by Do you ever get the impression that some music was sent to us years ahead, in order to warn us what was to come? Rewatch the video for ‘Feel Good Inc’ by Gorillaz and see what you think.
Damon Albarn has always been a visionary mind in this respect, but he truly pushed this to the maximum when he unleashed the creative genius of the video for ‘Feel Good Inc’ in 2005. You can’t shake the feeling, however, that the message and meaning of it have been somewhat lost over the course of the two decades it’s been floating around the internet; it’s exactly the type of thing you can imagine someone feeding an artificial intelligence machine to make their own deepfake video.
But this is a precise example of the world completely losing its mind, because it is the antithesis of everything that ‘Feel Good Inc’ was supposed to symbolise. Of course, the themes and allusions to virtual reality and AI in the video are plain to see, but it is equally worth so much more than that. Fiction, creativity, and surrealism are all vital in playing a role, and it’s these three factors which society these days seems to be lacking more and more.
The element of fantasy and surrealism was most strongly expressed by the gloating lighthouse that emerged in the sky, yet this was not solely a fragment of Gorillaz’s own imagination. Taking inspiration from the concept of the island in Castle in the Sky, directed by Hayao Miyazaki, the cartoonish wonderworld of dreams often gave way to something far more brutal, realistic, and sinister, which the band were keen to channel through their magnum opus of a video.
Thus, using the same filmic techniques of animation, the genesis of ‘Feel Good Inc’ was rooted in something deliberately fantastical and in some ways at odds with the truth of the world, but equally and unsettlingly acting as a mouthpiece for it. As the character of 2-D valiantly attempts to awaken those around them to the dangers of themselves being dumbed down in the name of mass containment, it’s chilling. This is no longer a piece of fiction but what’s happening to us now.
As such, when 2-D backs down at the end of the video from the situation and seemingly resigns himself to the fact that he will become brainwashed, some would have seen this, once upon a time, as an artistic commentary on what Gorillaz were fighting against in the industry. The same still rings true, but it also now speaks to a level of nullification in society as a whole, where the surrealism once contained to a music video now threatens to plague our everyday lives.
In a lot of ways, that’s the true mark of genius, though no one in Gorillaz could have possibly cultivated that amount of foresight at the time. In 2025, people say that AI has somehow crept up and taken over the world without anyone even realising it; on the contrary, ‘Feel Good Inc’ shows that this was always destined to be our fate all along, and we unconsciously gave in.
