Fans are Pissed at the Gorillaz For Trying to Sell NFTs After Years of Being Advocates for the Environment

Fans are upset with Gorillaz for embracing NFTs. There is even a Change.org petition trying to get the band to stop the sale.

On Friday, Gorillaz’s game-changing self-titled debut album turned 2o years old. The virtual group celebrated the occasion by teasing a bunch of new goodies, including a rerelease of their classic 2001 debut. 

One of the things teased was an non-fungible token sale of their debut to commemorate the anniversary. Gorillaz wouldn’t be the first popular act to hop on NFTs. Popular artists from The Weeknd to Wu-Tang Clan to freakin’ Bhad Bhabie have all tried to jump on the NFT bandwagon which has blown up over the last month. And in case if you were wondering what an NFT is, it’s a one-of-a-kind digital asset — from Gifs to videos to drawings — that can be bought and sold; to counter counterfettting, NFTs depend on a shared public ledger called the blockchain.

And here is where the issues come. NFTs leave a huge environmental footprinnt.

Some of the numbers are quite shocking. Wired did a piece breaking down the effects of NFT. In the article, they detail how an artist sold six NFTs for thousands of dollars. Just the sale alone consumed 8.7 megawatt-hours of energy. The average American household uses about 11 megawatt-hours per year.

Goriilaz embracing NFTs go against the ethos of the band. One of the follow ups to their classic debut was 2010s Plastic Beach. Damon Albarn got the idea for the album when he was looking at a beach near his house, and he noticed all the junk around him. “I was just looking for all the plastic within the sand,” he said at the time. 

When the news hit social media went to Twitter to address their frustration with Gorillaz and their sellout ways. 

There is also a Change.org petition encouraging Gorillaz to stop the sale. That petition has almost 500 signatures as of the time of publication.

You know what they say in the Dark Knight, “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”