the fact that she was texting at the time of her own death, and for the record, her last words contained two typos: I jsut wanted to remind you taht …
“And all I wanna hear is the message beep”
-from “Feel Good Inc.”
Gramps! That is what she called the museum relic that was walking across the street without a care in the world, like nobody else existed. She was forced to put down her iPhone in the console next to her Monster energy drink so that she could flip off the old coot. She yelled out to him before speeding by in a blur. He may even have been a grandfather. He sure looked the part, dressed in a suit and donning a whacked-out fedora. She had seen JPGs or GIFs that showed similar strangefolk from the past.
“These kids is too fast
Juiced off a junk treat”
-from “November Has Come”
She was racing home to watch the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, not that it actually mattered what time she got there because the show was already scheduled to be recorded to her DVR. But she feared somebody would begin tweeting spoilers if she didn’t watch it live and so she pressed down the gas and then picked her phone back up, remembering suddenly that she needed to text a friend.
“When lies become reality
You numb yourself with drugs and TV
Lift yourself up it’s a brand new day”
-from “Demon Days”
The would-be-could-be grandpa had seen the vile young woman flip him the bird. He could only shake his head as he continued along alone on his way. He remembered when he was young, when they were young together, how different things were. Saturday nights were his favorite.
“I remember when we used to dance”
-from “Dirty Harry”
There wasn’t a day that went by that he didn’t think of her, God rest her soul.
“Bring me back to fallen town
Where someone is still alive”
-from “O Green World”
When he got home, he relaxed back into a recliner. If you had just now peeked into his living room window, you might have otherwise assumed he had never left this spot at all.
He did not know about the fate of the woman who had given him the finger, didn’t know of her accident just blocks up the road from where she had sped past him. She was as gone from his mind as she was from the world by the time he picked up the magazine and resumed the article he had started reading the previous night. He remembered why he had put it down before. It made him incredibly sad to see the awful picture of the dead kangaroo, burned alive, a victim of the awful drought in Australia.
“So hard for a good soul to survive
You can’t even trust the air you breath
Because Mother Earth wants us all to leave”
-from “Demon Days”
He closed his eyes so as to block out any more thoughts of the cruel world.
“All alone …”
-from “All Alone”
“Soon, Margaret,” he thought. “Soon.”
-G
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