Keep on Battling, Yoshimi
I’ve been trying to decide what this article should be about for three months now. Should I write about The Flaming Lips as a band? Should I just focus on Fight Test, which is a strong contender for my favorite song ever? How can I say that The Soft Bulletin is better than Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (or vice versa) when they’re both awesome?
In the end I’ve decided that I’ll just write about one album and you can go look for more on your own. Okay, enough preamble (more like pre-ramble amirite?). On with the show.
Discovering The Flaming Lips was the best thing to come out of my holy-crap-I’m-almost-thirty crisis a few years ago. In an effort to stop getting older I started using Macs and writing poetry and listening to indie music and doing all the other things that people who are worried about getting older do to prove that they’re still young and with it. Most of these things are terrible, naturally. My wife was very tolerant as I brought Moleskine journals and used iMacs into the house, and put up with some really not very good “music” as I tried to pretend I liked listening to guys with wispy beards whine about their lives while noodling around on $10 keyboards.
I’m not sure how Yoshimi got mixed in with the second-hand-Casio-keyboard guys, but I’m glad it did. The opening track, after some weird 80′s sci-fi sounding stuff, started with this:
I thought it better not to fight – I thought there was a virtue
In always being cool…
Which describes me perfectly. The whole song does, really. It’s brilliant. It’s catchy. It’s strangely upbeat, considering it’s about losing the person you love because you weren’t willing to step up and move outside of your comfort zone for them. Like many others, this has been something that’s scared me silly my whole life, and this song captured it perfectly. This song (along with Do You Realize?? from the same album) has more or less become my own personal theme song, the one that plays in my head when I’m imagining I’m the hero of a really boring movie.
The rest of the album has the same sort of trick: The lyrics, taken at face value, can be pretty bleak. Things like “We’re not gonna make it/ he explained how the end will come/ you and me were never meant to be part of the future” sounds pretty depressing right? But the song, with its central theme (and title: All We Have Is Now) feels hopeful. Now is the time to make the world awesome, and even if we weren’t ever “meant to be part of the future”, there’s still a lot we can do here.
Just as amazing is what they’re doing in and under and around the lyrics. Listening to Yoshimi is like living in an oil painting. There are swirls and layers and places where one sound blends into another, other places where the things that are going on over there make what’s happening over there make sense. This is an album for headphones, as there’s a lot going on, and the sound moves around. Every song is rich, nuanced, textured, like Van Gogh’s Starry Night, but with sound.
Based on the awesomeness of Yoshimi (even my wife liked it) I went out and bought The Soft Bulletin and At War With the Mystics. My wife and I argue over whether Soft Bulletin or Yoshimi is the best of the three, but all three albums have their merits and are well worth your time and money.
I could go on, talk about my favorite songs, explain at length why they’re my favorites, and basically just fulfill the mission of this site far beyond the point of embarrassment, but it wouldn’t help. Go; buy just one track on Amazon. You’ll be back.
You have a limited amount of time, so why spend it reading about things that suck or are only kind of okay? Favorite thing EVER is not a review site. We're unrepentant fans, and this is the stuff we love. Hope you like gushing, because we're about to embarrass ourselves.
I first encountered this band in the early ’90s, when I was working at a music magazine and they had that weird random hit song with “She Don’t Use Jelly.” Everybody assumed they were just some kind of one-hit novelty act, but we did an article on them — turns out they were ALREADY accomplished indie darlings back then. (It came the same month they sang that song on “Beverly Hills 90210,” so the joke was that any band that played the Peach Pit could make our cover).
So here’s the video, for nostalgia’s sake! As an added little past-blast, it predates Wayne Coyne’s signature college professor / mad scientist look:
I saw the “She Don’t Use Jelly” video after I watched the “Do You Realize??” Video, and at first was wondering how Carrot Top got in there. Somehow, knowing that Wayne used to have flaming red hair makes the world a better place.
When Yoshimi first came out, you could stream it at their site, accompanied by this amazing little cartoon art slideshow.
Do you realize that there has been discussion of Aaron Sorkin writing the script for Yoshimi as a Broadway Musical?
http://www.spinner.com/2010/03/26/flaming-lips-wayne-coyne-yoshimi-musical-broadway/