One Song - Gorillaz "Feel Good Inc"

Episode Date: June 26, 2026

This week, we’re leaving the guitar-smashing world of Blur behind and stepping into the strange, animated universe of Gorillaz with their massive 2000s classic “Feel Good Inc.” Diallo & LUXXURY break down how Damon Albarn went from Britpop frontman to the voice behind one of the most original bands of the era — and how a song built on a nasty bassline, eerie laughter, acoustic strums, and De La Soul’s unforgettable feature became impossible to pin down and even harder to forget. The guys get into Demon Days, Jamie Hewlett’s wild Gorillaz concept, the genius of turning a “band” into a whole fictional world, and why “Feel Good Inc.” feels like a party record, a cartoon transmission, and a weird little warning all at once. Along the way, they trace the early bridge from Blur to Gorillaz, unpack the song’s strange mix of hip-hop, alt-rock, and pop, and talk about how this record keeps finding new life with listeners who weren’t even there the first time around. Diallo & LUXXURY talk about music! One Song Spotify Playlist Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Everybody. I love that harmony stack at the end. Yeah, I don't think that I knew that that was there. I don't think I'd ever really notice it either. It's somewhat buried in the mix. You feel it. But that's the only time I think the vocals are so clear as well, because his whole vocal there was also filtered.

And do we know if that's just him singing the higher registers and layering it? That sounds like a stack of demons. It sounds like damans. A stack of demons. Yeah, it's a stack of demons. What a great gift that would be. Yeah, here's your stack of demons. Here's a stack of demons for you.

I know it's your birthday, so I'm about your stack of demons. Oh, you're so. luxury today we're diving back into the work of an artist who helped define british rock in the 1990s then turn around and helped imagine what a band could be and look like and sound like in the 21st century that's right diallo and after covering blurr's song two were continuing our damon all bar and two-parter with a group that technically isn't even real but somehow became one of the most important bands of the 2000s today we're covering a song built around a filthy baseline Disgusting.

A haunted laugh, a massive De La Sol feature, and a chorus that feels like escape floating just out of reach. Plus, this song won Alburn, his only Grammy, and scored him his highest ever ranking U.S. chart position in the top 40s. That's right. We thought it was song, too, and it was guerrillas. It helped him finally break it in America. Damon's biggest hit is this song. To be clear. It's a song that sounds like pure fun on the surface, but underneath it, it is asking a darker question.

If Feeling Good is a company, what exactly? exactly are they selling? So windmill, windmill for the land. We're talking one song, and that song is Feel Good Inc. by Gorillas. and a wide leg that feels modern, not overwhelming. Plus, that signature, wait, for this price? Moment. Old Navy's drapeed denim wide leg. If you want a $3,000 a month payday for life,

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Raffle number 155-2194. Please play responsibly. I'm actor-writer-director and sometimes DJ Diallo Rill. And I'm producer, DJ, and songwriter and musicologist, luxury, aka the guy who whispers, interpolation. And this is one song. The show where we break down the stems and stories behind iconic songs across genres and tell you why they deserve one more listen.

You will hear these songs if you've never heard them before. And if you want to watch one song, hey, have I got to. Good news for you. You can watch this on YouTube, Spotify. And while you're there, please like and subscribe. All right, Diyah, I want you to start with your first memory of gorillas. Because depending on when someone found them, they may have experienced this band in a completely different way. What was your way in?

Well, I think I was a fan of Damon Alburn and Blur early on. And so I was kind of hip. I think what caught my ear was the story around them, like for a minute, you know, is it a band? Is it not a band? Is it animated? Damon Alburn is a ball. Yeah, this is technically, this is a virtual band. cartoon, but it's also a band.

Yeah, and also, you see pictures of these cartoon characters popping up, and it's kind of still pre the internet the way we think of it now. Like, it was just like, I knew that there was something coming. I knew there was this whole concept. And nothing happens in a vacuum. Like, you got to think about this in the context of everything else that was going on. Dap Punk at this time is already starting to vanish into the helmets. You know what I mean?

Like, you know, the times when you could just go to Nikki Beach and see, you know, the Dap Punk guys out there spinning records. you know in Miami like that was already starting to fade away and they had come out with that cartoon in Estella 55 55 which also had a cartoon and you know that cartoon they're singing the songs of dat punk we knew there were corporal singers and there were just there was a whole lineup of people who were trying to reinvent what it was to even be a band yeah at the turn of the century. Like a concept, like you were saying the word concept.

Yeah. Concept. I concept. Sadly, 9-11 hadn't happened yet. So there was like a good mood and it felt like art in particular was a place where all kinds of expression were like really, after 9-11, things got really dark for a while. But into this weird sort of like pre-9-11, you know, 2001, let's say. Very happy time.

I don't even just think in my life. It's just a different time. Yeah. And the guerrillas have, it gets announced, I don't know how I would have found out about it. Maybe I was looking in LA Weekly, you know, like where you get your concert info. Right.

But the guerrillas had a big show in Hollywood for all the, all the hipsters were on their way to the knitting factor. The knitting factory used to have a place on Hollywood Boulevard. And I just remember that night. Everybody piled into the theater not knowing what to expect. Like, is this just going to be a band playing the music of these cartoon characters? Is it going to be animated robots? on the stage like Chucky Cheese.

Like we just had no idea. Showbiz. How did you even know in this era that what it was? Like where did you get that piece of information from? That it was a band called the Gorillus. And that it was associated with Al Barne. I might have seen the cover of an enemy. I think I would more likely I would have read a review of the single or something like

in L.A. Weekly. In Atlanta, we had creative loafing. Like I felt like those used to be places where everybody who wanted to know what was cool and what was next. It was either that or time out. So you were aware they were coming before you heard like Clint Eastwood or whatever the first one? No, I think I'd heard the single Clint Eastwood. Okay.

And, you know, like being a DJ at the time, uh, I thought that song was really cool. I'm feeling glad I got sunshine in a bag. I'm useless, but not for long the future is coming on there. I thought that song was so cool. Yeah. And by the way, I wasn't just a fan of blur. I was a fan of Del the Funky Homo sapien. Yeah.

who had stayed with me for the two nights he was playing a gig near Harvard. Yeah, he's, they were like, hey, I used to be on student government. They were like, hey, the rapper needs a place to stay. I was like, don't call him the rapper. You call him, Del the Fungia Hama Sapien. And yes, he could sleep on our couch, and I'll never get Dale showed up. And I expected him to have like an entourage or even luggage. And he literally showed up with a PlayStation in one hand and a blunt in the other.

He was like, hey, man, can I, can I hook this up and play some video games? I was like, sure, Del, you can do whatever. Did he have a bag? And I remember he was just sitting there like, yeah, this game's sick. It was like not into video games or marijuana, but I thought it was so cool that the man who made Mr. Dobelina was sitting there right in my living room. All that is just to say, I thought Gorillas was always going to have Dell on the song. And so when I showed up, as far as I knew, I would have Damon on stage and Dell on stage. We show up and it's basically just a huge screen.

It's almost like watching a movie with sound. Um, fault me. I don't know if the, if the music was pre-recorded and piped in or if they were hiding a band behind the screen. I don't know because I didn't have any inside information on that level, but it was a great show and they introduced the band members of gorillas as the only people that you needed to know to appreciate this music. And it totally worked. You know, the presentation was the band, the characters, the visuals, the music. It was all just one thing. And I'm just going to admit this right now. Um, for the longest time, I just assumed Dell had done all the raps. And that's a thing. And that's a thing. including not just that first album, but even some of the rapping on this album, including Feel Good Inc. When DeLas starts rap, I actually thought that was Dell pulling... It's easy to forget that this is a guerrillas featuring

De La Sol song. Yes, yes. I mean, I'm telling you. And it's a little embarrassed to say, shout out to De La Sol. You know, I'm a huge fan. I thought Del was doing voices, like the same way that, like,

he does different voices on Give Me the Lute. I thought that was all still Del just doing different voices. Not just three numbers of DayLoss. to see the featuring De La Sol. Well, this is as good a place as any to talk about the fact that guerrillas are a virtual band. There's a lot of lore about them. Suddenly, they're a 25-year-old band. So not only do we have these four primary characters, and I'll name them for you, because they have names.

2D is the vocalist. Noodle plays, quote-unquote, guitar. Murdoch Nichols is the bassist and Russell Hobbs on drums. So much lore. You can go down a real rabbit hole on the Gorillas Wiki. There's not just Wikipedia, but like a guerrilla-specific wiki. And there's characters. These characters all have phases one through seven.

I think we're in phase seven currently. One can get very lost in the lore. And it's important to point out that Damon Albaran has created this lore and this band with the unsung hero of the episode. Yeah, so Damon did not do this in a vacuum. Tell us about it. Jamie Hewlett is the animator who created Tank Girl, sorry, comic book and creator and animator, I should say. So artist. and in 1998 he moved in with Albarn.

The two of them lived together in their, in a flat, and both of them at the time in 1998 had both recently broken up with different members of the band Elastic. High-profile breakup in Damon's case. Right. They had both broken up with different members of the band Elastika. So perhaps bonded by that connection. Trauma bonding. Trauma bonded in 1998.

The conversations began to ensue, like maybe we should put a project together, and the idea of this virtual band started to come together, designing the characters, creating the backstory, all the lore. And by 2001, that first record drops the one that you're talking about with Clint Eastwood famously on it as the first, the single that really broke them. What's the name of the album? Let's just say it.

Can we just say it? I think it might be just self-titles. I could hear it the way you were describing you were talking around the names. Is it self-titled? It's self-title. Yeah. Yeah, it's guerrillas, okay. You're referring to the self-title debut album, Gorillas.

That's right. from 2001. Great, by the way, amazing. That's the one with the Jeep and the camouflage on it with gorillas spray painted and red. To me, that's one of those iconic 2000s records. I see it in my sleep.

So much we end up talking about on this show reflects where we were when this music was released. 2001 is the first year that I was really, really sort of like doing more DJing than anything else. Like I had my little stupid internship at Virgin Records, But really, I was DJing at the standard. I was DJ at a place called The Room here in L.A. And that first guerrillas album really had some major cuts on it.

Most people know Clint Eastwood. My favorite song on there was Rock the House. And also 19-2000, another great song featuring Miho Hattori. From Chiba Mato? Yes, and Tina from TomTom Club. Oh, wow. It's funny you say that about 2001, that was a really transitional year for me where I was doing things that weren't music.

And suddenly I put all of my effort and attention into like figuring out how to write songs, produce them. I got my first pro-trolls rig. And this was the moment that I was like, I'm done with the advertising thing. I'm done with whatever I was doing before. Thank you. And what's interesting about it that I'm only making the connection now is in a similar way that Damon Albarn is coming from a band background. And I have talked about this on previous episodes.

But there's this moment that I think Damon has had where he's like, can break out of this band box, as it were, where there's four opinions. And the music making process requires expensive equipment and studios, et cetera. But in this moment, a lot of us are realizing that there's gear out there that's more affordable. And there's also musical ideas that kind of comport to what we want to do with rock and roll. We want to take rock and roll in this direction that has different beats and different rhythms. I found this great quote where Alburn literally says, one of the reasons I began guerrillas is I had a lot of rhythms. I never thought I could use in blur. So as simple as that, like what the beats were kind of implied a different musical, you know, on top of that.

I was going to say bed, but it's the opposite of that. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense because also we said a lot in part one of this two-part episode that there was, you know, in the mid-90s, it was all about the guitars and the groups. As early as like 98-99, you could see that things were moving in more of a pop direction, everything for the Spice Girls to Brittany, in sync, the Backstreet Boys. Sure. I'm sure that at some point, Damon was just like, you know what? I just kind of want to do the other beats in my head. Like, it's well known that at this time he's sort of getting more into African music. He was definitely feeling hip hop. He wanted to do more dancey stuff. Yeah. And this would be a project that would allow that. And the beats are both the rhythms, but also the sound of sampled instruments of the sound of the hip-hop sounds and production techniques. And for me personally, the revelation I'll never forget was when I had a song that was very, I was super into Stoner Rock. I was super into Caius and Queens of the Stone Age. And there was like all this, I was doing rock stuff. And I first got my Pro Tools rigged together, and I didn't have any way to record drums. So what I needed to do was sample drums. So I started chopping break beats from my record collection, from my CD collection, which necessarily, and that meant I would go, I remember some early beats that I got.

I got a Sonic Youth beat from the song 100%. There's this part where Steve Shelley goes, I remember taking that beat. And basically, that was my first sample. And I took that loop and I put it down in Pro Tools. I laid it across the song. Go back to our song two episode we just did. That's what they did in that song. And then on top of that, I started playing guitar.

And it just, it had this feeling of rock but with robot. Rock, but with robot. Robot rock. Dap Punk is doing robot rock in this moment. Using that breakwater beat. Absolutely. The convergence of the genres was happening because of the tech and maybe because, to your point,

a feeling of getting away from the, you know, we're post grunge, We're post Brit Poppe and maybe we were post-vice girls, too. I think we were all feeling him, man. It was definitely a time for like a post-modern mashup. By the way, mashups are really big at the side, too. That's right, 100% right? Post-modern mashup of everything that you like.

And the tech enabled that too, to your point, right? Girl Talk literally is enabled by the technology to your point to do these mashups where he takes the instrumentals from one genre and the Acapellas from a different genre. Z-trip. I always say you can't talk about matchups without talking about Zach, a DJ Z-Trip, who was one of the first people I knew to do on all mass-man. mash-up set in Miami at Winter Music Conference one time. And that was the first time I actually were pigs by Sabbath.

Yeah, because he mashed it up with some good stuff. It's fun how all these things converge in this moment, 2001. And in Damon Albarn, the connection between blur and guerrillas is also happening as a result of maybe the desire to put new beats together like you're saying. But the technology is also enabling it too. The technology is allowing a new scene to sort of grow out of the 90s. It was very fun. So now we're moving forward to 2005.

their second album, Demon Days, an album that if you thought that the first guerrillas record was Damon clearing a path with his collaborators to do more genres than Blur have maybe been able to do. This one even further expanded the musical palette, if you will. Of collaborators. Of what, yes, of what guerrillas could sound like and the type of people he could work with.

Yep. It wasn't all the same people from the first album, and I think that alone sort of let you know that, Oh, no, he's going on an even grand, on an even more diverse journey into sound. And that's why this song is so special, because it had such a combination of factors that hadn't really been put together in this way, especially in 2005. We do a little bit take for granted that a song like this does sound more like a 2026 song. But in 2005, this combination of, you know, essentially a hip-hop beat, for lack of a better word.

Yeah. It's not a, we hear that it is not a drummer playing it. We hear that it is a programmed beat. And then we do, on top of that, however, have what sounds. like a live bass line, a live guitar player, I think, doubling that bass part. And then, of course, there's Damon singing, but then there's also De La Sol rapping. This combination of things in one song in 2005 was we hadn't really heard anything like that before.

I think even his singing on this song is a little hip hop-y, if that makes sense. Oh, we're going to get to that. I'm so glad you said that. There's going to be a callback to another recent episode, but you're 100% right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd also say that it's funny because I agree. I feel like the song is hip-hoppy, but you got to remember. at this particular moment, the definition of hip-hop is very broad. Like, I think Al-Qas kind of changed the world with Hey, yeah. Technically a rap song, but it feels like a song from the 60s.

It's a pop song, it's a wedding song. You're right, it's like a pop song with 60s, Stacks Motown vibes. It's fast. And by the way, Phil Good Inc. On the relative scale of hip-hop tempos, kind of a fast song. Yep. And yet there's still enough hip-hop there, maybe because of De La Sol, maybe because of the way that Damon is also rapping.

Oh, yeah, they're rapping like Mad Men. The speed of their rap, you know, the cadence is 16th notes. This BPM not far off, not from a DJ since from Alcass's Hayah. So I think that, again, this is a very fun time in hip-hop when hip-hop can be as grimy as Get Rich and Dijk trying, the D-Sin album, or it can sound like Feel Good Ink by Gorillas and Hay-Yah by Al-Cast. It's a fun time. By the way, I think there's a pop hit that makes you think. Yeah.

Because it's got all this commentary about where society is. and it somehow put it all into a really infectious baseline. Well, it's also the kind of song, too, that, like, I think the title itself being feel good, it does kind of work on. It's a Trojan horse. It's a little bit of a Trojan horse. It's almost like this is how we do it. Oh, totally.

It's like the band name Happy Mondays. Why Happy Mondays? Because you're fucked up on pills. But it frames your experience of the song that going into it, that's the title. Yeah, no, totally. This song makes me feel good. I don't know why. All it lacks is like a parenthetical coming after it.

It makes me feel. feel good because it's been sold to me. This happiness can be bought. Happiness can be packaged and be sold. Exactly. Shubed down your throat. By the way, if you caught part one of this two-parter when we talked about Blur's song two, first of all, thank you. And if that sentence is confused, you go back and watch that episode.

Please do. Because one of the things we talked about in that episode is how the guerrilla sound was already starting to sneak into Blur. We want you to go back and listen to their self-titled album, Blur. And there's a song on there called On Your Own, which I really like that song. It's kind of a pubby song for Blur, but in it he mentions Hooligan Gorilla. We feel like that is not an accident. Damon has even said that, on your own, by Blur, is sort of one of the earliest guerrillas songs.

Well, since you are such an all-bar and A-lister, you know, you do know the lore of this man in his career. What is it about that song in particular that feels like it's the beginning of gorillas? Well, you know, I don't know this for a fact. I mean, like he said that that's one of the earliest guerrillas songs. But I didn't realize until we were working on this episode, the Jamie Hewlett of it all. And they would have been talking sort of backstage at Elastika concerts. You know what I mean? And so he might have just thrown out a word or an idea to Damon.

And that meant that Damon took those ideas into a blur session. And Hooligan Guerrilla. I mean, like, you know, I can see some soccer hooligans. You know, that seems to work for me. But it's also probably not an accident that they were both dating a member of the band at that time. You know, there are times when the spouses get together and talk. And so I imagine that was sort of the beginning of them talking about possibly collaborating. And again, taking some ideas that him and Jamie had been tossing around and throwing that into a blur song.

So whether it was, you know, because he was a 10-girl fan or maybe because, like I said, they're talking backstage in Elastica concerts. At some point, there's a friendship here and there's a bond. And apparently, as a story goes, there was one time when they were watching MTV, you know, sort of in the late 90s. And they were just like, man, everybody just feels like a cartoon. And it was like, you know, like all the Brady Spears, the in sync. Totally, right. They were like, why don't we just skip the middle band? Right.

And give MTV exactly what they want, which is a cartoon that pumps out good music. Totally. And the earliest days, I think to your point about like the band maybe being behind a scrim, maybe not when they're touring, it sort of conjures up ideas of like, you know, Blue Man Group or like even Kiss, you know, putting together a musical entity that can survive beyond the members desire to even have to get in a van and tour. or a tour of the world, you can have a show and not even have to be there for it. I mean, if you wanted to be really cynical, I said for years,

Dapunk could tour every year. We would never know who was in those robot helmets. Absolutely. And I do feel like to a certain extent, this is Damon saying, look, more artistic freedom. I can do hip hop and nobody's going to be like, hey, but you're from, you know, you would to school with Damien Hess. You know, like nobody's going to ask him for street credit because it's a cartoon. Yep.

You know, it gives you more freedom. And like you said, they can go, they can tour any way. and you don't have to feed them. Yeah, and it can outlast you. It's a brand that can go for hundreds of years, and your family can eat off of it because you don't have to stop touring just because you're old or you died.

I think about that all the time when I think about it. Even artists like Prince, like Prince, I thought, aged wonderfully well, but at the end of the day, his, even if his voice had gone, he could still play that guitar. Yeah. You know what I mean?

I feel like similar with guerrillas, like even when, you know, Damon gets a little bit older and he doesn't fit into some of the suits that used to be able to fit into, he can still call up 2D and noodles, and they can just bring the band back together and pump out some new music. Oh, yeah, no, they just came out with a new record, The Mountain, just came out,

and we want to talk about how this idea of collaboration has ballooned. The list of collaborators on this record is incredible. I won't name even one third of it, but we've got Dennis Hopper, idols, we've got Tony Allen, we've got Sparks, we've got Asha Putley, we've got Marky Smith. There's at least two dead people on this. I know, RIP. So when we come back, we're going behind the screen. We're going to be the ghost of the machine,

and we're going to get into the stems. Don't go away. Stick around. We'll break it down. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly.

If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, Peace contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor, free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. All right, welcome back to one song. Before the break, we talked about gorillas as this manufactured band commenting on manufactured feeling. With that said, now let's get into the song, and as we do on the show, we're going to listen to some stems. Let's listen to some drums, and then we'll talk about them. Here is the two-bar loop that goes through the whole song.

You've heard it twice now. I've heard it all my life because any time I hear that particular drum pattern, I think about beat it. Yeah, boom, which therefore makes it... Oh, let it with it, baby. A little later, we have some 16th notes that join in the party. Let's listen to those. Very subtle. Do you hear that?

Oh, I heard it. Play it again. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And then it goes away. Which to my ears sounds like a sample. because it's got such a very distinctive... It's not a high hat from a drum machine. It's a very distinctive, like... It has recording artifacts attached to it.

And it has tone. Yeah, it has a tone. It has a note. It has a color. Yeah. Can you let it play? Because I want to hear how often it comes in. Sure.

Well, it's about to go into that other thing. Oh, I see. Yeah. Never mind that. Well, maybe it happens twice. Hold on. Here. It's just a sort of subtle thing

that's peppered throughout that loop to spice it up, make it a little bit different. And then in addition to that, we have basically a hook in the drums. There's a motif that is very much when you think about the song, kind of like one of the parts that's cool that you think is iconically part of this song. Here it is. Just those two crashes, right?

Yeah. One, two, three, four, boom. Which mirrors what's happening in the vocal. Feel good. One, two. So there's something really cool about how that motif, very simple. It's just literally adding a crash to the two kick drums there. And sometimes there's a little bit of a variation on it like this one.

I started too close to it. Same thing, two crashes, but now three kick drums. Now, do we know what human drummer played the drum? So that's a great question. And you know on this show, long-time listeners will know we do our homework. There's a lot of hours of research that go into making this show. I can tell you that not only was I not unable to... It's not a cartoon named Russell, by the way.

Not only was I not definitively able to find the answer to that, but I'm fairly sure that was obscured on purpose. Yeah, I can see that. There are credits on this record. There are splits we'll be getting to. And there are names associated with the making of the song. And we'll give you all of them. But when it gets down to the who did what in terms of what you're hearing,

gets a little bit, I think, again, obscured on purpose. On purpose. It's not in the liner notes and it's not in the splits that there's a guy who programmed these drums. However, one thing we do know is that, that there are three credited producers on this song. Okay. Danger Mouse.

Yeah. We'd be talking a little bit more about it. I feel like in the 2000s, Danger Mouse was maybe the Stephen Street. Yeah. Like he was an in-demand producer who worked on so many great, great songs. Beginning a little bit with this one. This is a little bit his origin story, but we'll be getting into that in a second. There's also Jason Cox.

And finally, Damon Alvarn's cousin, whose name is James Dring. And he does get a production credit, a programming, credit. In different sources, I've seen programming drums credit, but like I didn't see that every time. So it's possible that James Dring programmed this beat. And then there are other times where the sometimes live drummer for the band when they perform, who at the time was Cass Brown, he I also have seen credited, but that feels a little less credible. All this to say, we're not really sure who programmed it. Maybe it was Damon. He's muddying the waters to have his collaborators maybe feel more included.

You know, I do feel like I feel a little bit of assuming that Danger Mouse did anything on this track. I feel like it does sound like a Danger Mouse track. When I saw his name of the Craig, I was like, oh, I kind of get it because this doesn't seem completely far from some of the other songs of his that I like. Like people who know Danger Mouse know that he was one half of Narls Barkley with Sealo Green and their song Crazy. So just a little bit of shine for Unsung Hero, one of several for this band and this

episode, Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse. He had just done the gray album in 2004. Now, for those you don't remember, that's what put him on the map. Do you want to tell us about the gray album? Yeah, the gray album. It was taking the Beatles' white album and putting it with Jay Z's Black album and all of a sudden Jay Z's rapping over the Beatles.

It was an intellectual property nightmare, but it was artistic gold in that mashup era that we were talking to earlier. I was just going to call back to that exactly right. So in the mashup era, one of the biggest records to come out of it, and a breakout star, from the opportunity in this tech era, he could with his laptop and access to the, you know, material thanks to the internet, put together, as you put it, the acapellas from Jay-Z with Beatles instrumentals and did to great effect.

I got 99 pounds, but a bitch ain't one. Hit me. The year's 94 in my trunk is fraud. They also throw out there, in the middle of the 2000s, there's so many technologies coming about. Like you said, more and more people have what used to be only happening in studios. You could do it on your laptop and garage band and some of these early. Changed my life too. Absolutely, yes. But there was also, I think it has got to be sick because I come at this from the DJ point of view.

And at the time, it took me years to find out some songs had the same BPM because you might think, oh, that song has such a great vibe and find out that the tempo is actually really slow. And vice versa, there might be a song that you think is very slow, but it's actually about 120 BPM. when Serato Scratch Live came out, famously, you were able to finally, not only the computer program could actually discover what the BPM of everything was, but then because it was a data point in the line, you could sort your songs by BPM. And I'm telling you when that happened. Life changing.

100%. DJ started DJing differently. All of a sudden, you were like, wait a second, radio heads, idiotic is the same speed as Miami bass music? You can start cross-pollinating. The genres, absolutely. This open format DJing was. And there was also, but I think open format DJing was sort of almost, it wasn't a result. I always say open format DJing owes more to the birth of the iPod.

Okay. Because all of a sudden, all your songs, you can play through your songs, you can shuffle, and all of a sudden the Beatles are right next to Jay-Z in a totally different way. But specifically with Serato Scratch Live, and I realize that they were kind of different entities at the same time, but they both came together to sort of show DJs that all these songs had the same BPMs that you would never suspect. and people just started experimenting and then they started building those MP3s

in their computers and I feel like into this wonderful mash-up world come the gorillas. What a perfect metaphor to get us back into the song because from one stem to the next we have the ability as we now know Damon Alvarn was consciously wanting to do

to put together different sounds from different genres, different worlds to make basically this song doesn't necessarily fit into any one genre as we've been discussing. It's got a hip-hop beat and rapping, but it's also got this kind of maybe 60s into 70s. Yeah.

B-BORtering on like this, this funk. Yeah. Yes, it has that kind of 60s, B-52s-Sounding. B-52s borderline surfer. Surfing, very well put. All of these things are coming together in one place, and the technology is helping to enable that. Absolutely.

Enable that or Ableton. Ooh, hazy. So just to wrap up the Brian Burton of it all, the Danger Mouse. So Alburn said that he had heard the gray album. And he needed a producer. He had been working on the first guerrilla's record. It was Dan the Automator, Dan Nakamura. Dan the Automator.

Shout up Dan. Handsome Boy Modeling School. That guy has been at the forefront of just great music for a very long time. Yeah, so he'd been working with him and he needed a new producer. So when he heard the gray album, he thought to call up Brian Burton, who we remember wasn't part of Narls Barclay or anything yet. This was his big break, really, was getting. Because at this moment, there was litigation that came from the gray album.

As much as it gave him a name, it was. It wasn't with something that was saleable that he would monetize. The boomers were not happy. Yeah. The boomers who grew up on the Beatles and were working at record labels for Jay-Z were not happy about the great album. Yeah, this was a moment that he had, there was an asterisk next to the fame of Danger Mouse in this moment. So Albarth calls him up and he says that this song, Feel Good Inc. was one of the first things that they did together. He says, quote, it was very instinctive when you don't really know someone and you say, do you want to come over and try a few tracks?

It doesn't really work out this way, which I love as a story. Because I was co-writing before the podcast era and before the DJing era. I came to L.A. as a co-writer, and I would get in a room with strangers every day for three years. And there is always this sort of uncomfortable moment of like, well, let's make art together, stranger. So I do understand what he's saying. It's like it doesn't always work out that the first thing you make together is a song like this. You know, the problem with not our podcast, but like the idea of telling stories on podcasts is that it makes it seem like every choice that everybody, does directly led to that really great thing that they did. And we know that the story is written

by those successful moments, but there are hundreds of not successful moments that get you to that. That's why I just got to keep trying. Absolutely. Pockmarked with failure, as the expression goes. Hey, I'm trying to cover up my pockmarks. Oh, you were talking about something else. Well, you're failing to do so. No, don't use that. Unnecessarily mean. Petching strays. I thought it was a safe space. You set me up for a joke. I couldn't resist. So, and for his part, Danger Mouse says, nothing I had done had really prepared me for doing this. I just thought that's such a simple statement, but it's like he really was doing

mashups and kind of working in an artistic realm. He hadn't produced, he hadn't gone on to do what he was about to do, which in 2006, Narls Barkley and crazy, this already changed his life. That was next level. Yeah, that was next. I mean, you could play at weddings, you could play it for briefly. You could play it for like really hit parties with like supermodels from Willamina. Like it was like everybody like crazy.

That sounds very specific. Did that happen to you? Yeah, clearly. But at the time, I was hiring the DJs for the Chateau Marmont and the Bar Momo. And we had some very flaw in. And I was also doing the standard in New York every now and then. So there were a lot of, there was some fancy parties. Wow.

I wish I'd been friends with you then. Me too. We could have written some songs. I think we could have done some damage back then. Younger, leaner us? Come on, man. You would have done some damage. I feel like there's a very distinctive clap in this song.

Yeah, let's listen to that. a one-bar loop and you can even hear the bleed proving that humans did this. Oh, yeah. And I'll add that to the beat. Whoa, it's really on a weird beat. It's very 60s. Oh, yeah. I'm trying to think of a song that does that.

I think a thousand surf rock songs do it. So that's what we're hearing in the claps. And then I'll add. I'll meet you, Philth and McNasties, man. here we go so that's our beat yeah we probably don't know who did the claps either I'm not sure

could be Damon could be one of the demons what if we find out is him just smack in his stomach like Questlove said he got the claps on next movement go back and listen to our episode on the roots the bass guitar another question mark Morgan Nichols is the name of a friend of

Jamie Hewlett and is the live bassist or has been the live basis in the past on their songs And his name is the basest. Okay, see, that word... His name is the basis. The name, his name is the basis for the virtual basest.

Because remember, that character's name is Murdoch, Nichols. Which I think Murdoch, even though he tried to spell it all weird, is like the most British sounding name. Yeah. Like, he's supposed to like Murdoch, like Robert Murdoch, and then the word Nichols. But they feel like kind of cool, but you can't... That's a British name.

But he's not credited in the liner notes or in the splits. Of course. We're not sure. But let's listen. Oh. Yeah, no deterioration on that. Oh. No, no, no.

I love that slide up to the octave there. And I hear it doubling a guitar, which is a very surf rock, very, very reggae thing to do, very rock-steady thing to do. Yeah. The same line being played on both bass and guitar. So you get a little more high-end, you get a little more of that low register and the high-end together. It's possible also, too, by the way, because there is a guitar player who's credited Simon Tong with additional guitar. Maybe we're hearing him on the doubling. there? Not really sure.

I will say, like, there's something Blurzian. If I can use that. Blurgeon. There's something blursion about that base. I don't know. Maybe because I knew Damon, but I could have seen that being in a blur song. I love that baseline. It's so simple. I just love these, like, really simple, hooky, you know, lowest string riffs. Again, with the B-52s did a lot of them, but so did Dick Dale. It's a

very 50s, like 50s surf rocks. And so did Blur on London Loves, you know, like, Again, I think that a little signature bass kind of goes well with Damon's style of singing. And again, we're sort of building that within these layers of stems, we have a mix of machine made and human made. That was very clearly a human bass and guitar. But if you weren't positive, we hear the little isolated thing at the end here. I'll play the whole thing, sorry. Yeah.

And listen. Yes. I love that little part. That's definitely a human being and their fingers. on the strings and the little imperfections and the different dynamics of the notes. Right now, yeah, I've learned how to do all those little imperfections. Thanks to our show.

And we will be inadequate. Our show is helping them scrape all that human content. Sorry. Sorry, future. We've heard the drums. By the way, Russell Hobbs sounds like somebody who did not get paid by Barry Gordy. Sounds like the guy who was definitely in the Funk brothers. In the lore, he's supposed to be from Brooklyn, actually.

He's supposed to be a hip-up. In the lore, because he's a cartoon character, right? they're all based in fact Russell hops Tell us about the guitar All right So this is noodles right Right

Or Simon Tong who gets credited With additional guitar And by the way Simon Tong was in the verve He plays guitar on Bittersweet Symphony Oh And join Blur after Graham Coxon left in 2002 So he's on the Think Tank LP And he played live for the Demon Days tour

And by the way he's also in Another Damon Allbarn side project which is the good the bad and the queen the good the bad in the queen is Damon Albaran with Simon Tung Paul Simonin from the Clash and Tony Allen the famous Afrobeat drummer from Falakuti's band well fantastic yeah another really cool side project so here is what he is playing

yeah and that's a loop we hear that exact same thing again warts and all can I hear where that is in the light it sounds familiar I'll bring in some layers so you can hear that in context I just love how imperfect that whole thing is. The sound of it, the recording of it, sort of in the red. It's not perfectly tuned. And then he does this slide, which is a little bit awkward and off.

But with the repetition, your ear just kind of likes it. It kind of goes with it. And I feel like I'm in, you know, Hawaii. It's very Hawaiian sounding. All right, I'll bring in some other elements. Okay. Just so we know where it is in the song. Woo!

That is... Right here. That's a little early. That is not falling where I would have thought it fell. That's pretty outstanding. That gives it so much character, that quirk. By the way, the non-pro-toolsness of that, not being on grid, is really so much a part of the human, the character.

And that's, I think, a huge goal of mixing machines and human. I think that's a project goal. I got to say, if you're working on the little squares, you would not think to put the notes there. No. I'm sorry, just so we can have it absolutely clean. Could you just play the bass on that part playing in symphony, in harmony together.

I love that. Imagine driving home. Simon Tongue. Well done. Well done. Well done. That is something that I didn't really... I don't know that I knew to give it flowers

in my 1,000 listening to this song, but that is just... That is angelic. There's so much beauty in the strangeness of all the choices of what's being played, how it's being played, the timing of it. the sound of it being recorded, the rhythm, like the whole thing, these are choices that only a person would make.

I tend to agree. The name of the album is Demon Days, but I would argue it should be called Angel Days, because that is just beautiful. It's so cool as a contrast to the otherwise locked in rhythm. The rest, and not the bass and guitar aside, just having the drum beat locked in like that, it provides a really incredibly, not only nice contrast, but like essential. You know, it gives the song so much of its character. I mean, it's very balleric, if you want to talk, like, British. Ibiza. I still say Abitha. And I don't know you're trying to be, like, fancy, but like, I say like the British say, I say Ibitha. But it definitely sounds balleric, and that kind of fits with the other songs on this album,

because one of my favorite guerrilla songs of all time is on this album, a song called Dare with Sean Ryder from the Happy Mondays, ironically. And he's a man who knows about partying in Ibitha. So I feel like that's in keeping with the general sound of Demon Days. Let's listen to the acoustic guitar that comes in during the break, or technically the chorus. Okay. That's the part I like. And then a little bit later, that same thing, that same part, but it's treated a little different.

Is that a different guitar? That's an acoustic guitar. It might maybe two layered probably. Certainly on top that melody is another lyric guitar. And then what's interesting, I hadn't noticed it until I was in the stems, is when that same part comes in. for the second chorus. This is the windmill, windmill part, by the way.

It's treated a little different sonically. Let's listen. It doesn't have that high-pass filter. So it's more high-fi. Let's low-fi. And there sounds like some claps. Yeah. It sounds like it could be the reverb.

From the clap. Yeah, but not the clap itself. Claps bleeding in. Yeah, with reverb, what you can do is you have the wetness and dryness. Yeah. If you put wet all the way to 100, basically you can take out the sun.

sound source and only have the resultant reverb from it. That's a little bit of what I'm hearing. So, yeah, that's the guitar line there from William. It's like, you know what? The claps on Feel Good Ink. That was me. I was clapping for a while in there. You know, I told him to leave my name off.

I don't need the glory. Just for context here, I'll put the vocals in so you know where we are. You know, every time you play it, I know. I'm waiting for those drums to come back. because they come back in like a beast. I just want to call attention to this really fun sample that I've always noticed, but I don't know what it is. Now that it's isolated, maybe we can get the one song nation on board

to figure out where did this come from. I'll play it isolated, then I'll put it in the mix, and you'll be like, oh yeah, I noticed that before. Here it is. Right? Have you ever noticed that before? No, I hadn't. You'll never unhear that.

Here it is in the mix. And it's dissonant. It doesn't fit in musically with the bass line or with the bass line with the rest of what's going on. You checked who sample. There was nothing there. It's not on who sample. I looked lots of interviews.

But that very much sounds. It's one of two things. Either, we were just talking about Porta's head. This could be Simon Tongue or Damon. They could have recorded it and made it sound old. Made it sound low-fi. I would say play that again. Yeah.

Play that little thing again. And let me see. Let me see if I can Shazam it. Ooh, good idea. Because not everybody has the stems and so they can't isolate it. So let's see what we got. All right. Shazam, tell us what this is.

Ready to go? It's very short. Let's go. And obviously that synth stab is not part of it. Can you loop it? Sure, I'll try looping it. One second. I love that we're in this rabbit hole. I'll loop it without that synth stab,

which sounds like it was overdubbed over this recorded sample. Probably try to mask it. Let's go. Here we go. It feels like it's a sample because I'm hearing other instruments. It feels filtered. It's just the top end of a record. I almost say there's like even a man talking.

Do you hear that voice? There's like a human voice on it. There's several things happening there. There's a guy singing. somewhere in there. It could just be some old library record, whatever it is. We're not trying to get them in trouble anyway, folks. I'm saying it's fair use and I'm a musicologist.

So you're not going to jail. Hey man, we know music's niche, man. What actually was that? That was Jamaican. I never heard that one before. That was clearly an undercover agent trying to sound Jamaican. Then there's another sound that we'll be hearing right after this answering machine. Let's listen and then I'll explain what it is.

Oh, yeah, I know this. Yep. So that sound, do you know what that is? Oh, um, did we talk about it? You might know it from your childhood. You might know it from grade school, from like grammar school, from like, you know, from being a kindergartner. I don't know. You mean the instrument?

That instrument, yes. What is that? I don't think I know. It's called a Suzuki Omnicord off the rack. Yes, we've talked about this on another episode of the show a while back, I think. Maybe. You know, you might be right, and I can't remember. But what it is is it's basically an electric auto harp.

It was very inexpensive when it came up. Suzuki, you know, was literally a brand, a Japanese brand. They made motorcycles. They made motorcycles, but a lot of music education as well. And it's a single button. I've actually got one here. It's called an Omnicord. It's called an Omnicord.

I've got a VST version of it, so I can show you exactly how it works. The other people, what a VST is. VST is just a plug-in, so here in Ableton. So with a Suzuki Omnicord, you can just with one finger, actually two. One finger pushes a button, and the other one, like an auto-harp, you strum it. So I'm not going to strum it here, but what I will do is, show you. Strum it.

No, I refuse. Basically with the one button, you choose the character of the chord. If it's major, minor, or a seventh chord, and then you can get an arpeggio out of it by strumming. So here's an example of just strumming a major chord. And then that was with one finger. It was playing all the notes in the chord itself, the root third, fifth, basically. But going up several octaves, which is why you hear it go higher and higher and higher. And now I'll do it for a minor chord.

So that's a D-flat minor, and here's a D-flat seventh. Dominant seventh. Minor seventh. These are all not complicated chords, but certainly, like I said, this is an educational tool. So for children, the ability to sort of make, you know, you can basically play a song if you know what chords, what finger to go for one note to the next, but the root of the chord is you're trying to play. You can play the chord with one thing. You just trying to figure out which chords sound good next to each other. That's right. And the simplest way to put this is this is a way to play a chord with one finger.

I could have started with that, but I didn't. That's it. Yeah, that's not a great, man. So that's the Omnicord, off the rack. And we know that Damon Albarn loves the Omnichord, because the other place that you've heard it before is it also came with a little cheap drum machine. And that one of the presets sounded like this.

Ah, that's a preset? That's a preset on the Omnic cord. He used the same toy for Clint Eastwood. I am. But just a different use of it. It's got the same chords, but it's a preset. So one button gives you all of what I just played. Incredible.

And can you use those presets on a song without everybody just eaping it? So glad you asked. Let's listen to a song that does that. by luxury. So let's stay together. So there you go. I love that. You can because I did it, and therefore,

the short answer is, yes, you can because it's an off-the-rack instrument, just like using a Rhodes. You know, we've talked a lot about how sounds, you know, another example of this is the preset from Show Me Love, right? The M1 keyboard. Oh, sure.

Right? Or like the Melotron on some of those Beatles songs. 100%. The Melotron that we've heard millions of times since the 60s and evokes its use on strawberry fields. Anyone is free to use it. It's just a sound that's available. That's a pretty good Melitron. Nice work.

I like the hand gesture too. That's why you need to watch this show on YouTube. That's I had to play. Yeah, you got to see. I'm doing so much of my hands. Well, the song didn't sing itself. So let's hear a little bit of Damon's singing, I would argue it's almost rapping. Let's hear a little bit of Damon Albert's vocals on the song.

Shat, shrapita, shrapa, feel good. I love how he's out of breath. You know what that is, like, to my ears as a guy who stepped up to the microphone to do scratch vocals on music I'm working on? That's the first time he's ever done it, or maybe the second time. It's such a scratch vocal. The proof of the pudding is, besides it's being charmingly imperfect, normally you'd go in an overdub that second line so that you don't run out of breath. But he's like, shop, shapa, dappa, feel good.

Okay, can we address that? Another one in the room is that I didn't know he was saying feel good. I thought he was just going, hoo-hoo-hoo. Yeah. All this time. And I mean, a couple of years ago, I think I figured out somebody said, like, he's saying feel good. And I was like, oh, is he? I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing about me.

when I like a song, I almost never Unless it's like, you know, like some hip hop You definitely want to know Oh wait, what did he mean by that? And then I'll go on Genius or one of these websites or whatever But on especially on a lot of like singing songs From my youth all the way up until like the 2000s It never occurred to me to go online and make sure that he wasn't just going

Who, who, who, you know, I always going You didn't know. Feels good. It feels good. It's the title. I actually saying feel good. Shat, shop, but da, shop a joke. Yeah, there's no ass. I just left. He just like runs out of breath, but he just, he does both parts. But like, normally, you would, you would have two people sing that or two takes. You would just ensure that they didn't interrupt each other like that. Well, I'm going to take a step further. I also hear a little bit of, like, you know, because we know he knows who Falakuti is. And there's a little bit of that sort of like Afro beats, not to be confused with Afro beats, which is more recent. But there's a little bit of that, you know, Afro B where it's not so much a word. It's just like, a, Akuta.

Yeah. You know. And also, Percussive sound. This is part two of a two-part episode that we've done about Damon's projects. He went from, woo-hoo to, who-hoo.

He went from, absolutely. To feel good. So he's like, I just got to take these two syllables that anybody can say and make it work. Mm-hmm. Two-note melody. A two-note hook.

Can you name that song? Can you name that song in two notes? Yeah. I can name two songs. He goes, feel good. I can name two Damon All-Barns song. songs in two notes. Damon, you should just do a so-called,

Damon. There's a sinister laugh at the very top of this song. Can you play it for us? The long laugh, too. Tell me that's one of the members of De La Sol. It's Nacio. It's Plug 3. Oh, okay.

All right, right. Yeah, totally. I can totally see it. And that's the part where I was like, yeah, you know, there's definitely a rapper. It's so long. That intro, it's like a seven-second long laugh. It might be longer than the Vincent Price laugh at the end of thrilling.

Well, I'm going to try to laugh that like. Creaking door sound. Got a new horizon, it's a femoral style, a melancholy town where we never smile. And all I want to hear is the message beep. My dreams, they got a kissing because I don't get asleep, no. Mm-mm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. We talked about Shrekkashang just a couple episodes ago. This is the Fred Schneider thing.

It's the talk singing where there's melody in it. Talk singing, not toxicity. But talk singing. There's melody in there. And he goes back and forth. There is da-da-da-da-da. That's more explicitly melody. But the da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

It's sort of one falling note. Yeah, going down the stairs. It kind of mirrors speech, but we kind of wouldn't talk like that either. So it's somewhere in between speaking, rapping and singing. It's also got that effect that makes it sound like he's got a tin can with a string up to his mouth.

That's right. Yeah, he's either using a low pass filter or it's an inexpensive microphone or it's literally a megaphone or some kind of like, you know, you can put a microphone in front of a megaphone, you know, there's lots of ways you can get that effect.

Oh, that's kind of cool. I didn't know that. Yeah, I could totally see that. But it has the effect of old AM radio or old telephone, right? Yeah. Because we've cut out all the high frequencies. Yeah.

It's just low by. win. Yeah, exactly. The Dodgers win. It's just very low-fi. Very low-fi. It's done forever you and me. Whim-mill, win-mill for the land is everybody in.

I love that harmony stack at the end. Yeah, I don't think that I knew that that was there. I don't think I'd ever really notice it either. It's somewhat buried in the mix. You feel it. But that's the only time I think the vocals are so clear as well, because his whole vocal there was also filtering. And do we know if that's just him singing the higher registers and layering it?

That sounds like a stack of demons. It sounds like demons. A stack of demons. Yeah, it's a stack of demons. What a gift. What a great gift that would be. Here's your stack of demons. Here's a stack of demons for you.

I know it's your birthday. So I'm about you a stock of demons. Oh, you're so kind. Dayla Sol's on the track. Can we hear a little bit of their isolated? Of course, as we always would say, R.A. True. Laughing gas, these hazmat.

Fast cats. Lining them up like crass. Ladies ponies at track. It's my chocolate little tag. I'm stepping in heart of this. Yeah, bear rapping in harder this year Watch me as a gravitate Ha ha ha ha ha ha

Don't forget about the laugh contest I'm sorry Play that very last That very last laugh Okay But listen to David It sounds a little I think he's hoo-hoo-hooing

I think he's hoo-hooing by that point Right Michael Jacksoning there That's more of a Yeah I didn't hear feel at all in that one So I don't think I was crazy I was probably just focus on the later Who-Hoo's

And by the way, De La has always brought a little bit of snark, comedy, laughter, sarcasm, biting wick, acerbic wit to what they do and hear nothing, nothing unexpected in a good way. Yeah. Like, there's still De La Sol, even though they're on this track. And even though the first time I heard this, I just thought Dale was using different voices. But it would have been crazy. By the way, also, I think there was this thought that, like, hip-hop could only be one thing, especially when De Laugh came out. They helped explode that myth. And I love the fact that they were good, don't stop, get it, get it, which is Luther

Campbell and two live crew. Oh, yeah, yeah, you're right. You wouldn't necessarily think of two live crew. Interpolation. Yes, and de la soul getting along. But guess what? A lot of your favorite rappers actually do listen to more than just the particular style of hip-hop that they perform.

And by the way, Damon talks about finding this voice for the song. He said, quote, feel good was the beginning of it. I really enjoy that voice because it's an opportunity to say some quite bizarre things that I wouldn't necessarily be able to. sing about. So it gives them another character to play. We were going to break down all the lyrics, but I think it's important to point out that like the lyrics don't always have to be like interpreted literally. You know what I mean? I think that we just decided to leave them as they are. As it stands, these lyrics are more akin to sort of like the nonsense lyrics in a good way

of a David Byrne song. And I think that we're going to just leave it at that. I think you're right. I think they're just stream of consciousness. A little bit. And maybe the meaning is what you make of it. All right. We've heard the song. How did the splits break down on on gorillas. All right, well, Damon takes 37.5% of the publishing pie. Interesting. Splitting it equally with his buddy Jamie Hewlett, interestingly, who I don't know had much of a musical contribution literally, but perhaps just as the inspiration source

or maybe lyrically they work together. Unclear them. The waters have been muddied in terms of who did what on this song. Sure. Except that we know his co-creator of gorillas, Jamie Hewlett, got 37.5%. Amazing. And you know what's crazy, but I think you know where I'm going with this, like an older Damon is taking less of the pie, and I think it's because he's gotten older,

and he sort of recognizes, you know, nothing happens in a vacuum, and why don't I try to split the pie more evenly? By the way, who gets the last 25%? Dave, Trujoy Jolly Kerr. Yes. From De La Sol. That's awesome. 20%.

And Brian, Danger Mouse Burton gets the last 5%. Okay, well, great. That's super cool. Which to me maybe implies that he did have something to do with, what sounds very Danger Mouse, that bass line, the guitar part, maybe he found that sample. Maybe he found the sample. It's unclear, but those.

Those are the four names listed in the publishing splits. Well, it should be said, the Feel Good Inc has taken on a second life thanks to TikTok. Like so many songs from the past, these kids here for the first time in Gen Z is like, what's this cool song? And what's funny is that people are not really using it for the dark corporate dystopia side of the music. They're using it for nature videos, hiking. Have you seen this thing where they're like rape benches?

No, what is that? There's like a thing where like they'll show the bench and then they'll pan over and they'll show you what the bench is looking at. And that's what gets the bench it's rating out of. And by the way, some of these benches are amazing, but they use the windmill, windmill part of the song is the part where you whip over. I love things like that need an explanation. It's not intuitive at all.

It was not obvious at all. But people will be like, look at this nice bench with a view. 100 out of 10. Windmill, windmill by gorillas. Okay, whatever. Also, like the scale of 1 to 10, it's 100. This TikTok trend is basically people finding their own little windmill island, a bench, a trail of view,

just a moment outside the Matrix and these data centers that we're all going to be slave to. And then sharing it on a screen, which is very guerrillas. I know. And I think, look, the same way the guerrillas

continues to release music, I think that Damon is not finished with this band, and thankfully we get to, you know, we get the benefit of getting new music. All right, as always, you can find us on socials.

You can find me on Instagram at Diallo, DialO, LLO, and on Instagram at Diallo. And you can find me on Instagram at L-U-X-X-U-X-U-Y and on TikTok at LuxuryX. You can also watch full episodes of OneSong on YouTube and Spotify. Just search One Song podcast. We'd love it if you'd like and subscribe.

Also be sure to check out the One Song Spotify playlist for all the songs we discussed in our episodes. You can find that link in our episode description. I don't know why I said it like that, but that's where I'm going to leave it. Because we also have a Patreon now. That's right. Patreon.com slash Diallo Luxury. That's right. And if you've made this far, you're officially part of the One Song Nation.

Show us some love. Give us five-star review if you can. And send this episode out to a fellow music nerd. It really helps us keep the show going. All right, luxury, help me on this thing. I'm producer, DJ, songwriter, musicologist, and every Friday night from 10 p.m. till midnight, KCRW DJ, Luxury. And I'm actor-writer-director and sometimes DJ Diallo Riddle.

And this is one song. We'll see you next time. This episode was recorded at KCRW headquarters, engineered by Katie Gilchrist, produced, edited, and mixed by the one and only Eric Hicks.