Even though I'm not a big fan of music, I can faithfully say that one of my favorite songs to listen too in my free time is Gorillaz, a British virtual band created and headed by English musician Damon Albarn. While the band has a few songs that became semi-mainstream, like "Clint Eastwood" and "Feel Good Inc.", one of their more intriguing songs, to me, is "Rhinestone Eyes" from Gorillaz's 3rd album, Plastic Beach.
Despite the each stanza of the lyrics being 3 lines long, the structure of the song favors even numbers, with the first 2 sections consisting of 4 stanzas and the third section being made up of 2 stanzas, inadvertently causing the reader to take.
While there is no overall narrative in the song, it evokes a strong message of a society betrayed by and alienated from the loss of natural life that plagues it. The song is structured in an inorganic, abnormal fashion, with each 3-line stanza crafting almost entirely different imagery from the last while also keeping close to the song's theme of exile from a rapidly-developing world. This is done both figuratively and literally, with many of the stanzas sharing similar closing lines or phrases, such as "factories far away" and the song's namesake: "rhinestone eyes". These phrases are repeated numerously, even dominating parts of the song's instrumental breaks. In conjunction with the varying imagery provided by each of lyrics' stanzas, "Rhinestone Eyes" crafts a main idea revolving around artificiality and its effects on others:
I'm a scary gargoyle on a towerThat you made with plastic powerYour rhinestone eyes are like factories far awayWhen the paralytic dreams that we all seem to keepDrive on engines 'til they weepWith future pixels in factories far away
Rhinestones are a kind of imitation diamond. When combined with the imagery of the songwriter's persona feeling like a "scary gargoyle", the stanza's closing line echoes a message of the "you" in the song being an imitation of something attempting to be human. The line "factories far away"illustrates how the pursuit of technology and the future distances people from what they know and love. The imagery of people's dreams "[driving] on engines 'til they weep" sets up the song's nihilistic tone, illustrating how people hopes will eventually fizzle out with the coming of the future.
As the song moves on to its next section, "Rhinestone Eyes" begins to place greater focus on the feelings of people than on societal corruption, as shown by its sudden, exclusive use of a first person narrator. Many of the narrator's lines, such as "I got a feeling now my heart is frozen", "I prayed on the immovable", and "...red light is all I can take", echo that of people suffering from depression or losing motivation to live. A frozen heart is symbolic of a person unable to feel emotion, praying on "the immovable" being equivalent to having dreams to big to accomplish, and red light (which is stated after a line regarding the narrator breaking up with a girl via taxi) can be associated with "stopping" in life and hitting a rut.
Altogether, "Rhinestone Eyes" echoes the story a forward-minded world moving too fast for regular people to keep up with or understand. In short, the persona behind the song feels that the world looks back at him with "rhinestone eyes"; the world seems artificial and uncaring to him. This message, too me, is particularly relevant to America's current political climate, with many new sources seeming more biased and manipulative than ever, and the future White House appealingly being set up to only cater to a select group of Americans. It's truly a deep and relevant piece in that way.
It's part of the noise when winter comesIt reverberates in my lungsNature's corrupted in factories far away
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