Does the identity of a band or single musician really matter that much in the grand scheme of things? Does the personality of the performer in any way affect the virtue of their work, or are they two aspects of the ego which have no bearing on each other?

It would make no sense to say that personality holds no influence on the creative side of any given person, but when interpreting their work, is there a necessity to know who that person was?

Many people would argue the affirmative. When you take an art history class or the History of Rock, or any number of analogous surveys that touch on different movements in the evolution of human expression, the character of the artist is often called into question. Would Jackson Pollock have created his great blurs if he had not harbored tremendous anger issues and a rocky relationship with a whiskey bottle? Would The Beatles have survived if John had not met Yoko? (No.) And without Riefenstahl’s indiscriminate eye for physical beauty, could Hitler have won over the masses, or without the Beats would we have counterculture movement, all bursting from a deep-rooted desire to see the world, to live on the road free from the fear of the bomb?

However, most of these people fall into a grouping that seems to have died with our last century and the Analog Age. In the dawn of the digital era, two disparate views on ego and persona emerged: There are those who still adhere to the the self-important view that cocaine and the ‘80s yuppie boom threw upon the masses, and on the diametric pole stand those who no longer care about personal adulation and instead err on the side of making a statement on the part of humanity as a whole, rather than “woe is me” confessionals whose impact on the collective consciousness is virtually nonexistent.

One prime example of this new breed that has dominated the underground music scene in the last decade, while also achieving major mainstream success through their animated masks, are Gorrillaz, aka Jamie Hewlett and Damon Albarn. Though they have achieved fame and the critiques that are inherent with it, the group’s most recent album, “Plastic Beach,” and its predecessor “Demon Days,” are clever, conceptual pieces that highlight social decay and the danger of humanity’s impact on the world as a whole. Today the band announced a world tour, an incredibly rare opportunity to see Albarn lead a band through his songs as opposed to 2-D, Russell, Noodle and Murdoc and their meta-animated video world takes.

So the real question one should ask when they look at art is, why do I care what this person is telling me? Should I care that Lady Gaga wears ridiculous costumes to hide her Jersey nose and accentuate her ass, all because she has self-image issues? Does Stephanie Meyer’s inability to get laid merit millions of book sales? And why in the hell is it necessary for banal housewives in plushy climes far from our wonderous Appalachias to subject viewers to aural torture with the mundane, upper-middle class lives?

Every time some vain project that is as masturbatory as those mentioned above is loosed on the world, the author of the Great American Novel is aborted, Ernest Hemingway and Kurt Cobain dance the Shotgun Roulette Duet, and Hunter Thompson raises the middle finger of his memorial canon at us poor saps, the living.