Damon Albarn, pictured here performing at the 2009 Glastonbury Festival, has become a pop music Renaissance man. (Luke MacGregor/Reuters)

Most musicians would kill to be seen as the voice of an era. Damon Albarn, on the other hand, has spent most of his career working hard to avoid being defined by an era.

Because of all of his flourishing musical projects, the Guardian newspaper named Damon Albarn 'Multi-tasker of the Decade.'

Albarn is still best known as the frontman of the seminal Britpop outfit Blur. Back in the mid-'90s, he and his mates were the crown princes of the second British Invasion. Armed with a thick, fake Cockney accent, Albarn sang with glib but articulate charm about feeding pigeons in parks, relaxing at country estates and having gender-bending trysts on beaches. With their jaunty guitars and pulsating post-rave beats, Blur albums Modern Life Is Rubbish (1992), Parklife (1994) and The Great Escape (1995) represented the sound of Young Britain.

But for the last decade, Albarn has been diligently striving to present himself as more than just a snotty young Brit — even while Blur was producing chart-topping albums, Albarn was quietly and cleverly challenging his own reputation. In 2002, he released Mali Music, a critically lauded collaboration with musicians like Toumane Diabaté, whom he'd connected with on an Oxfam trip to Africa. In 2006, Albarn formed The Good, the Bad and the Queen, a group that includes Clash bassist Paul Simonon and famed Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen; a year later, Albarn adapted a 16th-century Chinese novel into a jaw-dropping operatic stage production (Monkey: Journey to the West).

(EMI Music Canada)

Along with artist Jamie Hewlett, Albarn is also the braintrust behind Gorillaz. The idea for Gorillaz seemed like a nifty if ephemeral gimmick when it was hatched in the late '90s: a bunch of cartoon characters who serve as the public face of a genre-melding supergroup. But the act has gone on to sell more than 15 million records, earning notice from the Guinness people as the "Most Successful Virtual Band" of all time. This week, Gorillaz dropped their third full-length album, Plastic Beach, a killer collection of songs that mix hip-hop, Middle Eastern orchestras, soul icons and motorik grooves.

It's hard to fathom that such a wide-ranging curriculum vitae could belong to the same man who once battled over chart supremacy with fellow Britpop icons Oasis. In 1995, the two bands squared off over which single — Blur's snide Country House versus Oasis's bleary-eyed Roll With It — would sell the most copies. The UK press salivated over the rivalry, labeling it "The Battle of Britpop" and the "British Heavyweight Championship." (In the end, Country House won.)

While the incident spurred Oasis to ever-greater heights of bombast and tabloid-baiting idiocy, it seemed to chasten Albarn. In a 2002 interview with the Guardian, Justine Frischmann, lead singer for Elastica and Albarn's ex-girlfriend, claimed he experienced "a sort of nervous breakdown" around the time of Parklife that caused him to "assume the character of the insensitive yob" as a way of coping with the overnight explosion of Britpop. But it seems that Albarn came out the other end of that personality swing wanting to do more than just write easy-to-digest pop hits. In fact, he wanted to explore music that had nothing to do with what was trendy.

Disillusionment factored in this transformation. The dissolution of Albarn's eight-year relationship with Frischmann in 1998 played a major role. In contrast to the caustic and aloof observations of Blur's early work, the album 13 (1999) found Albarn writing from a place of introspection and humility. But politics also weighed heavily on him.

Britpop was just one part of the "Cool Britannia" movement that overtook pop culture in the mid-'90s, a phenomenon that encompassed everything from Austin Powers to artist Damien Hirst and was championed by Tony Blair, the man behind Britain's New Labour party.

Albarn, far right, with the other members of Blur, circa 2000. (Payou/EMI Music Canada)

Dismayed by the policies of the conservatives, Albarn was one of many young artists (along with Noel Gallagher) who eagerly supported Blair's early campaign. But he grew frustrated by New Labour's failure to live up to its promises; in the fantastic new documentary Blur: No Distance Left to Run, Albarn is vocal about his feelings of betrayal by a political figure in whom he'd placed so much hope.

Albarn's political frustration escalated in the 2000s. At the height of the War on Terror, he and Robert Del Naja of the group Massive Attack bought full-page ads in NME magazine, in which they deplored British military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. "It puzzles me that so few musicians and people in the arts have raised their voices against the threat of war .… It's hard to imagine an anti-war song becoming a radio hit, as it might have done in the 1960s."

Albarn didn't write any overtly pacifist anthems, but he did become more engaged with the world. He traveled to Mali and made an album. He convinced his Blur bandmates to record Think Tank (2003) in Morocco, where they collaborated with local musicians. He co-founded Honest Jon's, an independent label devoted to releasing offbeat and rare tracks, from calypso to British folk music.

Over the years, parenthood has also informed his worldview. He has a 10-year-old daughter with his current partner, British artist Suzy Winstanley, and in an interview with the Guardian last November, he described himself simply as "a father who is passionate about music." (For its part, the Guardian named Albarn Multi-tasker of the Decade.)

Like the rest of the Gorillaz oeuvre, Plastic Beach showcases two of Albarn's greatest strengths: his gift for impeccable pop melodies and his talent for curating eclectic sounds. It takes a kind of savant to envision a blissful marriage between Welsh psych-pop oddball Gruff Rhys and U.S. hip-hop crew De La Soul, but that's what you get in the kaleidoscopic reverie Superfast Jellyfish. On White Flag, the rapidfire patter between UK grime MCs Bashy and Kano provides a bracing counterpoint to the sounds of the Lebanese National Orchestra for Oriental Arabic Music.

Gorillaz is made up of four outlandish, badly behaved cartoon characters: Murdoc, 2D, Noodle and Russel. It may seem like a silly conceit, but those avatars serve as a commentary on the manufactured nature of celebrity personas — and, by extension, a critique of any figurehead that represents authority.

Plastic Beach, Albarn recently told the Guardian, is his way of "trying to make people understand the essential melancholy of buying a readymade meal in loads of plastic packaging." In Albarn's mind, there's not much that separates processed consumer products and prefab pop stars. But he believes that pop culture is still driven by an inherent humanity. "People who watch X Factor might have some emotional connection to … this detritus that accompanies what seems to be the most important thing in people's eyes, the celebrity voyeurism."

If there's a common thread in all of Albarn's projects, it's his desire to overturn the dominant culture — even if that just means making awesome pop music that sounds like nothing else on the radio.

Plastic Beach is in stores now.

Sarah Liss writes about the arts for CBC News.