The Gorillaz’ House of Kong exhibit.
I learned there was a Gorillaz exhibit a few hours before I went to it. I was at Amoeba Records earlier in the month when they had a signing event and I heard the opening for The Mountainhead. I was down to go, but I didn’t know what to expect.
When we arrived you get into groups of 12 and then you wait in front of the statue Pazuzu. The drums playing gave me a sense that if it was 1,000 years ago and you heard the drums and saw this statue you would believe he was real.
You’re escorted into a room and given instructions on how you have to listen to the instructions on your headset. Another employee in the room found a package on the floor and asked if someone would deliver it to lost and found at the end of the exhibit. My friend volunteered and I made sure to look out for her because she was now part of the show.
The first room is what I expected. Framed original art work explaining the history of the band. The next room was similar except it had a miniature statue of Pazuzu in the center of the room. They continue with the history of the band and then a fire alarm goes off before the room goes pitch black. An old gargoyle voice tells you to keep going for answers and to open the door. 11 people stood and looked at me.
I opened the door and we walked through a dark hallway to an exit that leads to a backyard with a small mobile home. Gorillaz music starts to play but I’ve been through enough haunted houses to know an anvil will soon drop. Then the coolest thing happens. Idris Elba starts talking into your headset and tells you to enter the caravan.
The caravan looks like the bottom of the barrel. Empty beer cans, cigarette burns on the couch, and an overall sense of VH1 behind the music. Idris talks us through it and says you can make it through if you try. You walk through the caravan and enter a closet and it’s a long, narrow dark hallway crammed with clothes on hangars. The metaphor was understood and you enter a series of rooms from there that detail the artistic phases of the band.
The last phase was kneeling in front of a stain glassed window with their art work. The music changes and the glass appears to break before the images turn to noise and then goes completely dark. The narrator asks you what you think. The only light shown is one to the next door.
We finally end up in lost and found. Angela hands the security guard the package and he removes a VHS tape and plays it. The security screens switch to a video of images that are cut to the opening song of their latest album. It ends with the album cover, there’s silence and then one of their classic club songs begins to play. You walk through the door and cross a dark hallway until you’re once again outside and it’s Pazuzu who says goodbye to you.
That was a trip. Even if you’re not a Gorillaz fan you walked away with an appreciation for how they presented their latest album. It was about death and rebirth.
The immersive experience ends, but you enter a large warehouse with a room playing the band’s documentary followed by another room with more of their memorabilia. If more music groups had the foresight to create exhibits like this I think it’s a great way to explore albums.
They put tape over your phone so you can’t record during the experience, but here are some pics from the museum at the end. I’ve never seen a band share their vision this openly and creatively before.
Their sketches were mounted on the wall, their lyrics in drafts were displayed. It was an open notebook to their process.
Marketing and branding rarely get me, but it did today. You can’t share your existential crisis with me complete with a spiral through your darkest days and I’m not grabbing a souvenir.
Great art stays with you. The first time I heard The Mountainhead I was moved by the album. Then they created a pop-up museum that explored the process of that art through their toughest times. That kind of honesty lingers and you think about it. You don’t think it does, but then after dinner someone can catch you in a moment of reflection like this. Listen to the album and if you have time, head to this exhibit in downtown LA.
