A Spoonful Weighs a Ton

The Flam­ing Lips were an acquired taste for me.

My first expo­sure to the Lips was watch­ing Beavis and Butthead in a dorm room, and see­ing “She Don‘t Use Jelly.” The video got a decent amount of air­play, not just a oneshot on that show. Most of my col­lege years, MTV was on in the back­ground some­where. They actu­ally played a lit­tle music then, but it was becom­ing more scarce. Beavis and Butthead was part of that all impor­tant tran­si­tional phase for the chan­nel. Yes, boys and girls, the M in MTV stood for Music.  Beavis and Butthead is one of the miss­ing links between what it was then, and what it has evolved into today.

The video was odd; the song was too. I liked the sound of it, but the lyrics seemed so non­sen­si­cal that I felt they were forced. My over­all impres­sion was that the group was another one of those groups try­ing too hard to be weird. Gen­uine indi­vid­u­al­ity and unique­ness is some­thing I cher­ish, but at the same time I don’t much care for self-conscious delib­er­ate non-conformity.  (Since then, I have grown to believe they’re really just this won­der­fully bizarre.) Some peo­ple try awful hard to show how odd dif­fer­ent they are, until they become a pre­fab prod­uct them­selves. Thank good­ness I didn’t hear that they were on Bev­erly Hills, 90210; I’d never have given them a fair chance! Yeah, the song was good, and I enjoyed singing along with it. Still, I expected that they were one-hit won­ders. So many bands at that time had dis­ap­pointed me. I had learned not to buy an album based on one song, or even two, because my $10 was two and a half hours of work! I missed out on the joy of lis­ten­ing to years of Soft Bul­letin, and hear­ing lyrics as beau­ti­ful as these.

And though they were sad
They res­cued every­one.
They lifted up the sun.
A spoon­ful weighs a ton.

Giv­ing more than they had
The process had begun.
A mil­lion came from one.
The lim­its now were none.

Being drunk on their plan
They lifted up the sun.

Forc­ing it off with their hands
The trap­door came undone.
Above our heads it swung.
The priv­i­lege had been won.

Being drunk on their plan
They lifted up the sun.

Yelling as hard as they can
The doubters all were stunned.
Heard louder than a gun,
The sound they made was love.

Other bands, take note.  Lyrics are impor­tant.

A few years later, Yoshimi Bat­tles the Pink Robots came out. A friend of mine loaned me the CD with roughly half a dozen oth­ers she thought I might enjoy. Again, I thought, this is weird. I lis­tened to it with­out an album cover, com­pletely, con­fused at the noise of the bat­tle scene between Yoshimi and the Robots, and try­ing to parse things. My very young son loved “Yoshimi Bat­tles The Pink Robots, Part 2″ in par­tic­u­lar. Since he hated rid­ing in the car, I would play it on loop for him. He’d freak out if I even lis­tened to the first three songs, so it took a while for me to get to the rest of the album. I didn’t even con­nect the band with “She Don’t Use Jelly” until my hus­band heard what I had play­ing one day and gloated that I DID like the Lips enough to have an album. I protested I’d never heard of them before, and he illu­mi­nated me. “Oh, weird. I guess I can see that. I’d for­got­ten all about that song.”

Most peo­ple have heard snatches of the most pop­u­lar song on this album, “Do You Real­ize?” because it was in a Nis­san com­mer­cial. Of course, the com­mer­cial only plays a snip­pet of the song, and it does no jus­tice to the whole of the song, much less its place in the album. I just learned that Wayne Coyne says that the album isn’t a con­cept album, which is very sur­pris­ing to me. Still, those first four songs tell a story of the tri­umph of mankind and love. Then it moves on to other things, but the rela­tion­ship between all the songs on the album is still strong. There are under­lin­ing themes of love, sci­ence fic­tion, right and wrong, wist­ful­ness, and power throughout.

This album became one of my game night albums. I played it more if we hap­pened to be play­ing GURPS rather than D&D, because I had a par­tic­u­lar char­ac­ter that I felt aligned with the Lips, plus it was a mod­ern cam­paign set­ting. I could see my girl pop­ping vit­a­mins so she‘d be strong to fight some pink invader robots. I’d play it over and over, super­charg­ing myself with love and poten­tial energy and hope and bit­ter­sweet aggres­sion. I played it other times, too, when­ever I just wanted to power up. Years of lis­ten­ing to Yoshimi have passed, and it still hasn‘t got­ten old.

When At War with the Mys­tics came out in 2006, my hus­band was adamant. I HAD to buy this album, no, really, I didn’t under­stand, I’d love it!  I lis­tened to it, and the yeahyeahyeahyeahyeahyeahyeah in the first song imme­di­ately irri­tated me. It was too much.  I have my the­o­ries on why — I need a lit­tle space to truly hear new music.  The sit­u­a­tion wasn’t really con­ducive to focus­ing on what I was hear­ing. If only I had watched the video, I’d have laughed til I cried and lis­tened to the entire album.

Instead, I put the album out of mind. The spousal unit did not despair, though. He made me a “mixed tape” on an mp3 player to go in the van when I drove to work. He hid “The W.A.N.D.” in there, between known favorites of mine. I came home one day ask­ing what that song with lyrics about a magic stick “that will make them all fall.  We got the power now…” He smugly replied, “It’s that new Flam­ing Lips album you hate. Of course you love that song. It‘s your theme song, duh.”

(Yes, I want to put up the video for it, too.  I’m an absolute paragon of self-control.)

I was sold. I lis­tened to the album, open-minded, and love flooded my heart.  One awe­some album isn’t enough for me, but two, of that cal­iber… well.  Be pre­pared to hear me rave about the Fear­less Freaks more in the future, but for now I’ve had more than enough fun with this post. If you visit their web­page, you’ll be able to lis­ten to more.   It is one of the best band web­pages I’ve vis­ited.  As soon as I post this blog I’m adding it to my links, in fact.

Enjoy!