from the “Parking Lot Experiments” of the mid-90s to this
year’s Record Store Day album, “The Flaming Lips and
Heady Fwends.” Set for an April 21st release, the limited
edition vinyl record features an odd cast of characters,
including Bon Iver, Erykah Badu, Neon Indian, Nick Cave
and Ke$ha, many of whom have lent their actual blood to
the record.
“That is totally a gimmick,” Wayne Coyne answers with
great relish. “It’s a beautiful gimmick. I think all things that
we marvel over are based in gimmicks.”
He’s on the phone for a day of back-to-back interviews, a
trapping of the job that would cause lesser, more jaded men to
roll their eyes and submit with dragged heels, particularly
those
who’ve been playing the game through 30 years
and
13 LPs. But Coyne, much to his credit, dives into everything
he
does headfirst with the manner of childlike wonder
that’s
come to be established with the vast majority of the
Flaming
Lips’ catalog.
At
the beginning of our conversation, he lets it be known
that
he’s slightly distracted. His wife is photographing him.
And
he’s in his underwear. He didn’t bother putting anything
else
on, knowing that he’d be running a marathon of
phone
interviews all day. Maximum comfort is important.
It’s
a hard image to erase from my mind as Coyne settles in
to
explain the band’s decision to embrace Siri on a recent
web-only
track called “Now I Understand.”
“There’s
so much about music and art, experiences in general,
that
are just unspeakable,” he continues. “And we don’t
even
have a real reason to even talk about them, but luckily
there
will be this gimmick, this thing that’ll happen, that will
be
the spark that let’s everybody not worry about sounding
like
a complete idiot when we talk about something. I love
this
voice of Siri. I use her quite a bit. You treat it like it’s a
real
person in there that loves you and is trying to help you.”
“Now
I Understand” is a gimmick, sure, but it’s not the
sort
of song you anticipate upon hearing that the band has
embraced
the iPhone 4S’ soft-spoken, feminine voice. It’s
gentle
and warm and strangely humane. “Wayne
the
track with her soothingly familiar monotone. “I don’t understand.” Coyne’s Neil
Young-esque falsetto is nowhere
to be
found — a rarity for a Flaming Lips song.
“Her
voice is like music,” he tells me. “It doesn’t really
have
to be a musical instrument. It’s evoking other worlds;
it’s
evoking other things in your mind. I’ve had so many
people
say this is exactly the 2001: A Space Odyssey technology;
this
is Hal.”
And
while he never opens his mouth on the track, Coyne
has
done his part, gently pushing her off on a cosmic journey,
after
some trademark Apple beeps, forgoing the standard
Siri-fare
in order to tackle much grander questions than
fast
food restaurants and driving directions. “I don’t under-stand,” she answers
some unknown question, “The moon,
the
stars and the sun.” It’s an awful lot for one little piece of
mobile
artificial intelligence to ponder, but she’s got it after a
couple
of minutes, with a little vocal help from Erykah Badu
and a
backwards Biz Markie. “Now I understand,” she utters
the
eponymous phrase, closing out the track.
“I
think a lot of people always worry about this idea of gimmicks
and
serious art,” Coyne continues. “It’s all gimmicks.
Without
a gimmick, you haven’t done your job. We always
have
to think of little things we can relate to, all the time.”
And
in the end, it’s not the band’s strongest track — this
likely
wouldn’t be anyone’s first choice for a Flaming Lips
mixtape
— but it’s the latest in a long tradition of unblinkingly
embracing
gimmickry and playing technology itself as
an
instrument. It’s a tradition that can be traced back most
notably
to “The Parking Lot Experiments” of the mid-90s, a
parking
garage orchestra performed on the cassette players
of
dozens of cars, conducted by Coyne from behind a familiar
bullhorn.
Mass-produced,
the concept morphed into 1997’s
“Zaireeka,”
a four-disc album meant to be played on multiple
stereos
simultaneously, a sort of home game version of
the “Experiments.”
A hell of a gimmick, that, and one that
would
help lay a sonic foundation for future Lips releases,
including
1999’s “The Soft Bulletin,” a neo-psych pop masterpiece
largely
regarded as a high water mark in the band’s
career.
Around Valentine’s Day last year, the whole thing
took
an even more ambitious shift, harnessing the power stand,” she answers some
unknown question, “The moon,
the
stars and the sun.” It’s an awful lot for one little piece of
mobile
artificial intelligence to ponder, but she’s got it after a
couple
of minutes, with a little vocal help from Erykah Badu
and a
backwards Biz Markie. “Now I understand,” she utters
the
eponymous phrase, closing out the track.
“I
think a lot of people always worry about this idea of gimmicks
and
serious art,” Coyne continues. “It’s all gimmicks.
Without
a gimmick, you haven’t done your job. We always
have
to think of little things we can relate to, all the time.”
And
in the end, it’s not the band’s strongest track — this
likely
wouldn’t be anyone’s first choice for a Flaming Lips
mixtape
— but it’s the latest in a long tradition of unblinkingly
embracing
gimmickry and playing technology itself as
an
instrument. It’s a tradition that can be traced back most
notably
to “The Parking Lot Experiments” of the mid-90s, a
parking
garage orchestra performed on the cassette players
of
dozens of cars, conducted by Coyne from behind a familiar
bullhorn.
Mass-produced,
the concept morphed into 1997’s
“Zaireeka,”
a four-disc album meant to be played on multiple
stereos
simultaneously, a sort of home game version of
the “Experiments.”
A hell of a gimmick, that, and one that
would
help lay a sonic foundation for future Lips releases,
including
1999’s “The Soft Bulletin,” a neo-psych pop masterpiece
largely
regarded as a high water mark in the band’s
career.
Around Valentine’s Day last year, the whole thing
took
an even more ambitious shift, harnessing the power same things, and the
possibility of sex, all these sorts of
things
come into it.”
But
for all the talk of technology’s tendency to isolate
users,
it offers a faint glimmer of hope, providing a musical
experience
that can only truly be created with several
humans,
gadgets in hand. Sure, it’s not quite a live Flaming
Lips
show, with Coyne rolling over the heads of audience
members
in a giant inflatable hamster ball, but it’s a break
from
sitting alone, at home, beneath a pair of headphones.
“I
really don’t think technology is forcing us apart,” he
explains.
“I think we’re lucky that we get to travel on airplanes
now
and instead of being forced to deal with the
people
that are sitting next to you, we all are allowed to
have
the luxury of our own little piece of entertainment.
Even
now, when we’re having a conversation in a restaurant,
we
all look at each other and we know, we’re gonna
have
a little bit of phone time — I’ve got some texting I need
to do.
It’s no longer this barrier, and in the time when we’re
not
on the phone, we say this is our time together. Let’s
talk
and look and embrace each other, whatever, but if we
didn’t
have that option, that would be a strain as well. I
think
we like the idea that we’re gonna be connected all the
time,
but we’re connected right now too. We can do both. I
think
the human mind is so much more capable of so much
more
than we think it is.”
And
what about the great rock record? Technology is doing
away
with that too, right? With iTunes culture returning us to a pre-Beatles era
dominated by singles. Certainly a
bit
more of the Lips’ focus has shifted in that direction,
as
the band embraces technology on a song-by-song basis,
be it
Siri, YouTube, or, say, “Drug Chart,” “In Our Bodies
Out
of Our Heads,” “Walk With Me” and “Hillary’s Time
Machine
Machine,” which were bundled on a USB key and
housed
inside a big gummy skull (not to be confused, of
course,
with the band’s gummy fetus offering) — one that
had
to be eaten in order to liberate the music inside. The
band
will also be commemorating this year’s Record Store
Day
(Saturday, April 21, 2012), with the release of a limited
edition
colored vinyl pressed with the blood of a number of its diverse collaborators,
including indie darlings Neon
Indian
and, oddly, pop princess Ke$ha.
But
the band hasn’t been entirely swept up in such one-offs.
2009
saw the release of “Embryonic,” a hard-psych tour de
force,
one of the most cohesive LPs of the Lips’ career and
certainly
its most critically acclaimed since 2002’s delightfully
apocalyptic
examination of the struggles of man vs.
machine,
“Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.”
“There’s
still a part of me that loves this idea of sitting there
with
nine or 10 songs and having it be an extended moment
of
mood and atmosphere and sounds and melodies, so we’re
probably
gonna do both,” Coyne explains. “We’re embracing
songs
when that works for us and we’re also embracing
these
bigger movements of music when that works for
us
too. It’s all available. Technology suggests that the new
thing should throw out the old thing. Art isn’t like that. It’s
thing should throw out the old thing. Art isn’t like that. It’s
just
another thing that you can do.”
Things
like tossing musical ideas into the cloud as soon as
you’ve
birthed them from your head — a constant stream
flowing
on the web, 24 / 7.
“My
guys are always working,” says Coyne. “We have a
couple
of 24-hour streams that you can always just go to
and
download. We have one that plays our 24-hour song.
Anytime
you go to it, it’s a stream that’s always playing.
We
put up a new one at the end of last week that plays an hour-and-a-half-long
sound documentary about one ofour albums that came out 20 years ago and you can just go
to it
anytime.”
“You
press two buttons on your phone and you’ve got this
great
thing,” Coyne explains. “For me, I think that’s the
way a
lot of our things will be moving; that we’ll always
just
present them. They’ll be going anytime that you want
to go
there; you can go there and it’s playing something
we’re
doing. It’s not marketing, it’s not promotion, it’s just
another
way that you’re gonna be able to hear music, hear
our
ideas, hear what we’re doing, hear what we’re into.”
And
really, if it means unfettered access to Coyne’s strange
and
ever enlarging brain — gummy or otherwise — long
