2D may have been kidnapped into Gorillaz, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t liable to break out on his own musical stylings upon occasion–a new song called “Sleeping Powder” being the prime example. Ribbing off the “your brain on drugs” commercial from the 90s that Rachael Leigh Cook recently felt the need to resuscitate, the video opens on 2D at his piano, a framed photo of Liberace overlooking him and some MAD magazines situated where sheet notes ought to be.
The elegant opening on harpsichord offers an ironic touch to how inelegant 2D’s continued drug addiction is. Indeed, part of 2D’s backstory is that his zeal for mind-altering substances led him to incur a number of head injuries, followed by an appropriate vicious cycle need for pain killers as a remedy. “Gone with the self of the day,” whatever incarnation of it that might be created by the type and amount of drugs he’s ingested, 2D’s piano and other environs slip away as he enters an alternate universe–much in the same way as Murdoc in the video for “Saturnz Barz.” A backdrop of pandas segues into 2D fumbling along in some garden variety European city surroundings (you know, arches, people on horses, sun-soaked apartment buildings, etc.) before here he’s in a circus ring here and then he’s in some seemingly ancient civilization there.
All the while dancing and splitting into various fragments of himself, the video empowers one with the sense that, well, maybe it isn’t so bad to surrender to the power of drugs now and again. Regardless of how it might somehow incite you to wear high-waisted pants that even Joaquin Phoenix in Her couldn’t get away with.
