arguing for the soft bulletin

The Flaming Lips have been around for about 20 years now. They've built a reputation for being one of America's most outlandish and absurd rock 'n roll acts. They sometimes wear fury animal outfits and fake blood. Lead singer Wayne Coyne has been seen performing from inside a human-sized bubble ball. They write songs with unusual titles like "Pilot Can at the Queer of God" and "Rainin' Babies." They were best known throughout the '90's as "the band who sang that song about Vaseline." And yet somehow over the span of their last three releases, The Flaming Lips took the leap from "weird indie fringe act" to "essential rock band."

The band's most recent release, At War With The Mystics, carries on with the precedent set by the previous two records. It's a mishmash of electrosonic space rock, with a bit more straightforward rock than Yoshimi or The Soft Bulletin. Yet Mystics isn't quite the opus that both of those other records manage to be. The highs aren't as high, the lows aren't as low.

But neither At War With The Mystics nor Yoshimi accomplish what The Soft Bulletin does. This is The Flaming Lips' finest musical concoction, the album that took them into rock royalty and crowned them as darlings. This is where The Lips most clearly express their artistic vision. This is the album that saved them. It's the book that an author tries to write his whole career and finally does.
















Back in the mid '90's, The Lips released an album called Clouds Taste Metallic. It was a surprisingly creative collection of songs that went largely unnoticed by the public. So what do you do when creatively you're starting to actualize but nobody's listening? You've already been dismissed as "the Vaseline song" band? If you're Wayne Coyne & The Lips, you go back to the studio and record Zaireeka, a four-disc album intended to played all at once. Someone say gimmick, right? Maybe so. But Coyne says on the band's website that it was during the Zaireeka recordings that they gained the enlightenment they'd been searching for. They realized then that they weren't a live rock band who records albums; rather, The Flaming Lips were a studio band that loved to tinker and experiment behind closed doors. Understanding this helped them to cement their identity. And once the Zaireeka recordings were finished, their identity understood, they were left with a few songs that just didn't work with the four-disc concept. Those songs laid the foundation for their next release, 1999's The Soft Bulletin.

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Once the music starts playing, right away you are drawn into the theater of this album. You can picture the stage curtains spread apart as the show begins, the loud echoing drum snares and the "ta da!" keyboards. And then, once the scene has been established, in comes Wayne with that fragile, lovable voice (or, if you're new to The Lips, it's the annoyingly shaky voice), singing the words to a story that starts, "Two scientists were racing for the good of all mankind / Both of them side-by-side / So determined." Like most of The Soft Bulletin, this first song is lush with keyboards and backing vocals singing ahhs and oohs set to a galloping rhythm. Best of all, the keyboards sound a little like they're gasping for breath on their deathbed, like they're being bent and stretched in unnatural sounding ways. The Soft Bulletin is loaded with similar sound experiments throughout, blurring the line between noise and music.

Like following the white rabbit down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, thus begins this odd journey.

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Like any good story, The Soft Bulletin succeeds in creating a unique universe for the listener. That's not something I can quantify for you, it's just something a person feels. The Wizard of OZ, Willy Wonka, The Royal Tenenbaums, Pulp Fiction - these are all stories that accomplish this. Sgt. Pepper by The Beatles is an album that accomplishes this. Shoot, Super Mario Bros. is a video game that accomplishes this. And so too does The Soft Bulletin. You might just have to take a blind leap of faith with me on this point.













But The Soft Bulletin's greatest strength lies in its cohesive themes, the way it ebbs and flows with tension between victory and defeat. In this regard, it is more than a collection of songs. Rather, it is a lyrically and musically connected work, which lends to the album's sense of being like theater or literature.

A good portion of the album concerns itself with strange stories: talk over spider bites, gashes on your leg, and lifting up the sun. But there is something bigger at work. Like the scientists at the beginning, The Lips themselves seem to be chasing some great discovery. The Soft Bulletin is not sung from the shy diary of some shoegazer. It is a declaration in the form of a story, some vague message of hope (perhaps) to ALL MANKIND!!! (echo, echo, echo)

But these large themes are almost always intertwined with tragedy, failure and the loss of hope. You begin to realize that The Flaming Lips aren't just a fun band playing fun music. Often times they are downtrodden and defeated, pessimists posing as realists.

"Waitin' for a Superman" for example, says:

Tell everybody waiting for Superman
That they should try to hold on
Best they can.
He hasn't dropped them
Forgot them
Or anything.
It's just too heavy for Superman to lift.

In "The Gash (Battle Hymn for the Wounded Mathematician)"
is about quitting in the face of adversity:

Is that gash in your leg
Really why you have stopped?
'Cause I've noticed all the others
Though they're gashed, they're still going
'Cause I feel like the real reason
That you're quitting, that you're admitting
That you've lost all the will to battle on

The pain is more straightforward on "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate":

Love in our life is just too valuable
Oh, to feel for even a second without it
But life without death is just impossible
Oh, to realize something is ending within us...
Feeling yourself disintegrate

You sometimes find yourself asking, "Why so downcast, Flaming Lips? What's the matter?"















However, the conclusion of "The Gash" - the musical apex of the album - is halfway defiant.

Still the battle that we're in
Rages on till the end
With explosions, wounds are open
Sights and smells, eyes and noses
But the thought that went unspoken
Was understanding that you're broken.
Still the last volunteer battles on
Battles on
Battles on

As we journey through this music, we come to understand The Flaming Lips as complex and highly emotional creatures. And this is conveyed not only through words, but also through the music, naturally, which I've not spent enough time talking about. You could give three dumps about the greater themes of The Soft Bulletin and still love it for its sometimes wildly unpredictable and sometimes strangely sweet musical fantasias. Download "A Spoonful Weighs a Ton" and you'll find out what I'm talking about in a hurry. One second it's a bunch of high-pitched sugary notes, trickling piano keys and flutes, and the next a rumbling bit of madness between bass and drums.

Listen to "The Spark That Bled" and it's perfect circle form, from beginning to end, despite the crazy path it takes you in between: contemplation, then blues, then cheer, then almost country, always theatrical. And who can deny singing aloud with the line: "I stood up and I said 'Yeah!'"

"The Spiderbite Song" is great interplay between piano & drums, twinkling chimes and random beeps, and Wayne. "'Cause if it destroyed you, it would destroy me."

And I love "What is The Light?" It changes the mood of the album with that thump-thump heartbeat rhythm and those deep, brooding thrusts on the piano, building a real sense of suspense. And the way it goes straight into "The Observer" - the epic instrumental - is brilliantly executed. Really, what a theatrical album.

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Finally, you might be wondering, "Great, but what about the two scientists? What cure are they racing to find?" The answer, ladies & gentlemen, is they are trying to figure out how to capture love into some scientific form and use it to heal all sickness in the world. At least, that's my theory. Look at the subtitle of "What is The Light?"

"What is The Light?: An Untested Hypothesis Suggesting That The Chemical [In Our Brains] By Which We Are Able To Experience The Sensation Of Being In Love Is The Same Chemical That Caused The "Big Bang" That Was The Birth Of The Accelerating Universe."




















Ultimately, I can't say enough good about The Soft Bulletin. It's just an innovative and challenging piece of work through and through. It raised the bar for anything the band would record afterwards, making The Soft Bulletin their gold standard of achievement, the record that pushed The Flaming Lips into the realm of the elite.

Of course, the immense reception to The Soft Bulletin would go on to put great pressure on their follow-up release. People wanted to know if it was a fluke, or rather, if it was a sign of great things to come. Under this scrutiny, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots was released three years later, in 2002.

Will we carry this discussion onward, next to examine the brilliance of Yoshimi, and to eventually contrast it against The Soft Bulletin.