the flaming lips with a little help from my fwends

But while such recurring retro-gazing exercises may seem antithetical to the adventurous, boundary-pushing ethos the Lips displayed on 2009’s Embryonic and last year’s The Terror, the mere task of making the most totemic (and, by extension, contemptuously overplayed) rock songs of all time seem fresh presents its own formidable challenge, one they’ve answered by gradually shifting their cover-song approach from faithfully sacred to kill-yer-idols profane. But in the post- Soft Bulletin era-during which the Lips’ music became both more tonally serious and relentlessly experimental-cover songs have become a necessary salve through which the band can reassert their playful side and maintain the circus-like atmosphere at their concerts even when touring behind decidedly more downcast material.Īnd ever since they trotted out old warhorses like “ Bohemian Rhapsody” and “ War Pigs” on their 2006 At War With the Mystics tour, the Lips have seemingly been on a mission to modernize the entire classic-rock canon, by curating full-album, collaboration-heavy reconstructions of Pink Floyd and King Crimson milestones (with a Stone Roses debut-album redux thrown in to show they’re still fond of music made after 1980).

It was their contrarian reverence for tradition, with the band dropping straight-faced covers of Led Zeppelin’s “ Thank You” and Louis Armstrong’s “ What a Wonderful World” into their repertoire for no other reason than they loved the songs.Īs the Lips scored sudden mainstream success in the early '90s with a fluke MTV hit, their cover choices turned decidedly more esoteric, as the band used their modicum of celebrity to shine a light on known artists’ lesser-known work, reclaim new-wave novelties, or to promote then-unheralded underground peers. In this context, what made the early, garage-punk iteration of the Flaming Lips so strange was not their sordid subject matter, disturbing cover art, or 23-minute acid-rock jams.

Mascis moaning his way through Peter Frampton’s “Show Me the Way”, the Minutemen chopping Van Halen songs in half, Pussy Galore licking the burnt spoons littered throughout the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, Sonic Youth swiping the title of CCR’s “Bad Moon Rising” for their Reagan-era state-of-the-union address, and the Butthole Surfers grinding Black Sabbath’s “Sweet Leaf” into skunk weed. Back in the mid-1980s, the easiest way for underground bands to draw ideological battlelines separating themselves from their 1970s arena-rock antecedents was to appropriate their most hallowed songs for devious ends.

The flaming lips with a little help from my fwends