Sweepstakes
I want to talk about why Sweepstakes is an underrated Gorillaz masterpiece.
It’s more experimental than pop can get away with. It gives you loose, sparse musical ideas kinda bouncing off one another, confusing tempo, noise, it’s a messy, disorganized, chaotic, formless song that doesn’t feel like it gels.
And it doesn’t resolve this by tightening up the grooves, by fitting things together better, it resolves this additively, by adding more and more and more elements. At about 58 seconds you get a telegraph booping along to Mos Def’s tempo and then some crunchy synth elements that start to gel the song together, and it starts to work. “Hey, this is kind of a bop” Then, another full minute in, the drums join the party, and horns.
It’s a lot, all at once, each of the elements that felt out of place and chaotic before now gelling in a groove that feels heavy and inevitable, it’s still a big noisy cacophonous mess but everything is aligned in this huge messy crescendo of horns and cymbal crashes and flow.
And that’s the point where you turn up the volume, because you must. It’s a banger.
It makes me think of Ravel’s Boléro when I listen to it, which was also, uh, controversial on account of Bolero’s musically sparse repetition with successively added elements, building to a huge crescendo.
Decoding the music masterpieces: Ravel’s Bolero — a sinuous and sexy composition with ‘no music in it’