10 Music Videos That Changed Music Forever
4. Clint Eastwood - Gorillaz
At the start of the new millennium, MTV started to get much more stagnant with its music video content. While there had been lulls in the stations relevancy before, each passing video seemed to be either a pretentious visual undertaking or performance clips of a band with very little in between. Suddenly, a few cartoon characters came in to flip the format on its head.
Gorillaz was the brainchild of Blur frontman Damon Albarn, who had the idea to combine his music with the visual images of his partner Jamie Hewlett. Instead of having to worry about booking music video shoots, the entire song would be depicted by this virtual band with some macabre imagery mixed in. The results were absolutely hypnotic, from the larger than life depiction Del the Funky Homosapien's ghost to the zombified gorillas that sprout from the ground to tear the band limb from limb.
It may have seemed a bit childish for some, but this was a bold new direction for the music video format. There had been moments where you didn't have to worry about the actual song performance, but now the music didn't even need to come from the actual musicians who played it. After this one video, the entire musical landscape opened up for more abstract visuals to come through the door.