In 2001, a cartoon band dropped one of the strangest, most hypnotic singles in pop music history — and an Oakland rapper named Del tha Funkee Homosapien ended up on it almost by accident. Clint Eastwood by Gorillaz went to number four on the UK charts, sold millions worldwide, and introduced Del to an audience that vastly outnumbered his existing fanbase. It remains, for many people, their first encounter with Hieroglyphics.

The story of how that collaboration happened is both straightforward and somewhat miraculous — a reminder that the best creative collisions often come from genuine mutual admiration rather than calculated commercial strategy.

Who Are Gorillaz?

Gorillaz is the virtual band project created by Damon Albarn (of Blur) and Jamie Hewlett (of Tank Girl comics). The conceit: four animated characters — 2-D, Murdoc Niccals, Noodle, and Russel Hobbs — form a band, and their music is attributed to them rather than to the real musicians who make it.

The self-titled debut album arrived in 2001. It was experimental in a way that felt genuinely novel — hip-hop, alternative rock, dub, pop, and trip-hop filtered through Albarn’s melodic sensibility and Hewlett’s visual world. The singles were accessible; the album was stranger and deeper than most casual listeners realized.

How Del Got on Clint Eastwood

Damon Albarn was a genuine hip-hop fan — not performatively, but actually. He had been listening to Del’s work and reached out through Hiero Imperium. Del, for his part, was open to collaboration in a way that some underground MCs weren’t: he had always operated across genre borders, from his early work with Ice Cube to the electronic-influenced production on his solo albums.

The verse Del wrote for Clint Eastwood is a masterclass in making complex ideas feel effortless. Delivered over a sparse, eerie loop with a melody that lingers for days, Del raps about rap itself — about being a ghost, about invisibility, about the nature of skill that goes unrecognized. It’s deceptively simple language carrying genuinely sophisticated ideas.

The hook — “I got sunshine in a bag / I’m useless but not for long / the future is coming on” — belongs to Albarn’s 2-D character. Del’s verse arrives as a counterpoint: urgent, concrete, grounded in a way the dreamy hook isn’t. The tension between those two elements is part of why the song works so well.

What It Did for Del’s Career

The honest answer is: it didn’t transform it in the ways you might expect. Del was already well-respected in underground hip-hop circles. The Clint Eastwood exposure brought him a new audience, particularly in the UK and Europe, and created a pipeline of fans who followed the song back to I Wish My Brother George Was Here, No Need for Alarm, and the Hieroglyphics catalog.

But Del’s career was never defined by mainstream metrics. Hieroglyphics Imperium was built precisely to insulate artists from the pressure of chasing radio success. The Gorillaz collaboration was a creative win and an exposure win — not a commercial transformation that changed how he operated.

What it did do, durably, is ensure that a version of Del tha Funkee Homosapien would always be discoverable by people who found Gorillaz first. That pipeline has been running for over twenty years now.

Del’s Relationship with Gorillaz Continued

Del appeared again on the Gorillaz Phase One: Celebrity Take Down collection, and the relationship with Albarn remained warm. His participation helped establish Gorillaz as a project with genuine hip-hop credibility — not a novelty band sampling the aesthetic, but an actual collaboration with actual artists from the culture.

In retrospect, the pairing made sense from both directions: Albarn, drawn to the most interesting sounds happening in music, and Del, representing the Oakland underground that was doing some of the most creatively adventurous rap in the world at the turn of the millennium.

Start with Del

If Clint Eastwood is how you found Del, the natural next step is the Hiero catalog itself. Start with I Wish My Brother George Was Here (1991) for the origin story, then No Need for Alarm (1993), and the Deltron 3030 self-titled album (2000) for the sci-fi concept record that proved Del’s imagination had no ceiling.

From there, 3rd Eye Vision (1998) will introduce you to the full Hiero crew — and at that point, you’re in for real.

Stream Del tha Funkee Homosapien and Hieroglyphics on Spotify. Merch and exclusive drops at shophiero.com. Catch Hiero live at Red Rocks 2026.