Winter in Ithaca: an essay on the Flaming Lips







I was living in Ithaca, NY when I was first introduced to The Flaming Lips. A friend of mine, who took it upon himself to be privy to the newest trends in the world of indy rock, suggested them to me. Ithaca has the privilege of steep hills, large, healthy trees, and imposing Gorges which gush with waterfalls. At the time nothing was more exciting than walking through this landscape with headphones on. Whatever is playing in your ears has a way of seeping into everything surrounding you—my heartbeat would grow heavy, and my legs would feel lighter than ever. The Flaming Lips are one of those bands who have gone through a major transformation over their career, while—for the true aficionado—always expressing, whether in their grundgy punk songs of the early 80s or their Nirvanic massive productions of the mid 90s, the same enthusiasm, the same rebellion, the same philosophic longing. To explain this phenomenon to myself, I concluded that Wayne Coyne, the songwriter and inspiration of The Flaming Lips, had a mystical connection with the world—and since I was young, and desirous of intensity and power, I wanted to become Wayne Coyne. I wanted to exist in his body, and every song gave me the opportunity to imagine what it would be like to do so. Soon this obsession started to terrify me, I would wake up, look out at the snow-filled window, and instead of perceiving what I perceived, I would add to the frame whatever it was I imagined Wayne Coyne would see when he looked out the window; and since many songs were about ‘spacemen and their guns’, ‘elephants and kangaroos’, ‘hypnotists’, ‘aliens’—and more, the possibilities were limitless, and I would always grow despondent after a few minutes, certain that the trapeze artist I had conjured was nowhere near as detailed as the full circus Wayne would surely have been capable of imagining. I always had a notion that I was sick for having this obsession, and that no matter what I feared, it had always been only within me: caught in the fascination with psychedelics and infinity, the odd guitar timbers and multi-layered melodies stole my mind off to a place of expansive oblivion—and, I decided that this feeling of indeterminacy which came over me would only disappear if I became the creator of such possibilities: I kept shifting between the euphoria of the infinite and the fear of it. Wayne Coyne represented the limit of this fear for me. He was the one who existed outside the infinite. What made this obsession even more difficult to shake was that while I was raising Wayne up to this holy distinction, Wayne himself, in his youth, constantly sang about Jesus, and I just assumed that he was referring to himself, especially when he sang, “Jesus was a rock star who destroyed all he’d seen.” It took me over three years to shed myself of Wayne Coyne, and when I finally realized I was out from under his spell, I was never entirely certain of why he had left—it may have been that I replaced him with another vision of omnipotence, a friend, a lover… But I continued to listen to the music, because it always reminded me of an important formative stage of my existence, and that which had always appealed to me, the sense of humor, the honesty, and the absurdity continued to suit my mood. So, it was not without a certain irony that, deep within Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, I turned back on some old tunes by the Flaming Lips only to discover anew what the songs meant to me back then, why they swallowed me whole, and why, still to this day, they represent that late adolescent struggle immortalized by Hamlet’s schizophrenic consciousness.
I think it most apropos to stick to five songs taken from the album In a Priest Driven Ambulance Car, considered to be their first masterpiece. The first song on this album is entitled Shine on Sweet Jesus on Me (Jesus Song #5):

Waitin' for my ride
Jesus is floatin' outside
(shine on, sweet jesus, on me)
Watchin' the water rise
I'm gettin' lost in the tide
(cry all your teardrops on me)
While I'm still myself,
Your blankets covered me
Covered me while I was still asleep

Watchin' the planets shine
Reflecting yourself in the sky
(shine on, sweet jesus, on me)
Scraping these smiles of mine
Impossible one at a time
(cry all your teardrops on me)
While I'm still myself,
Your blankets covered me
Covered me while I was still asleep

Jesus is at my side,
Wondering what he will find
(shine on, sweet jesus, on me)
Watchin' the water rise
I'm gettin' lost in the tide
(cry all your teardrops on me)
While I'm still myself
Your blankets covered me
Covered me while I was still asleep

As a secular Jew, songs about Jesus remained a mystery which I assumed had some cultural significance, one which I was lucky enough to be exempt from. As I read more and more philosophy, the significance of Jesus’ sacrifice was impossible to avoid. What struck me when innocent to the Notion which finds its realization in the resurrection was the toying with truth which Jesus symbolized. The sight of Jesus ‘floatin’ outiside’ as an image which somehow surpassed the surreal images on earlier albums, such as: “Brains falling out of my head.” Suddenly, to see Jesus, instead of ‘monkeys humping holes in brains’, sublates the vain and circular fight of the artist who thinks that the more extreme the picture-thoughts conveyed in the work art, the greater the impression. To sing of Jesus transfers the artist’s conception of himself to the outside, refuses to project a particular genius, and announces the end of the artwork as artwork as such. This song represents the refusal to make a great work of art, thought is not valued as anything less nor more than a prayer. Jesus is floating outside not because a single consciousness has pictured his appearance, Jesus is floating outside because the artist has sacrificed his personal mechanics and decided to take witness to what is there when he is not there at all. This is why Wayne sings, “While I’m still myself/Your blankets covered me/Covered me while I was still asleep.” Often obsessed with describing the rancor of dreams, Wayne removes his ego completely from the process, eliminates all his dreams, and sees himself as the mere object in the care of something beyond himself. But this beyond is not anonymous, it is someone who is much like Wayne himself, someone long-haired, whose smiles are capable of forgiving all sin. Wayne’s ego returns, but it does so in the form of a living God which is immune, in that it is above, the vanity of dreams. One only needs to listen to these songs, recognize the playful marching beats and the wistful nature of Wayne’s crooning, to convince themselves that these songs are really a joyful act of self-annihilation. This is why Wayne does not need to maintain a common theism throughout, he can abandon himself just as variously as once he was bound by the variety of his imagination. ‘Watchin’ the planets shine/reflecting yourself in the sky’—is not inspired by the Christian notion, and this complicates Wayne’s gesture, since what is being grasped is not a stagnant mediator for objectification but the process of objectification itself—so here, instead of using Jesus to overwhelm the self out of its subjective obsession, the vastness of the Universe, as explained scientifically or as once known by the Ancient manifesting heroes and gods onto night’s canvas, now replaces Jesus, but recreates for Wayne the infinity necessary to reflect not into his ego—but out of it.
When I was obsessed with the Flaming Lips, I was also obsessed with hallucinogens, most specifically mushrooms, but I did a good amount of acid as well. I had a friend who was attending Cornell for free because of his peculiar genius and instead of working to assure safe passage through the world, he became the biggest drug dealer on campus. This made it easy for me to have access, and it also placed me in a world where what was valued most was the unraveling of the mystery. “Knowing” in its most naked element was what we were all striving for, and my friend Darian seemed to be at the top of this Caste system, handing out pieces of advice for cash. He also managed to ace his chemical engineering classes while staying up all night preaching the messages whispered in the forest out the window of his co-op. Being with him, high on acid, or listening to The Flaming Lips all interwove to create a network of personal reinvention—and I took all these things much more seriously than my literature classes.

“Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,/ and thus the native hue of resolution/Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,/and enterprises of great pitch and moment/With this regard their moments turn awry/And lose the name of action.”

In Hegelian terms, my classes were all limited to reflective thinking, to boundaries, to limits, to qualifications of what knowledge was supposed to mean, whereas, at night, by the waterfalls, in the infinite melodies, speculative thinking tore away all stationary manifestations of existence. I was religiously attune to these methods.

Seeing the unseeable,
Filling down the void
We're not what we used to be
We're not really boys

Screaming till our lungs are full
Kicking down the teeth
We're not what we used to be
We're just paranoid

Unconsciously screaming
And whispering at everything she brings


This song is violent, it begins with loud hits on the snare, strong distorted guitars and Wayne’s shouting voice. The band is laboring in search for knowing—it does so by negating all objects of perception. Sight is unseeable, the human is no longer human, no longer a child, teeth are breaking, and what in the end is all this but paranoia, not a sign of wisdom but all this breaking down itself is negated too. So that the void, as opposed to causing vertigo, fills up as a result of this unsight, the void is solidifying—the more one screams the more breath one has to breathe. Unconsciously screaming is the ratio of one to infinity. Unconsciousness destroys the volition of the punk rocker raging against the machine, it turns it into a mere whisper, responding to she, to nature, to Mother Mary, which brings despite the repetition of unsight and the damaged ego of drug-addled youth. What in the first song (the lost and renewed self) arose through vision, arrives in this song as the process of lost vision, realizing only the vicious circle—as a movement one can only continually exert.

“We do it wrong, being so majestical, To offer it the show of violence, For it is as the air, invulnerable, And our vain blows malicious mockery.”

My favorite line in this song was always ‘We’re not what we used to be/We’re not really boys.’ This transformed idea of identity is imbued with fearfulness and liberty. It is both a reflection on maturation into adulthood and the fact that the human itself grows out of its categories. There is not a period of one’s life which is more prescient of what will become the constant dissatisfaction of self-identity than the one which forces the boy to reinterpret himself outside of his parental instructions. This is the limbo where one MUST, if one is to approach liberation, ask the timeless question in Hamlet. It is also the limbo where one must accept that being will not be forthcoming with an answer. The Flaming Lips transgress this limbo—they proudly assert to be the negation of all category—they are growing out of their youth, and yet maintaining it with the rebellion of infinite resignation to wherever their violence and non-sight will bring them. And this leads them back into themselves.

What I'm thinkin' is so delicate
If I breathe, you know, I'm gonna lose it
It's just a drop in the biggest ocean I know I've ever seen
And in a moment it's big enough to drown the whole world

This is my present to the world
And I want you to take it
This is my present to the world
Take it from me, please please take it from me

All I know is I don't know it
It's rainin' babies from the sky down on me
Tiny drops on my windshield
And in a second it's rainin' rainin' all over the whole world

I used to think that Wayne was such an arrogant, fucking asshole for singing this song. At the same time, to reach unflinchingly for the messianic without fearing the megalomania implied was immediately an overcoming of the very psychic limitation which made me so angry that these words were spoken by someone else, who was not me. (F. Nietzsche is similarly defacing in his self-praise.) So it is here again, in different form, in the ever-changing confrontation with what is alien in the Self that we find a way to refuse the vanity of self—at the exact moment that vanity of self unfolds. Thinking chronologically about the psyche of the artist, we remember that the urge for the surreal, for the shocking was the first moment—quality and quantity are valued over presence. Value is given to an external marker (that of pyrotechnic mental capabilities) and the real act of expression which is all that the artist experiences has been forsaken. Next we found that the artist replaces the pyrotechnic image with Jesus, but at the moment that Jesus is seen as triumphing over all picture-thoughts, he becomes one himself, and so we return to the unconscious screaming, that place where nothing yet has been proffered. With the internalization of the offering, the song above speaks solely to the skeletal structure of singing, of art. That which is desired will immediately be destroyed if one single breath is taken, if one word is uttered. This word is singular, it is one drop, and yet in that it is found, it becomes universal, it swallows the whole world, and it is this paradoxical breathtaking moment which is Wayne’s present to the world.
Please please take it from me… this is an elemental prayer, one which prays for language to continue mediating. This Notion of presence, the one which will be destroyed in becoming Word, is no longer the great weight which burdens the artist, it can be transferred, but what can be transferred if nothing is ever spoken? The gift given by the artist is in reality a plea by the artist himself to maintain possession of his Notion without fearing that in not speaking of its presence it will never become… the gift given is the Notion realizing itself, refusing to become a concrete image or even a word. Encircling the throne of the Notion in this way Wayne can in fact be heard praying to himself, “This is my message to the world…take it from me, please please, take it from me.” He can be heard voicing the plea of the universal, take me into you, this is my message, just this, my plea.
I was not able to possess this gift immediately. I heard Wayne urging me to believe in himself. Looking back, I don’t know what I could have thought I was supposed to believe in. While Wayne sings of sacrifice, I refuse to do the same—I project (give, present) him with my own self-consciousness, one which still believes that my utterances have particular relation to myself…Wayne is broken apart and refusing to give anything, and all I could hear back then was my own particularity, had I sung that song, telling everyone how great I was, because I had a present. I was unable to realize the irony of that which was present. By the end of the song the water which once housed the drop representing the Notion has become thousands of Rainin’ Babies, and in a single second they are big enough to drown the whole world. Here the diffusion of water and generation are projected as a surreal image which drowns open-upon itself while filling up with hope. In keeping silent everyone will be able to hear what cannot be uttered.

My friend Darian and I rarely talked about the Flaming Lips, mainly because Darian was always talking about himself, and his music taste was different than mine—he liked punk music and The Grateful Dead. Whenever he spoke madly and convinced me that he was omnipotent, it was always a nice consolation to know how bad his taste in music was. I remember one night he started to obsess over his connection with Hamlet—this was like a challenge everyone in my school had to take up at one point or another. And though Darian was illiterate, and had only the Celestine Prophecy on his bookshelf, he too found his way onto the ego trip represented by the Prince of Denmark. On one of those cold nights of which their must have been over a hundred each winter, Darian and I ended up taking two chairs into the co-ed bathroom shower stall and turning all four faucets on to the highest heat so we could smoke a joint in a makeshift steam room. While we were in there, Darian stood up and began illustrating to me the way his energy takes him by the reins and whips him about in every direction. It was then that he compared himself to Hamlet. He had no control over himself, he feared that he was going to kill someone one day, and he made a point of asking me how I deal with all the pain and rage, and I just said that I must not feel as much as him, that things must be easier for me, and he consoled me for having submitted myself as such, saying I was a really good friend. But at that moment I had conquered him, I had experienced his ego and refused it; instead of projecting my own suffering, I remained silent.


Yeah, 'cause when I drive in my car
We put heads into jars
So take me please, take me to mars
I wanna go where they are [2x]
I wanna go

Yeah, and if I'm lost, well I don't care
'cause I walk on endless stairs
You say it's me, I think it's you
Who can blame us for thinkin' the way we do
'cause we don't care what we are [2x]

Take me please, take me to mars [3x]
Take me to mars [5x]


This song is not as brave as the other songs, this is a song about ego-tripping off of alienation. It is about returning the gratuitous violence of existence with one’s one gratuitous violence—the chopping off of the head. If only it were made clear that the head being chopped off was that of the singer himself. Then this song would resemble Bataille’s Acephalous: the gratuitous violence, now self-inflicted, would avoid representing a careless rebellion against one’s presence—it would be a careful challenging of the self. But I always loved this song the most exactly because it asked for the least amount of sacrifice; as such, I could remain within myself, while feeling utterly different. This was the kind of song which inspired me to imagine all sorts of bloody disfigurations of the people I was passing while the music played in my ears. Everyone was guilty of not being different like me, and so to maintain this satisfaction, I had to rid the world of everyone but myself. This then brought me to a barren world, bloodied red, but I didn’t care—and who could blame me for thinking that way. I always had a hunch that Wayne did not write this song, that in fact Jonathan Donahue, who was the lead guitarist, and eventually became the songwriter for Mercury Rev, was responsible for these lyrics. I still don’t know if this is an accurate guess. Though Mercury Rev did come out with a song with the line, ‘stairs to nowhere climb’—in which Jonathan sings all about his private world which nobody can enter. All of a sudden the advancing self-consciousness has regressed to the surrealism of earlier artistic endeavors—the ‘monkey humping brains’ is in this song the dream of selfhood of the singer—who wishes to be exactly this surreal possibility. But the plea is never answered.

I was born the day they shot jfk
The way you look at me sucks me down the sidewalk
Somebody please tell this machine I'm not a machine

My hands are in the air
And that's where they always are
You're fucked if you do, and you're fucked if you don't
Five stop mother superior rain

I was born the day they shot john lennon's brain
And all my smiles are gettin' in the hate generation's way
Tell 'em I'm gonna go out, shoot somebody in the mouth
First thing tomorrow

[chorus]

I was born the day they shot a hole in the jesus egg
Now the rain, it's all so random
What does free will have to do with it at all?
And you can't cry, but
It really don't matter, y'end up cryin' anyway.

[chorus]


This song incorporates all the motions of the songs above into a metemspychoptic journey which, though abandoning the self, remains transparently grounded in such a way that the specific human comes forth in all his love and hatred. No matter where the self originates, no matter where it transmigrates or disappears, it always returns to originate, disappear, or transmigrate. All its forms of beginning are historical figures of hope and possibility, each of whom was put to death for their revolutionary message. But the message, the same one unspoken about in Rainin’ Babies, returns in the disaster of self that abandons itself only to arise anew. You’re fucked if you do, and you’re fucked if you don’t. It is not possible to become the alien self, this is the solipsistic refuge of skepticism—who can blame us for thinking the way we do. Now, at last, with the internalization of the external presence of the self, Wayne has self-consciously raised his hands in the air in a gesture of hope and hopelessness… pleaing, praying and embracing that which inhibits him from crying, and then makes him cry all the same. Five Stop Mother Superior Rain, the same figure referred to as she in unconsciously screamin, is not outside of the figure or inside. The hands are in the air, not in prayer to this Rhea or Mother Mary like symbol, but in fact are this She itself…whose Reign, is all so random, that the ultimate freedom is achieved in the question of free will itself. This song attains an overemphasized utterance which pulls the slates out from under every ground, so that the movement itself becomes the only mode of beginning and end. And in what is a triumphant call to arms to the musical generation singing all around Wayne and the Flaming Lips—this song calls attention to the impossibility of refusing the smile, the one which decimates the skepticism of the punk rockers, and gives adequate reason for why Wayne later re-titled this album: Finally the Punk Rockers are Taking Acid.
My friend Darian ended up trying to kill himself. He had me chase him for five hours in the middle of the night, threatening that he was going to use the butcher knife he stole from the mess hall’s kitchen. He had a letter for me that I was supposed to send to his parents—but I ended up calling them right away and they drove up from Pennsylvania and took him out of school for a few days. He never did anything, and when he returned he was exposed, and he knew it. Unable to realize the limitless in his own life, he bound himself to the image of suicide as that which would prove his ego limitless—but, unable to accomplish this action, he had to face his own limitations. And he was humiliated as a result. For me, whatever glory I once attributed to his psyche was also demolished. He had been posturing all along. He had always wanted to be that ‘no longer boy’ who walks on mars, and this resulted in a denial of the ground actually beneath his feet. In the hierarchy of psyche put forth in this essay, Darian has revealed himself at the bottom, beneath Hamlet, who is beneath Wayne Coyne and the Flaming Lips.


I guess that everyone wonders why Hamlet killed himself. I remember my teacher at the time, who was old and hunched over and uninspiring, made a big point of explaining that the ghost of the father was a real figure on the stage—one could not accuse Hamlet of hallucinating, because then the audience would be implicated in his affliction. If Wayne Coyne and the Flaming Lips have successfully mastered the process of self-alienation, Hamlet is a complete failure—but his failure is caused because he can never rid himself of the real objective existence of that which terrifies him. Whereas that which haunts and distorts the character in Wayne’s songs is always unmentioned or impossible to grasp, Hamlet is confronted with a real crime and a real ghost—not only that, the treachery which is the mother’s giving into being of the child and the terror which is the father’s law and will is for Hamlet something which he cannot possibly disjoint from his particular mother and his particular father—this creates for him his alarming self-consumption. It is as if the mother and father figures in his life so fully embody the universal metaphor of self and object that he is imprisoned on the dead end street of teenage angst. Hamlet reveals his incapacity when he worries about the dreams that come after death. These dreams still come to the particular, tarnished battered self… it is of course for those who cannot break down the molecules of selfhood in their own self-consciousness while alive that have the bravado to wonder about the possibility of eternal torment. The eternal is already, in the figure of the waving hands, and the rebirth of souls—a self taken in and out of itself in a persistent unreaching of either full selfness or pure selflessness. Hamlet goes mad because he sees the philosophy of the world as confined to his small little stage—and he kills himself because of this incapacity to shirk his desire to be a self. The resurrection of the father is not the image of the external Jesus but a vain reflection of familial selfhood. Hamlet is one of those brats who continually reminds his friends that his family fucked him up…

I don’t remember if I ever contemplated suicide. I know that I would lie in bed and imagine axes splitting off my head, but this just felt like therapy. Many times I would take my headphones down to the Gorge and listen there for hours, screaming along to the lyrics, and this was helpful, I think, much more than trying to make believe I was some tragic hero.

How does it feel to be breakin' apart
Breakin' down molecules
How does it feel to be out of control
Another ring around this ball

Used to be all right
But things got strange

How does it feel to be fallin' apart
Sinkin' from the bottom down
It's not so easy holdin' it up
With everything fallin' down

Used to be all right
But things got strange
Used to take all night
But things've changed and God walks among us now


“O that this too too sullied flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into dew, Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d his canon ‘gainst self-slaughter. O God! God!”