The Flaming Lips' Shtick Is Getting Stale

Photo by Mark C. Austin

Let's have a talk about the Flaming Lips. The Oklahoma City band made their name in the '90s alt-rock scene with "She Don't Use Jelly," but they were nothing like their contemporaries. Their history was checkered with intense experimentation, and that song was an outlier in their catalog.

This sort of teeter-totter balance between accessible, mainstream rock music and vast sonic experimentation has continued unabated as the Lips have become one of the most successful bands in modern music. But as they've gotten more famous and more financially stable, the whole thing might be growing stale.

Here's the problem. When the Flaming Lips started, they were polarizing to be sure, but were also such great songwriters that any indulgences were able to be overlooked, or even appreciated as the genius of a band of mad scientists. Putting out a record like Zaireeka, which was virtually impossible to appreciate unless you owned four CD players, was just proof of their avant garde credentials.

In its own way, this was how the Flaming Lips even got away with releasing a record like The Soft Bulletin. So much of music appreciation comes down to aesthetics. It's unfortunately true that many would not have been able to overlook the sappy, syrupy sound of that album had the Flaming Lips not already proved themselves to be anything but Disney-aping schlock-meisters. Instead, it was the next step of evolution for a band that had all the street cred and "cool" they could possibly need.

This has more or less continued to be the game plan for the band. For every time they put out a challenging album like Embryonic, there's a companion piece like their full-album cover of Dark Side of the Moon to make sure their casual fans are still paying attention.

But these days the game plan is trite. The blueprint is ringing hollow. The indulgences have gone far beyond excessive, and the actions of the band seem either coldly calculated or desperate than the work of artists with a foot in both worlds. What happened?

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