Music is more than just a collection of sounds. It's a whole 'nother world where anything is possible. You don't have to be yourself, you don't even have to be human, and a lot of artists take full advantage of this world of illusion.
The benefits? Well, you can safely walk into any grocery store, club or gas station and not get mobbed by adoring though obnoxious fans. You can act like some kind of insane monster and let out that part of you that might never otherwise see the light of day. And sometimes, it's just cool to play dress up.
They say "fake it till you make it," but these seven artists are making it to fake it, and we can dig it.
Ziggy Stardust
David Bowie is a conceptual rock'n'roll genius. Throughout his career, he donned many characters with different looks, stories, genders and accessories. But his break out debut it still our all-time favorite. Ziggy Stardust is an alien from Mars, fronting the stellar rock outfit the Spiders. In his universe, Earth has been damned to just five more years, and Stardust comes with a message of hope and pure glam power. Yet, like many nonfictional rockstars, his vices destroy him in the end. But his message lives on, and the album remains one of the greatest in rock history.
Daft Punk
Sure, you know they're robots. But do you know why? As the story goes, Daft Punk were in the studio recording their second album, Discovery, when as Thomas Bangalter said, there was an accident. "We did not choose to become robots," he said. "We were working on our sampler, and at exactly 9:09 am on September 9, 1999, it exploded. When we regained consciousness, we discovered that we had become robots." Good luck picking those two Frenchies out in a crowd.
Controls
Daft Punk basically changed the game with their robotic look and feel, and they've inspired a lot of other artists to cover their faces and get weird. But this little guy seems to do it the best. Controls is a robot from far into the future in 30XX. He ripped through the time-space continuum to save humanity, which is in great danger of the "revolution." There isn't much he can tell us without ruining everything, so he communicates with his funky genre-spanning music. Oh, and he looks kind of like a wall socket. Adorbs.
The White Stripes
When this indie blues-rock fusion duo first hit the mainstream scene, they caused a lot of confusion. On stage, the story went that the trichromatic pair was happy brother and sister playing punky jams from peppermints and straight loving life. Then divorce records showed Jack and Meg White were actually an ill-fated couple. As it turned out, the bro-sis gig was just a fun act, and the concept of fun-loving youthfulness was lost on most fans. They band has sense broken up the band, too, but the White Stripes legendary catalogue lives on.
Gorillaz
Like we said, sometimes you don't even have to be of this plane of existence to make music. The Gorillaz are a whole group of cartoon musicians, existing almost exclusively in a two-dimensional world, coming to life in comic books, music videos and elaborate stage performances. It's actually two guys, Damon Albarn of Blur fame and Tank Girl cartoonist Jamie Hewlett, and they're responsible for some of the catchiest, most fun and experimental music of the last decade. Each of the band's four members has a long and vibrant backstory, as well as shared some pretty big adventures during their career.
Captain Murphy
More recently, this single cartoon character made a big splash on the blogosphere. The mysterious rapper, who worked alongside buzzy greats Flying Lotus and Earl Sweatshirt, had most fans eating up his tracks but stumped for a long time as to his true identity. And his twitter kept hard to the story, saying things like "They asked me to do a freestyle for the BET cypher but they didn't have an animation budget. #cartoonproblems" Of course, the cultish lyricist outed himself as FlyLo at the end of last year, but it's still fun to play along.
GWAR
But when aliens, robots, cartoons and incestuous brothers and sisters just isn't weird enough, you could always become a horrifying, blood-spewing monster of doom. GWAR are actually immense, other-worldy chaos warriors who spent thousands of years raping and pillaging the universe. They were banished to Earth where they were buried for years, until modern pollution thawed them out. Now they are hellbent on destroying all of humanity, apparently with a lot of slime you're not allowed to wash off for like, a whole day. Seriously, what's up with that?-->
