Not Crap. Good music, for the most part. Also, I love how they have put money behind making their live show an event. They seem to spread the goodness where even they go.

Just saw them last night at Red Rocks.............FUCKING AMAZING!!!!

They closed with "Moonlight Mile," my favorite Stones song.

Not, and never, Crap.

-Jeremy

They dedicated "Vein of Stars" to yours truly at the Aragon. I love this band and they are as far from crap as can ever be.

A wonderful band comprised of lovely people.

Linus Van Pelt wrote:Flaming Lips is Not Crap. Old stuff, new stuff, album stuff, live stuff, weirder stuff, less weird stuff. All of it good. All of it Not Crap. No waffling.

Agreed.

Clouds Taste Metallic is one of my all-time favorite albums. I am a fan of any and all things Lips (except I didn't dig Yoshimi too much). This band is excellent.

NOT CRAP.

SecondEdition wrote:Seriously, though - Randall, how the fuck is Wayne Coyne not a hippie? He has written tons of catchy, starry-eyed, psychedelic, lyrical, charitable and goodhearted songs that often show a childlike fascination with the world and a naive understanding of evil in the world. Sounds a whole honking hell of a lot like hippie shit to me - and that is not a bad thing at all. He's often incredibly quirky, which I don't mean as a fucking perjorative - I mean that as a compliment, because he makes his quirks pay off. He has come up with seriously wacked-out ideas that seem impossible and completely impractical that turn out to produce great, unique music (like Zaireeka). Acoustic? Sure. What do you call "There You Are" if not acoustic? And fucking brilliant?

You are mistaking all of those descriptors as something that should be considered hippie-esque whereas I don't. In fact, I would pretty much agree with all of the descriptors you've chosen to tag them with, but still wouldn't think of them as hippies even though a sizable portion of their new fans would lead you to believe so. You are also painting the Lips with a brush dipped in new ink. Their earlier work easily out-shines and out-numbers anything they've released this past decade. If anything, they've turned into this monster of an easy-listening rock band. At War With The Mystics is an easy-listening album made by a band trying to sound like 00's-Flaming Lips. I realize you're not being insulting, I think you're just way off base. Working the festival/jam-band circuit makes them more of hippies than their actual music, and this baffles me more than ever: the shows aren't improvised and/or jammy, the set is pretty much the same from night to night, loads of backing tapes and predictability, and yet hippies flock to them like the second coming.

Also, I don't think of hippies as being particularly noisy. Even at their most lite-rockish, the Lips can still whip up gales of fuzz and distortion as well as gauzy palettes of psychedelic haze.

P.S. Have you checked out Clouds Taste Metallic? You should. That album is insanely catchy and quirky, and resembles nothing close to what could be considered "hippiesh."

H-GM wrote:You are mistaking all of those descriptors as something that should be considered hippie-esque whereas I don't. In fact, I would pretty much agree with all of the descriptors you've chosen to tag them with, but still wouldn't think of them as hippies even though a sizable portion of their new fans would lead you to believe so.

I should explain that I don't think of them as "hippies" in the "bongos-and-acoustic-guitars-in-the-park" type way, or as "hippies" in the "Phish-concerts-and-hackysack" type way, but as people with the same kind of '60's spirit that typified many of the original hippies, except in the present.

You are also painting the Lips with a brush dipped in new ink. Their earlier work easily out-shines and out-numbers anything they've released this past decade. If anything, they've turned into this monster of an easy-listening rock band. At War With The Mystics is an easy-listening album made by a band trying to sound like 00's-Flaming Lips.

I don't think I once thought of the newer stuff that the band has made. I was talking about stuff like "One Million Billionth of a Millisecond On A Sunday Morning." Psychedelic shit.

I realize you're not being insulting, I think you're just way off base. Working the festival/jam-band circuit makes them more of hippies than their actual music, and this baffles me more than ever: the shows aren't improvised and/or jammy, the set is pretty much the same from night to night, loads of backing tapes and predictability, and yet hippies flock to them like the second coming.

Probably because the Lips still make vaguely psychedelic music. Yoshimi and the Pink Robots, from a lyrical perspective, could have come out of the '60's. It's a bit of a concept album, isn't it?

Also, I don't think of hippies as being particularly noisy. Even at their most lite-rockish, the Lips can still whip up gales of fuzz and distortion as well as gauzy palettes of psychedelic haze.

"Interstellar Overdrive" and the live half of Ummagumma. The Parable of Arable Land. The last three tracks on Freak Out!, and Amon Duul's Psychedelic Underground. All of that shit helped invent noise rock, and all of it was made by hippies. OK, maybe Pink Floyd weren't really hippies, per se...

Shit, am I confusing hippie stuff with psychedelic music? Or have the newer hippies redefined what it is to be a hippie? (Confusing enough to make me disregard most established rules of good, coherent writing. Jesus...)

P.S. Have you checked out Clouds Taste Metallic? You should. That album is insanely catchy and quirky, and resembles nothing close to what could be considered "hippiesh."

I have not. I haven't gotten past Priest yet.

seconded, thirded and whatevered on Clouds Taste Metallic...

the fuzz tone of Psychiatric Exploration Of The Fetus With Needles just fucking destroys everything and damn near itself! i can't get enough of that song...not to mention the backing vocals are beautiful...

pre-In a Priest Driven Ambulance - interesting but also not entirely original or amazing, still not crap.

In a Priest Driven Ambulance through Soft Bulletin - amazing, completely not crap.

Yoshimi - not as amazing but still not crap.

At War With The Mystics - crap.