There is no longer a need to sing the praises of the Flaming Lips: their triumph has coincided with what many are calling the exhaustion of originality within the rock genre. Well-respected as a groundbreaking punk, grunge, and now pop music outfit, the group has lived on well past the middle age of its members. Descending into others' songwriter's canons of music and lyrics is, in my view, always a fine challenge for non-professional musicians, but for those who make a (comfortable/ecstasy-filled) living, perhaps we listeners should expect more.
Especially from the Flaming Lips. A few years ago, the Flaming Lips were (and maybe still are) opening their show with an instrumental riff borrowed from an old song of theirs, recorded during the sessions that produced their masterwork, The Soft Bulletin. Its title--“The Captain Is a Cold Hearted and Egotistical Fool"-- has come to represent the neo-pop circus that is Wayne Coyne's big band. Still the ringmaster, the lead singer's withered voice sounds crippled, weak somehow, against the anthemic noise-rock, as he tries but fails to sing along with songs everyone already knows, and is singing along to already. Over the summer of 2014, the Lips played shows from Belgium to Edinburgh, Dublin to Austin, and from Bonnaroo to The Hudson Project, a new fest in Saugerties, New York (where VIP ticket packages cost over $1500). The band has amassed extensive pop fodder to fill their setlists: in addition to their own glam-punk catalog that stretches back into the 1980s, the group covered Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon in the studio and in live performance, as well as large chunks of the Who's Tommy. Besides a series of collaborative, limited-edition vinyl releases that trickled out during the last decade, featuring generally uninspired instrumental studio blunders with the Lips and "fwends," the group's label-- Warner Brothers-- helped the band reissue its previous works, in deluxe vinyl form. Throw in more than their fair share of gummi skulls, a 24-hour-long song with as much aesthetic appeal as watching paint dry, and the ongoing traveling feelgood roadshow, and there is still no excuse for slipping from being an inventive, dynamic music organization, into what appears to be little more than a stoner cover band. The Grateful Dead never needed confetti cannons, laser light shows, glittered costumes, or other cheap thrills to make their point; even today, Phish packs venues tight, without adorning the stage with as much as a disco ball. On tour, the Flaming Lips appear compelled to carry along with them a planetarium of effects, creating a theatrical spectacle that belongs in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee or Branson, Missouri, to augment tireless renditions of chestnuts from the rock canon. With their recent television appearance, when Miley Cyrus emerging from Wayne's crotch during "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," the Flaming Lips have more than 'jumped the shark'-- they established a new low for musical schlock, one where even the regurgitation of the anthems of the rock genre's heyday are needlessly cloaked in overstatement, collapsing under its own psychedelic weight.
In an interview with the Detroit Free Press in June 2014, and following a public falling out with the band's longtime drummer over an allegedly-racist slip of the tongue by the band's burnt-out front man, Wayne Coyne rationalized his own behavior, and more largely the band's meandering direction, in this way: "I think we’re living through this arc of what I call the sensationalized offended, the people who are so offended that they have to go on this wonderful thing with no authenticity required — the Internet — and say anything they want. And if someone wants to believe it, they can. But I think it runs its course so quickly." If, through the Internet, fandom has lost its need for authenticity, are artists and performers to create and behave as though their shtick-- whatever it is-- will 'run its course quickly?' The "arc of the sensationalized offended" may be Wayne's drug-addled characterization of what he sees as his and his band's role in society; it may, too, be an attempt at understanding the ever-vapid and ever-fluid public taste. Since the group's inception in the 1980s, The Flaming Lips have seen musicians come and go; they have licensed their hits for use in commercials (from cars to cell phones); they have released products that, in form and substance, are at best unwieldy and challenging (the Zaireeka vinyl box set, made of four vinyl LP records to be played simultaneously, comes to mind).
Full cover albums of others' work raises questions about an artist's creativity, and about their ability (at that time, anyway) to actually create original material. Phish's tradition of covering another band's album at a Halloween show was tainted in 2013 when the audience at the Atlantic City Convention Center was "treated" to a cover of a Phish album that had not yet been released (this past year in Las Vegas, Phish rekindled the tradition, albeit via an extended and jammy exploration of a 1964 Disneyland Records release, Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House). At SXSW a few years back, Bruce Springsteen declared with a shrug the music industry had entered the age of the "post-authentic" (see separate blog post, titled "Who's the Boss?"), a time when musicians are not just conscripted but in fact doomed to imitate, emulate, or downright steal from previous pop recordings.
Am I the only one who hopes Springsteen's next "Pete Seeger Sessions" will actually feature the songs, if not the ideology of, Pete Seeger? That Phish will find something more profound to cover on Halloween, than a children's sound effects record? That the Flaming Lips will rediscover and regain their cool and their mojo? Or are we to 'suffer fools gladly,' to learn to love the Lips in all their gummi-skull splendor, regardless of how hideous the digital artifacts inside may be?
Especially from the Flaming Lips. A few years ago, the Flaming Lips were (and maybe still are) opening their show with an instrumental riff borrowed from an old song of theirs, recorded during the sessions that produced their masterwork, The Soft Bulletin. Its title--“The Captain Is a Cold Hearted and Egotistical Fool"-- has come to represent the neo-pop circus that is Wayne Coyne's big band. Still the ringmaster, the lead singer's withered voice sounds crippled, weak somehow, against the anthemic noise-rock, as he tries but fails to sing along with songs everyone already knows, and is singing along to already. Over the summer of 2014, the Lips played shows from Belgium to Edinburgh, Dublin to Austin, and from Bonnaroo to The Hudson Project, a new fest in Saugerties, New York (where VIP ticket packages cost over $1500). The band has amassed extensive pop fodder to fill their setlists: in addition to their own glam-punk catalog that stretches back into the 1980s, the group covered Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon in the studio and in live performance, as well as large chunks of the Who's Tommy. Besides a series of collaborative, limited-edition vinyl releases that trickled out during the last decade, featuring generally uninspired instrumental studio blunders with the Lips and "fwends," the group's label-- Warner Brothers-- helped the band reissue its previous works, in deluxe vinyl form. Throw in more than their fair share of gummi skulls, a 24-hour-long song with as much aesthetic appeal as watching paint dry, and the ongoing traveling feelgood roadshow, and there is still no excuse for slipping from being an inventive, dynamic music organization, into what appears to be little more than a stoner cover band. The Grateful Dead never needed confetti cannons, laser light shows, glittered costumes, or other cheap thrills to make their point; even today, Phish packs venues tight, without adorning the stage with as much as a disco ball. On tour, the Flaming Lips appear compelled to carry along with them a planetarium of effects, creating a theatrical spectacle that belongs in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee or Branson, Missouri, to augment tireless renditions of chestnuts from the rock canon. With their recent television appearance, when Miley Cyrus emerging from Wayne's crotch during "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," the Flaming Lips have more than 'jumped the shark'-- they established a new low for musical schlock, one where even the regurgitation of the anthems of the rock genre's heyday are needlessly cloaked in overstatement, collapsing under its own psychedelic weight.
In an interview with the Detroit Free Press in June 2014, and following a public falling out with the band's longtime drummer over an allegedly-racist slip of the tongue by the band's burnt-out front man, Wayne Coyne rationalized his own behavior, and more largely the band's meandering direction, in this way: "I think we’re living through this arc of what I call the sensationalized offended, the people who are so offended that they have to go on this wonderful thing with no authenticity required — the Internet — and say anything they want. And if someone wants to believe it, they can. But I think it runs its course so quickly." If, through the Internet, fandom has lost its need for authenticity, are artists and performers to create and behave as though their shtick-- whatever it is-- will 'run its course quickly?' The "arc of the sensationalized offended" may be Wayne's drug-addled characterization of what he sees as his and his band's role in society; it may, too, be an attempt at understanding the ever-vapid and ever-fluid public taste. Since the group's inception in the 1980s, The Flaming Lips have seen musicians come and go; they have licensed their hits for use in commercials (from cars to cell phones); they have released products that, in form and substance, are at best unwieldy and challenging (the Zaireeka vinyl box set, made of four vinyl LP records to be played simultaneously, comes to mind).
Full cover albums of others' work raises questions about an artist's creativity, and about their ability (at that time, anyway) to actually create original material. Phish's tradition of covering another band's album at a Halloween show was tainted in 2013 when the audience at the Atlantic City Convention Center was "treated" to a cover of a Phish album that had not yet been released (this past year in Las Vegas, Phish rekindled the tradition, albeit via an extended and jammy exploration of a 1964 Disneyland Records release, Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House). At SXSW a few years back, Bruce Springsteen declared with a shrug the music industry had entered the age of the "post-authentic" (see separate blog post, titled "Who's the Boss?"), a time when musicians are not just conscripted but in fact doomed to imitate, emulate, or downright steal from previous pop recordings.
Am I the only one who hopes Springsteen's next "Pete Seeger Sessions" will actually feature the songs, if not the ideology of, Pete Seeger? That Phish will find something more profound to cover on Halloween, than a children's sound effects record? That the Flaming Lips will rediscover and regain their cool and their mojo? Or are we to 'suffer fools gladly,' to learn to love the Lips in all their gummi-skull splendor, regardless of how hideous the digital artifacts inside may be?
Regardless of what The Boss tells the hipsters gathered in Austin, the quest for authenticity may never trump earnest efforts of musicianship. The Lips' in-studio, collaborative cover of Dark Side of the Moon far surpasses in-concert renditions of the same work from years prior. Psychedelic and incandescent, reflecting the glow of a
global music scene, Wayne Coyne's Lonely Hearts Club shall saunter into the New Year. The fodder for the Lips' feelgood set lists has never been more
extensive; the bland socialized angst and paranoia that has fueled their few original compositions and lyrics during this decade have never been more available, in major American cities but also on side streets and back roads their tour bus will never see. While the band's traveling road show may likely evolve into something even more vaudevillian and whacked-out (and for many, sadly, an excuse for bad choices in substance use), I can remain ever-hopeful the Flaming Lips can and will find their way back to whatever fount of lyrical and musical inspiration they knew in the nineties (I hope they didn't lose those brain cells backstage somewhere). In 1997, it couldn't have taken much for Wayne to turn the opening track of Zaireeka from a mere bass line into a mournful ode of acceptance, and one of the finest rock recordings ever produced: "OK, I'll admit/that I really don't understand." Perhaps that is how we are supposed to feel about today's manifestation of the Flaming Lips, Miley Cyrus and all. But oh, Michael Ivins, how do you endure?
http://www.freep.com/article/20140611/ENT04/306110015
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/04/opinion/brooks-suffering-fools-gladly.html?_r=0
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