“Do you realize that everyone you know, someday, will die?” Wayne Coyne, 48, asked a crowd of smiling 20-somethings last week at New Orleans’ tenth annual Voodoo Experience.Up until that final day of the eclectic music festival, the weather matched Coyne’s depressing lyric, drenching City Park in a cold rain and leaving event-goers to wade through fields of mud. But in typical fashion for Coyne’s eternally optimistic band The Flaming Lips, the rain clouds departed, the sun shone, the mud dried and all was right with the world as far as the crowd singing along to “Do You Realize?” was concerned.
The typical Flaming Lips’ concert, as if “typical” could ever describe anything the band has ever done, begins with lead singer Coyne rolling onto the audience inside a large, clear ball known as the Space Bubble. He can rarely stand throughout the process and constantly requires the assistance of the audience to keep him up and moving. It serves as very visual metaphor for how important the fans are to the band as it is they who keep The Lips going.
As the band performed several songs from their three most recent albums, brightly colored confetti and balloons matching the band’s entirely orange equipment bombarded the audience from every direction. A large semi-circular projection screen behind the band displayed dazzling bursts of light and bizarre scenes of nude women dancing.
The band’s set list ranged from the fun yet meaningful protest “The Yeah, Yeah, Yeah Song,” which asks the audience to respond to flippant questions about authority and responsibility with an enthusiastic “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” to “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots,” a sad but beautiful song about the power of believing in someone despite the odds.
Much of The Lips’ music is bittersweet, sending messages of hope while describing situations of fear and doubt. No song in The Lips’ repertoire illustrates this better than their standard opening number for live performances “Race For The Prize,” a song about two scientists developing a much-needed cure despite the known fact they will die in the process.
The live Flaming Lips experience is bittersweet as well. That hour and 45 minutes in New Orleans, not to mention the two-and-a-half hour wait to see the band up close, was filled with so much anticipation, excitement, joy, color and music that the sights and sounds of the park were drab and muted in comparison. The only consolation is that the intense waves of hope and enthusiasm sent out by the band still resonate within everyone lucky enough to have witnessed the performance.
Coyne ended with “Do You Realize?” and repeated a touching line that could not have been any more true or appropriate for the occasion:
“Do you realize that everyone you know, someday, will die? And instead of saying all of your goodbyes, let them know you realize that life goes fast. It’s hard to make the good things last. Realize the sun doesn’t go down. It’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning ’round.
