In the catalog of musical artists who
make you wonder if there’s something
wrong with your stereo, sit The Flaming Lips,
the band about which I have written most
often on the blog, and, behind Elbow, are
my favorite band of the 21st century.
The Flaming Lips make their debut, actually,
in the late 80’s, make music for nearly a decade
before their first hit, “She Don’t Use Jelly,”
a song that I heard early in the 90’s,
then promptly forgot all about, so years
later, when my friend John is sending me
mixtapes from Minneapolis, I hear two
songs from The Soft Bulletin and would not
make the connection. As far as I knew, in
that moment in 1999, this was their first
record. Some months after receiving that
mixtape, I would buy the CD, and it would
change my life, or at least, become the
soundtrack for my life at a moment of
tremendous challenge and change.
First confession: nearly every one of the
albums I bought on CD in the early oughts by
The Flaming Lips, save two, I have also
acquired on vinyl, and anything I missed
during this period between 1995 and
2013, save one, I also acquired on vinyl.
Almost as prolific as these Gizzard Lizard
Wizard guys, The Flaming Lips, by my count,
released 13 albums in less then 20 years.
I have much of this stuff in my record collection.
Second confession: My loyalty has limits.
As much as I love these
guys, some of their output is unlistenable,
and so, I have not been motivated to
go all the way back to the 80s with The
Flaming Lips, and I have yet to take the
Zaireeka plunge, the four disc set that is
supposed to be played simultaneously
and synchronously on four different players.
I begin in 1995 with
Clouds Taste Metallic, and work my way
up through their last studio album,
American Head from 2020. And that journey,
while it has reaped huge earth-shattering
rewards, has contained some seriously
suspect musical endeavors. Buckle up.
I am about to attempt fifteen LPs
in a row, although, I confess in advance,
I may skip, as I did with Bowie, some of
the bonus material.
Clouds Taste Metallic, the earliest record in
my collection, was probably the third album
I acquired by The Flaming Lips. Coming
from the grunge era, it’s only similarity to
that humorless movement is its noise factor.
This is a noisy fucking record, but it’s also
whimsical in the extreme, catchy as hell,
and rocking. Here, Wayne Coyne’s oddball
lyricism is on full display, along with his
idiosyncratic singing voice, which is terrible
in the most charming of ways. He’s writing
about space stations, laughing giraffes,
“The Guy Who Got A Headache and Accidentally
Saves the World,” “Kim’s Watermelon Gun,”
animals escaping from the Zoo on Christmas,
and the happy-go-lucky “Evil Will Prevail.”
When the beginning track begins, quietly
as it does in nearly a whisper, don’t turn up
the volume; you will blow your speakers.
My first album by the Lips remains my favorite.
The Soft Bulletin was a revelation to me.
One of the first albums I’d ever heard that could
sonically be both trashy and beautiful,
both crushing and symphonic, weirdly funny
and sad, emotionally evocative and
intellectually challenging, everything and
everywhere all at once. There’s a kind of
exuberance over the entirety of this album
that I find irresistible and inspiring.
Lyrically, half the time I couldn’t tell you
what Wayne is singing about, but I know
that it moved me nonetheless. From the
bombastic opening that chronicles the
competition between two scientists, to
the abstract and mysterious quantum
implications of “A Spoonful Weighs a
Ton,” to the heartwarming love song to
a bandmate in “The Spider Bite Song,”
these lyrics and these melodies are spirited
and transformative. Even today, 25 years later,
I can’t sing that line “is it getting heavy”
in “Waiting for Superman” without choking up.
It, to me, is one of the saddest pop songs ever
written. I mean, things have to be bad if whatever
needs lifting is too heavy for Superman. Unbearable.
And immediately in the next track, we’re putting
groceries away, or folding clothes, and “suddenly,
everything has changed.” For no discernible reason
whatsoever, some combination of the melody,
instrumentation, and words in this moment just
destroy me. It was an album that stretched me
every which way and it came to me in my life
exactly when I needed it.
Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, I think of as kind
of a companion piece to The Soft Bulletin,
as it came hot on the heels of my first introduction
to the band in 2001, and this record worked on
me in similar ways. On the surface, a goofy
premise for an album, but it nevertheless provided
philosophical fodder and an emotional soundtrack
for the crucible I was going though 36 years
into my life journey. Songs about standing up
for yourself, machines developing human feelings,
Yoshimi, with her black belt in karate (of course)
and her battle against the evil pink robots to
protect the species from certain destruction: I
found these songs encouraging and terribly sad.
Again, the production is so over the top with trashy
drums and fart-like synthesizers, you’d think
this album would be difficult to take seriously,
and yet, after that first rambunctious battle
between the robots and our young Japanese
heroine, the lyrics and melody and these kinds
of symphonic interludes of “In the Morning
of the Magicians,” so mournful, so forlorn,
and so beautifully orchestrated, should make anyone
in touch with their feelers contend with the
biggest of humanity’s questions. And this continues
on side two: “I was waiting on a moment, but
the moment never came. All the billion other
moments were just slipping on away” in
“Ego Trippin’ at the Gates of Hell.” There’s
a Zen-like wisdom in Wayne Coyne’s lyrics,
and an understanding of some of the deepest
mysteries and paradoxes of life. Yeah, you’re
going to struggle with understanding your
most intense emotional landscapes. Yeah,
you’re going to obsess over missing out, and
in so doing, miss out. Yeah, you’re going
to feel sadness in the summer, so
what do you do? Look outside. Realize
that you have the most beautiful face.
Realize that you’re floating in space.
Realize that happiness makes you cry.
Realize that everyone you know some day
will die. Wayne knows, counter-intuitively,
that you’ll feel better if you would just
realize that the sun doesn’t actually go down.
“All we have,” he sings on the penultimate tune
from Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, “is now.”
All we have is now. “All we’ve ever had is now.”
At War With The Mystics begins with
“The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song” and the most
comical vocal turn in the entire Lips oeuvre.
Another philosophical study, this one to
suggest that, endowed with unlimited powers,
a human being would find it very difficult,
if not impossible, to do the moral thing,
would more likely or certainly do the selfish
or immoral thing instead. The album
continues in this irreverent way with
“Free Radicals,” a song that makes a prescient
but sideways jab at Donald Trump by name,
and then the band continues with a
combination of quiet, philosophical, big
idea numbers, a weird instrumental
reminiscent of the fight scene song from
Yoshimi, some anthemic toe tappers, and
the only single I remember from the album,
buried on side 3 of this double record,
the somewhat morbid “Mr. Ambulance Driver.”
This album marks a moment, I think, when
the band reaches a kind of pinnacle of
respectability and accessibility, after which
they will take a sharp left turn and do some
really crazy things. I forgive them for that.
Today I have listened to four certifiably great
albums from The Flaming Lips, at the middle
end of a career that is already in 2006 twenty
years strong. If you are already the
poster-children for unpredictability and
experimentalism, and you’ve started to really
catch on, what can you do that simply and
absolutely will throw everyone off the scent?
And is that what you want?
Notes on the vinyl editions:
- Clouds Taste Metallic, Warner Brothers Records, 1995, Vinyl Me, Please exclusive pressing on orange vinyl, no. 000234, 2015.
- The Soft Bulletin, Warner Brothers Records, 1999, Vinyl Me, Please Essentials repressing, yellow vinyl. This vinyl version includes alternate mixes from my CD release, at least one of which, “Buggin,” I’m hard pressed to understand how it’s improved. More bug sounds, a less rocking drum part. Most of the other tunes remain untouched, but there’s a non-CD track, “Slow Motion.”
- Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Warner Brothers, 2002, the 2022 20th anniversary 5 disc box set including the album and 4 more LPs of b-sides, demos, and radio sessions. All discs, black vinyl.
- At War with the Mystics, Warner Brothers, 2006, the first disc in the box set, Heady Nuggs, 2016-2012, 8 LPs, black vinyl.
In case you don’t already know: I’m listening to almost everything in my vinyl collection, A to Z, and writing at least one, sometimes two or three long skinny poem-like-things in response for each artist, and on a few occasions, writing a long skinny poem-like-thing in response to more than one artist. As a poet and a student of poetry, I understand that these things look like poems, but they don’t really sound much like poetry, hence, I call them “poem-like-things.” I’ll admit that they’re just long, skinny essays that veer every now and then into the poetic or lyric.
michael jarmer 