Gorillaz: "DoYaThing (f/ Andre 3000 & James Murphy)"

Kanye West aside, Damon Albarn might be the most remarkable curator of creative talent working in popular music today. Take the 2010 Gorillaz album Plastic Beach as an example: although Albarn worked on that album with everyone from Lou Reed to Snoop Dogg, the finished product not only maintained a consistent tone throughout, it wound up being one of the most gleefully lovable pop records of the year. Albarn is a tremendously gifted songwriter, of course, and the music on Plastic Beach was the best he’s produced with the Gorillaz project, but as good as “On Melancholy Hill” and “Rhinestone Eyes” were, it was his collaborators that really took that record to the next level and made it something that still holds up to scrutiny a few years later.

Now, after last year’s curious and underwhelming road dispatch The Fall, Gorillaz have returned properly with “DoYaThing”—and what a return it is. Not content with just releasing a hot single that features two immensely popular guests, Gorillaz have also given us a video and an extended version of the track that clocks in right around the thirteen minute mark. The shorter version (which serves as the video soundtrack, and also the radio edit) is, in so many words, hot shit. It coasts along on the same buzzing, burbling synths that made Plastic Beach so much fun, and the rhythm has a distinct Krautrock feel.

The song begins by alternating between Albarn’s typically understated verses and a chorus from Andre 3000 that feels straight out of the “Hey Ya” era—melodic, high-pitched, funky—before getting to the real heart of the track: Andre’s rap verses. These are some guest-rapper-of-the-year worthy verses, delivered fluidly at a blistering pace and with all the linguistic wit that marked Outkast’s best work. So enthralling is his rapping on this track that you forgot about all context and collaborators, and by the end of the radio edit, you’re practically begging for more Andre.

Until, that is, you hear the extended version. What we get in the additional section of this song is a two chord progression repeated ad nauseum, some synths freaking noisily out (courtesy of Murphy, perhaps, whose role here is unclear) and six fucking minutes of a totally batshit Andre ad-libbing about… himself? He’s not freestyling here, mind you, or even indulging in some free-form singing, which would be one thing. What he is doing, this artist who is normally the model of style and poise, is sloppily shouting out a totally uncharacteristic and astonishingly self-absorbed stream of total bullshit, including gems like “I’m the shit,” “I don’t even have to sing in key,” and “The moon is jealous of me / The sun is jealous of me… / Everybody’s jealous of me.”

This is a great song when it’s four minutes long, and the three-minute coda (which blessedly finds Andre returning to lyrical mode) is mildly interesting, but how Albarn could think that listening to that much of anyone’s shit-talking would be appealing is beyond mystifying to me, no matter how much I might miss Andre’s presence in the music world. It’s the kind of misstep that almost makes me wonder whether I haven’t been overrating Albarn’s talent as a curator up to this point; whether, perhaps, the success of Plastic Beach was just a lucky accident that happened to center around one talented musician and his catchy keyboard lines. Mostly, though, it just makes me wish Andre 3000 would stick to what he does best.