Weird news broke the other morning about the Flaming Lips singer Wayne Coyne. Deep into a Los Angeles weekend night, Coyne, his girlfriend, and Miley Cyrus all got matching tattoos of a dog quoting the Beatles. It’s just another moment in the Flaming Lips rollercoaster, which hasn’t failed to deliver the crazy all year long and hasn’t stopped dropping in years.
And things have been crazy, like when the Flaming Lips delivered yet another digital release: the five-song, Ender’s Game-inspired Peace Sword. Like so much of their recent catalogue, it’s another gimmicky sort of album with a better concept than music. An album inspired by a sci-fi movie? Another packed inside a gummy fetus? A 24-hour song? The Lips have got it all, except for music that’s worth listening to.
It’s increasingly easy to skip Flaming Lips releases. Their new music is increasingly muddled with a series of diminishing returns. There’s something in their music, a restlessness or malaise infecting everything. How did they get here? It wasn’t that long ago when they were one of the best bands on the planet, wasn’t it?
About 20 years ago, the Flaming Lips burst onto the American music scene. While they’d been kicking around on Restless Records for maybe a decade before, the success of their song “She Don’t Use Jelly” threw the drug-fuelled band into the spotlight. Before long, they were playing Late Night with David Letterman and The Peach Pit on 90210.
It was a hell of a surprise. Their early albums are rough to the point of being unlistenable. They mixed shambling hard rock with sludgy guitars and speedy riffs. And that’s the more accessible material. One song is essentially someone destroying a piano. Another is 25 minutes of guitar noise and backward vocals. Coyne couldn’t sing well, but that didn’t matter: this was musical anarchy.
As they gigged more and more and kept writing new material, they started maturing. They were still wild – it’s said they almost burned down a venue or two back in the day – but their music was gelling into loud guitar rock that owed a considerable debt to Neil Young and 80s hair metal, but with a genuine sense of optimism. Not every band could cover of “Its A Wonderful World” and have it sound completely irony-free. Fewer still could slip it onto a record dominated by impossibly fuzzy guitars and screamed lyrics about how things are getting strange.
It’s worth remembering how in the early 90s, Alternative Rock was the musical buzzword of the day. Labels were looking for the next Sonic Youth, Nirvana or Dinosaur Jr. Warner Brothers thought the Falming Lips were. They lucked out: within a couple of years, the Lips had a hit single that rose to 55 on Billboard’s Hot 100. And their 1994 album Transmissions from the Satellite Heart peaked at number one on the Heatseekers chart and even cracked the top 200.
But after 1995’s Clouds Taste Metallic failed to match its predecessor’s sales, the band was in trouble. Facing being dropped by their label, the Flaming Lips went back to their crazy, experimental days, releasing a four CD set, Zaireeka. This album was purposely designed to be unlistenable for most people: in order to “experience” the album as it’s meant to be heard, the listener has to track down four CD players and set them all to play the CD at the same time. Don’t do it right and everything gets out of sync and it’s even more of a mess. Hey, these were the days before everyone had 5.1-surround sound in their living rooms. It sold like hot trash, but got enough critical appreciation to give them another shot with Warner Bros. – although an agreement that it didn’t count towards a contractual obligation helped, too.
Again, WB lucked out, with the Lips releasing their two best albums back to back: 1999’s The Soft Bulletin and 2002’s Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. Both had a mellower pop sound and dipped into science fiction (and in one memorable case, Cat Stevens) for inspiration. The band was so hot that even their outtakes stand out, like the brilliant “Up Above the Daily Hum.” There wasn’t exactly a hit single, but both sold reasonably well and rescued the band’s reputation.
Around this time, their live show took a drastic turn. They’d always been a little different live – Ziareeka came about from experimental gigs – but now their stage show grew bombastic. Flying confetti, people in animal costumes, and Coyne walking around in a giant inflatable ball all became the norm. These live shows quickly became the thing of legend, getting critical notice from places like Rolling Stone.
But the reviews focused on the show’s trappings, not the music. Seeing live recordings of the band at this point are a fun experience, but listening? They only occasionally throw in some curveballs, instead running through a predictable set list.
They also began pumping out EPs on the regular, too. The first, and best, was Fight Test: a Yoshimi album track, some live covers and a couple loose originals. Next came Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell and the Yoshimi Wins ! EP. The music on these were generally light, but with ominous undertones: the slow, dirge-like cover of Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head;” the depressed-sounding “Strange Design of Conscience,” which Coyne opens by singing “given the hopeless nature of our times.”
Things continued getting darker on 2006’s At War With the Mystics. As they went back to loud guitars, they added a political bent. The opener was about abusing power; another name-checked Donald Trump and asked, “Without all your bodyguards, how long would you last?” It wasn’t bad, but there was a new edge to it, like they were frustrated, especially with their role as a good time, fun-to-watch band singing goofy songs about robots, scientists and women that didn’t use jelly. They were into deeper stuff, ya know? They even read the fuckin’ newspaper some days!
The Lips started trying new ways to show their creativity. There was a record covering Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon song-by-song. It’s a hot mess: Henry Rollins mumbles his way through a cameo, Peaches shows up to collect a paycheque, and generally, it sounds like something done on a lark.
As they continued releasing crap, we quickly hit peak Flaming Lips. Throughout 2011, they released a new record each month. Sometimes they were vaguely interesting; sometimes all it had was an interesting idea. Sometimes it didn’t even have that.
Indeed, the releases were sometimes more interesting for the way they were released than for their songs. One was a USB stick inside a pot-flavoured gummy skull. Another was placed in a gummy fetus. One idea was 12 YouTube videos meant to be played on smartphones simultaneously. And another was a flashlight toy that you were supposed to watch once you got high, I guess. I can’t imagine why anyone sober would watch a spinning disc for five minutes.
These albums were often collaborations: Yoko Ono, Neon Indian, and Lightning Bolt, among others. While they occasionally sounded inspired, like on the tense and atmospheric “I’m Working At NASA On Acid,” it was generally a frustrating experience. Some songs were impenetrable, like on “Brain of Heaven” and were self-indulgent, like on the six-hour “Found A Star on the Ground.”
Oh, and they released a 24-hour long song, which is either admirable or a waste of everybody’s time, depending on how charitable you’re feeling.
Taken as a whole, it showed a band more interested in making something unique than concentrating on putting out a cohesive set of songs. Indeed, their music has gone into the worst excesses of jam rock: long, rambling passages that lacks any clear idea, but they keep on going and hoping something will come. And after a certain point, I guess you have to commit to what you’re doing. If you want a six-hour song, why not go the full 24? It’s not like anyone’s going to listen to whole thing, except maybe some poor soul interning at a big musical publication.
I can’t help but think of Ziareeka when I think of the Flaming Lips circa 2014. That set came at a low point for the band, after they’d failed to capitalize on success. An admirable attempt, maybe, but the debut of a bad trait: When things aren’t going well, Coyne retreats into himself, going back to his roots of deliberately obtuse music. Even in their earliest days, the band’s music generally was a sounding board for wherever the muse took Coyne.
The problem now is that the muse doesn’t seem to be taking him anywhere. Where before, it led him to make a sci-fi concept album, a political rock record or a bombastic stage show. Now it’s all flash and sizzle: strange packaging, an unusually long song, an experimental way to listen, completely unwatchable videos.
Their latest EP is a great example of this. The Flaming Lips were asked to contribute a song for the Ender’s Game movie’s soundtrack. Instead they liked it so much, they banged out a whole EP’s worth of music. But as I noted in my revie for Peace Sword, nothing on the EP stands with their best music. It’s all swooping keyboards, spacey sounds and Coyne mumbling into the microphone. It’s a mess.
It’s a long mess, too: a 36 minute EP. As Pitchfork’s Stuart Berman pointed out, it’s long enough to count as their second album of the year. And maybe that’s the problem: the Lips just keep releasing music, even if it’s not any damn good.
There’s an obvious solution: slow down, take a moment to look over everything and release the cream of the crop. It sounds easier to say than to do, I know. But the Lips have shown that they can do this. Last year, they released their best album of this decade: Heady Fwends, a double LP containing the best bits of all their collaborations. The solution is somewhere in there. They can jam all they want to, with whomever they want. That’s their business. But as they’ve shown over the past couple years, their judgment in what’s worth releasing is a bit lax.
Other artists have faced this problem before. In the 70s, Neil Young was as productive as anyone, averaging about an album a year, but for all the music he released, he shelved a handful of full albums: Homegrown, Chrome Dreams, a live record.
Springsteen had a similar problem: his Tracks box set is largely made of leftovers and spare cuts from the mid- to late-70s. A few years ago, he released The Promise, an album made of shelved songs from the Darkness on the Edge of Town era. Neither are essential, but they’re fun listens.
Hell, even the Grateful Dead did this. After 1974’s From the Mars Hotel, the band retired from the road to work on a movie and a new album. It worked: Blues for Allah was their strongest album in years. They didn’t resume active touring until 1976 (and promptly started playing some of their best gigs of the decade, too).
But of course, knowing when to step back implies that Coyne has a sense of restraint. He might not: we’re talking about someone who just got a matching tattoo with Miley Cyrus (who he has a history with!), who got kicked off Instagram for nudity and who fired his drummer for reasons that haven’t been made quite clear.
The same day the Coyne/Cyrus tattoo party photos hit the net, the Flaming Lips released a new short film starring the duo. There’s a weird plot involving JFK’s brain, elementary school-level attempts at acting, and what looks like the set of the original Star Trek. Even at five minutes long, it’s as unwatchable as it is not-safe-for-work. It’s another sad mark in the ongoing decline of a once-memorable band. Knowing Coyne, it won’t be the last, either.