What is this?
The Flaming Lips
Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
In the fall of 2002 I stood in front of a Corning Community College vending machine with dollar in hand. While trying to figure out what candy bar would go best with my orange soda, I was humming a tune that graced the back speakers of my Hyndai Accent quite often during the course of that summer. I was four years into my musical metamorphosis; having ventured far, far from my angsty past and my brief stint with techno music brought on mostly by late nights with nothing to do except watch Amp on MTV 2. It was a period of change where I began to welcome bands like The New Pornographers and The Shins, both of which I must have played so many times that even my little green car must've been sick of them. As it turns out, I settled for a Twix that day, but instead of doing anything productive I went back to the classroom and replaced the exotic world music with the album that had been corrupting my brain waves. That album was Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots by The Flaming Lips, and it remains a beautiful piece of musical art even now, six years later.
Why this album is important to me:
The Flaming Lips first came into my life, not in the contemporary form, but as a crude psych-punk band. Wayne Coyne wasn't the wise, contemplative eccentric who lands on stage via ufo, he was the young deviant with big red hair who sang abstract songs with bizarre lyrics that were oftentimes not-so-easy on the ear. Still, when the Lips penetrated my world with 'She Dont Use Jelly', I wasn't alone. The song hit everywhere, from college radio stations to the main stream. It was this scattershot reach that allowed my 58 year old uncle to sing along with the song when my cousin played it in the family van. How the vast majority of the public chose to follow up, that's a little different. While Al might know what the girl who thinks about ghosts puts on her toast in lieu of the usual toppings, he certainly doesn't know what this here giraffe finds so funny, he probably doesn't know why a spoonful is so heavy, and I'm willing to bet he doesn't know the plight of Yoshimi or the sadness of artificial love.
Less to say, The Flaming Lips were a significant part of my life, and one that made my transition easier for me by changing around the same time. While older Lips albums are certainly an acquired taste (and I admit even I don't have the stomach to make them a main course in my listening buffet), the contemporary works of the Flaming Lips that started to shine through with Clouds Taste Metallic, and really came to the front and center with The Soft Bulletin are a more accessible music. Yoshimi, in a way, helped to solidify this change, it showed me that we were on the same page. I spent a good portion of the summer with two or three of the most important friends I'll ever have in my life driving around the familiar roads of Corning, South Corning, Caton, and Big Flats. Making habitual pilgrimage’s from Harvard on the Hill to the Arnot Mall, and during our adolescent weekends of pizza, energy drinks, and video games - Yoshimi provided a lush and imaginative soundtrack to my youth.
On top of the nostalgia factor, Coyne manages to construct a novel's worth of imagination in each song. A coming of age drama (which I still find I can relate to) opens up the album, a tale of vacant love, a colorful story of a world endangered by psycadelic human-eating robots, straight through to deep contemplations over the relationship of love and hate to a story of a man who travels back in time to warn himself to indulge in every moment. Each song is a story, and each story is one I could read a hundred times over and still be elated to turn back to page one. Hell, each one is a story I've heard a hundred times or more. So rarely are people able to evoke such vivid imagery through the use of traditional pop lyrics, and so rarely is one bands sound able to transport you into their own fictional realm. The Flaming Lips seem to be masters of this domain, with Wayne Coyne's unbridled imagination coupled with Steven Drozd's musical mastery.
Why this album should be important to you:
While it's likely too late for Yoshimi to bear the same nostalgia of adolescence, and the drama of the re-inventing of the Flaming Lips might be lost on you now, it's not beyond reasoning that you might make this album a significant part of your life. While the albums namesake might seem a bit brash or even childish, and it's follow up - the struggle represented through instrumentation and various overwhelming noises might seem a bit hard to swallow, I assure to that the album has as much sophistication as a Dickens novel. The songs, each one a narrative of an unfortunate character, are both descriptive enough to provide strong emotions, yet vague enough for you to find yourself in each one. With an obvious science fiction theme, the album tackles many issues, at times feeling the weight of tragedy masked beneath the catchy tunes and the other-worldly atmosphere of the record. Magicians, hypnotists, robots, time travel and more. They all seem like the proper ingredients for a made-for-TV movie. But Coyne sees the supernatural in a way that transcends 1950's pulp novels; he sees the loneliness of a new age, new problems as well as old, as people in a futuristic world struggle with the same hypothetical and emotional problems we face now. In this way the music transcends its own time, and by defining only itself, also proves that it will remain relevant in decades to come.
While Yoshimi might not appeal to everyone, I have close friends who share close musical tastes that just can’t seem to get onboard with the album, I believe, firmly, that it has something to offer everyone if they're just willing to look for it, or even let it look for them. From a literary standpoint, The Flaming Lips manage to do what so few published authors are capable of, and doing so in the structural format of a pop song makes it even more of an achievement. The fact that the accompanying music is so fantastic almost seems secondary to the brilliant stories spun through the album. As a whole each song both constructs living worlds as well as scores its own creation and fades seamlessly into the next world, and perhaps calls you back again later down the line. Far from the static, the jarring reality of the world at large - even when confronted with problems of no insignificant manner, life in the Yoshimi world has a fluidity that helps overcoming whatever your obstacle might be. Listening is like living a double life, or like cheap therapy.
For creating a living album, for writing nine important pieces of literature (and two non-lyrical audio-visual scores), and setting the whole thing to music, I think that The Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots should be an important album to you, and I think it's an album that should be in everyone's collection. If you've never heard this album before, if you've heard it countless times, Yoshimi is certainly an album worth spending some time with. An album worth remembering.