10 Songs Inspired By Real Events
2. Kids With Guns - Gorillaz
From day one, Damon Albarn had created the Gorillaz project with Jamie Hewlett to make something unlike anything that the music world had ever heard. With the "band" mainly being comprised of cartoon characters, it's almost expected that their songs would live in their own fictional world as well. Even though Gorillaz does have a certain storyline and canon, "Kids With Guns" is much more firsthand than many fans originally thought.
Coming off the band's second effort Demon Days, "Kids With Guns" is supposed to be about a legion of kids taking over society much like in the novel Lord of the Flies. However, Albarn's initial inspiration for the song came from a disturbing experience at his daughter's school. While still in elementary school, Albarn was struck by a recent story of one of his daughter's classmates bringing a gun into the school building.
Though Albarn contended that the culprit was a good kid, it ended up sparking his creativity as to why children are exposed to violence at such a young age. From that one incident, Albarn injected his own experience into the Gorillaz' universe and turned it into one of the most disquieting accounts of children's minds being molded into killing machines. For as childish as the images can be in the music videos, many people tend to forget that Gorillaz' music can get eerily real when it wants to.