The Flaming Lips are not a rock band. They are not an alternative rock band or a psychedelic rock band. Certainly their day jobs are performing as all three, but to label them as such would be to limit them and their history unjustly.
From their inception in 1983 as a “Hillbillies-gone-punk version of The Who” (Wayne Coyne in Fearless Freaks) to their most recent release Embryonic, they have seen massive artistic shifts, drug binge lows, sold out concert highs, original films, experiments, explosions, and reinvention. The Flaming Lips are the Avant-Garde.
Wayne Coyne became the leader of the entity known as The Flaming Lips with permanent bassist Michael Ivins. The two released their true debut LP Hear It Is in 1986 on Pink Dust Records, followed by 1987’s Oh My Gawd!!! and 1989’s Telepathic Surgery and In A Priest Driven Ambulance.
At this point, the Lips were experimenting mainly with psychedelic rock and punk, generally much heavier than your run of the mill psych rockers.
Based out of Oklahoma City, they began playing small clubs and making up for their lack of musical talent by being as loud as possible in their live shows. The slow gestation of the band’s final form was already visible at this early stage: experimenting with tape loops, classical music samples, pyrotechnics on stage and drug related/induced lyrics.
It was during this period that Wayne would develop his trademark high whine of a voice that would allow him to sound like any average dreamer with a rock star fantasy, yet allowing him to sing literally anything and get away with it.
It wasn’t until 1990 that the Flaming Lips would become signed to Warner Bros. Records to begin their major label career and eventually gain their true musical dynamo, multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd. 1992’s Hit To Death In the Future Head was not much of a departure from their rough-around-the-edges psych-punk sound, but their 1993 LP Transmissions From The Satellite Heart couched their surprise first charting single “She Don’t Use Jelly.”
The song was a prime example of anti-pop; full of sneering simplicity tinged with bizarre lyrics and a melodramatic take on nonsense.
1995’s Clouds Taste Metallic was the final album of this chapter of the Flaming Lips as a scrappy little anti-rock band simultaneously crafting catchy pop and non-traditional guitar rock. The recording of this album was documented in the film Fearless Freaks which illuminates not only guitarist Ronald Jones’ eventual departure from the band, but also the extreme heroin use of Stephen Drozd and various other drug influences fueling the group.
With the departure of their guitarist, the group found themselves pushing their boundaries as a three piece even further than they ever had in the past. Wayne came up with the concept of the “parking lot experiments,” the “boombox experiments” and eventually their 4-disc 1997 LP Zaireeka.
The parking lot experiments were Flaming Lips hosted events in which they gathered thousands of people into a parking lot and distributed forty cassettes of pre-recorded sound generated for the project. Wayne would act as a conductor, cueing each car stereo to begin at the same time and then indicating who needed to be louder or softer from his megaphone. The boombox experiments were identical, but on a smaller scale, and then it came time to pitch the idea to Warner Bros.
Zaireeka is a four-disc album intended to be listened to with all four discs playing at once. Wayne described in a 2008 interview with Tribune Business News that it was “…a kind of anarchy in art. It was like an art happening — you have to bring four sound systems together. Sometimes you get great synchronicity; other times, it sounds haphazard. You get to hear music in a whole new way.”
This sort of challenging of the forms of modern music as art is what makes the Flaming Lips avant-garde. They frequently take over the top, high-concept spectacle and bring it right into their audience’s living room. No two Flaming Lips albums sound the same, because they are marauders of music looking to pillage the new frontier.
Unsurprisingly, the sprawling Zaireeka did not chart very well, but in the interest of inconsistency, they followed it up with their commercial breakthrough, 1999’s The Soft Bulletin. While production had always influenced their sound greatly, The Soft Bulletin was a true studio album, due to the inclusion of manipulated and warped sounds. This was when Wayne’s songwriting fully fused with Steven’s musicianship, resulting in psychedelic anthems more soaring, drums sounding rawer and lead guitar making room for synthesizers and studio samples.
The commitment The Flaming Lips show to their audience having the maximum experience is evident in everything they do. They possess a beautiful marriage of personal ideals and trippy art experiments with this complete devotion to a hungry cult of listening and watching consumers.
Whether they’re landing in a giant UFO, Wayne is smearing himself with blood and singing from a nun puppet, or people in animal costumes are shooting streamers and smoke up in the air to mingle with the massive multi-media screen, The Lips made it.
It was right in this time, beginning in 2001, that the Lips began work on their first full-length film, Christmas on Mars. Written, directed and produced by Wayne, and filmed in his backyard in Oklahoma City in a Space Station he built, the film is a narrative with very little dialogue about the first baby being born on Mars in a dilapidated human colony.
Typical of the Lips’ DIY extravagance, the film stars the band members and members of Wayne’s family and friends (though Wayne’s friends include Adam Goldberg, Fred Armisen, Steve Burns from Blue’s Clues, and Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock) as well as featuring an original ambient score by The Flaming Lips.
Starring Steven Drozd as Major Syrtis and Wayne Coyne as a Martian who becomes Santa Claus, the film was in production until 2008 when it was finally released in limited art spaces. Completely unmarketable as a music video or a commercially successful film, Christmas on Mars can only be explained as something the Lips felt like making.
The Flaming Lips had truly arrived in the public eye at this point, touring with Cake and Modest Mouse in 2002 and releasing their most critically acclaimed, nearly-concept album Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots. The album earned the band their first Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental Performance for the final track on the album, “Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon (Utopia Planitia).”
The Lips had really hit the big time at this point, showing up in soundtracks to Hollywood movies, having the Fearless Freaks documentary released on DVD and touring up a storm. In 2002, they toured with Beck as his opening, and then backing band in support of his Sea Change album and they were set to headline the Lollapalooza Tour in 2004 until it was cancelled.
In 2006 they released At War With The Mystics, a more pop oriented, politically charged album for them. The next year the only instrumental track on the album “The Wizard Turns On The Giant Silver Flashlight and Puts On His Werewolf Moccasins” won them another Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental Performance.
The band, at their most popular, began headlining major music festivals and touring to great critical acclaim. They released the live DVD UFOs at the Zoo, which documented their epic homecoming concert at the Oklahoma City Zoo and featured the band descending from a giant UFO (which Wayne built in his backyard) at the beginning of the show. In early 2009 their hit “Do You Realize??” was named the official rock song of Oklahoma.
The Lips had cemented themselves as permanent arts fixture in the public eye across the board, yet somehow had avoided selling out. Only The Flaming Lips can write a song for Spider-Man 3 entitled “The Supreme Being Teaches Spider-Man How to be in Love” and still be cool for it.
They aren’t creating new genres or defining the curve of where popular music is going, they are moving forever farther outwards into their own realm. They aren’t concerned with keeping up with what Passion Pit or the Dirty Projectors are doing because they’ve already travelled light years in their own direction.
2009 also saw the release of their first double album Embryonic, which marked yet another curve in the creative travel of the Lips’ sound. Consisting of much more raw, brittle tracks, their new sound was also much more sinister than some of their more recent ballooning sunshine epics.
The album began as the Lips doing these “unknown [freakouts] and going, ‘Dude, what is that?’ with a real excitement. Like, ‘I can’t wait to work on that stuff’… we would have this surge of energy, and it would suddenly be like making our first record again or something. Or like making Zaireeka again, or some of these moments where people are just working from [intuition], whatever that is. I know it sounds cliché, but you want to get where you’re not trying to sound like yourself” (Wayne in a recent Pitchfork interview).
There is no stagnation in the creative life of this band, because as soon as things begin getting stale, they switch gears entirely and still leave you saying, “Oh yeah! This is what The Flaming Lips sound like!”
It seems as though the flow doesn’t stop, they don’t get tired and take a break from what they’re doing because what they’re working on for one project is entirely different from whatever they’ve done before and whatever they’ll do next. If any further proof of this is needed, the next project for the band is a track for track album covering Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.
Could stoner rock be any more exciting and anti-lethargy than The Flaming Lips? Is there another band working so hard to be avant-garde dynamos as The Flaming Lips? Will there ever be a cork in the seemingly endless bottle of sheer childlike wonder and amazement The Flaming Lips have had a hold of for the past 25 years?
Could you possibly get any more epic than The Flaming Lips? They have inspired hundreds of thousands of people to not accept the ordinary as the only way to live. They have given hope to the dreamers and solid footing to those floating in the ethers of imagination. They have proven that even freaks can rule the world, if they have no fear.
