![]() ![]() ![]() The Flaming Lips’ shows are not really a concert in a conventional rock sense, they are a Communal Event Shared By Like-Minded People, a party where the hosts just happen to be playing music for a couple of hours. On a recent interview on the “Nerdist” podcast Doc-Brown-coiffed bandleader Wayne Coyne described the experience of how much nicer it is to have someone scratch your head than to scratch it yourself, and I suppose having your brain scratched by a lover is as apt a metaphor for a Flaming Lips show as I can come. I have trouble trusting music made by people who by mocking their music, and who actually seem to be having fun (!) playing it, seemed to me to be mocking their audience along the way.Īfter seeing the Flaming Lips at the 930 Club in Washington DC on their Oczy Mlody tour, though, I’ll never think that way again. ![]() I tend to prefer Serious Music by Serious Musicians, who in my mind are usually distinguished by their all-black outfits (with flannel as an allowed exception), dour music and sour expressions. It’s the problem that I’ve often had with self-consciously “arty” projects, whether in music, art, theatre or literature. From their ragged early years as an Oklahoma-based indie band through to their early 1990s alternative breakthrough with “She Don’t Use Jelly” to 1999’s unlikely fluke hit “Do You Realize?” and their commercial apex during the early 2000s, I could never quite tell whether the Lips, and leader Wayne Coyne in particular, really believed what they were putting out or whether they were putting one over on the audience. I’ll be honest right up front – over the 30-plus years that I’ve known about the Flaming Lips I’d liked and loathed them in equal measure. You can get a digital copy via Amazon and iTunes.Wayne Coyne and merry pranksters The Flaming Lips create day-glow art out of artifice in an all-comers party in Washington DC on the heels of their strongest album in years. "Space Oddity" by the Flaming Lips is out now as a single. The service becomes more like a Flaming Lips show at the end of the first verse when a droning, electronic beat and full laser show kick in. The video then cuts to the main setting: a church where The Flaming Lips perform before pews filled with white balloons. They sit and weep at the steps of a mausoleum. The camera opens on two women dressed as nuns walking through a graveyard to the song's opening vamp. In the hands of the Lips, Bowie's ode to space exploration is transformed into a beat-driven, psychedelic eulogy to the Thin White Duke.īoth the song and the video contain moments of joy alongside moments of mourning. The latest, and one of the most touching, comes courtesy of The Flaming Lips, whose cover of "Space Oddity" shows up in this new video, a couple of weeks after the band played "Life on Mars?" at a pair of tribute concerts to Bowie in New York. ![]() Tributes continue to pour out for David Bowie after his passing in January. ![]()
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