I'm on the playground and it’s the early nineties. I’m shrunken, sweating, the scent of vinegary boy-smell in a turquoise Looney Tunes tee-shirt, the one where Bugs Bunny and Tweety Bird look like straight-up thugs, the first dumbing down of hip-hop on a commercial scale for a white audience, children included. The Vanilla Ice Syndrome. Billy, Ted Hernandez and I are standing on the platform next to the tallest slide, giggling at a small plastic bucket that the janitor forgot about when he was cleaning the inside of a tire swing at the far end of the playground. We’re giggling because we’ve spent the last five minutes on the platform at the top of the slide, pissing and spitting in the bucket until we’ve succeeded in concocting just about the most vile substance we’d ever seen or smelled. I think I know what’s going to happen next and I shudder. I ask Billy to stop, do we have to go through with it again but there’s two pieces of skin-colored Velcro covering his mouth, identical to what’s strapped across the top of my sneakers. He leers at me, wags his finger. I turn to Ted, to plead with him, no we can’t do this but his mouth is a zipper. When I reach up to un-Velcro Billy, he slaps my hand away, smiles, mumbles something that only Ted understands. The sky turns the same shade of turquoise as my shirt while Ted unzips his lips and yells something to this kid Arnold Weinstein, who’s minding his own business on a swing about ten yards from where we’re standing. Arnold ended up going to Fairport Prep with me, then Penn, then law school at Drexel, but that’s not in this dream. Right now he’s an 8-year-old dork, plain and simple: chubby, quiet, with freckles and a curly orange mess for hair. How much shit everyone gives him. We make fun of him for his orthopedic shoes, for always losing at foursquare, for the fact that he doesn’t know where his father lives. I’m feeling it all again, his snotty tears, my own Velcroed foot smashing into his fat gut the time he wouldn’t give me his last Double-Stuff Oreo at lunch. Ted tells me to stop thinking and waves at Arnold to come to the top of the slide. Arnold creeps towards us, real slow and timid because why would we ever ask him to hang out with us at recess where everyone can see, except that this time it’s only us on the playground because there’s no school. The sky turns indigo. Billy gets excited, rips the Velcro off and shouts out - spitting skin chunks - loud enough for Arnold to hear, the description of this horrific insect that we’ve just captured and put in the bucket. It oozes poisonous green pus out of its mouth, crawls around on at least a thousand hairy legs, has pincers the size of Swiss Army knives. If we move the bucket it might escape, so Arnold, if you want to see it, if you really want to see it, you’re going to have to climb the steps to the platform. I know what’s coming next but I can’t control my arms, and Billy’s cackling, trying to hold it together, and Ted’s already zipped his mouth back up so he won’t blow the surprise. He doesn’t have to worry. Arnold’s almost halfway up the steps when I slide bucket over the edge and his fat little smiling face gets blasted with our juice. But not just his face. His tee shirt, jeans, and sneakers are all completely soaked through. I’m too busy staring at the almost-empty bucket on the ground, trying to figure out how my arms managed to move so fast even when I didn’t want them to, so I never see Arnold run head-down all the way to the nurses’ office. Later in the afternoon, on a bus that’s empty besides Billy and me, Billy un-Velcroes and explains that Arnold’s mother had to come to take him home after lunch. We laugh our asses off the entire bus ride until it’s my stop and I’m alone. The sky is a deep orange, burning. Instead of my mother waiting for me, there’s only Andrew, his skin piss-colored, his eyes shining, holding Billy's severed head in one hand and a dripping bicycle chain in the other. I don’t want to get off the bus. Not now, not ever. An invisible pair of hands shove me forward towards the door, and I’m screaming, clawing at the green fake-leather seats, and Andrew’s skin is melting, congealing into a flesh puddle on the floor and what’s underneath is an elderly half-skeleton version of my mother, smiling a toothless smile and pointing at me with one of her bone-fingers, still clutching Tweety Bird’s head in her other hand. ‘You’ve got some explaining to do, Mister,’ she gargles as the bus disappears and the sky explodes like the scene in Terminator 2 where the robots finally succeed and everything is fire.
(picture by Jimmy Cauty via www.boingboing.net)
I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to be like every other self-described internet journalist (aka blogger hack that no one gives a crap about) and most of my favorite cable networks, spending the last month or three trying to find some unique, compelling way to analyze the last decade – the Two-Thousands, the Ohs, the Zeros, the Oughts, the Naughts, the Oh-Ohs – whatever you want to call it. There are already the ubiquitous Top-10 lists (Top-10 iPhone Apps, Top-10 Celebrities’ Assholes Falling Out of Their Skirts), I Love The 2000s marathons, an ever expanding collection of Skillz’ year-end raps. It seems like every Twitter-head and Facebook stalker is trying to carve out his or her own nostalgia niche. It’s not that I’m being a curmudgeon or that I don’t want to remember the past ten years. They were the best of my short life, although that’s mainly due to the fact that the 2000s corresponded with many of the events (high school, college, grad school) that are supposed to be the proverbial “BEST time of your life”. Clearly, any decade in which one receives his first hand job and hazes his first batch of screaming, blindfolded fraternity pledges in the backseat of the same beat-up ’97 Izusu Trooper has to be epic on a personal scale. However, other than my generation’s collective debauchery, a lot of shit sucked. There were a staggering number of reasons (9/11-Afghanistan-Iraq-Katrina-The Tsunami-George Bush-Bird Flu-Darfur-The Great Recession-H1N1-Jon & Kate Plus 8) why well-respected voices, from Time Magazine to Gore Vidal, decided to brand this decade as among the worst in American history.
Figuring out just how awesome or lame it was will take years, more decades, hundreds of magazine articles, blog posts and PhD theses. Our overall understanding of the 2000s will change again and again. Being the passive-aggressive slacker fiction writer that I was, I saw no problem in letting the super-nerds tackle this one as I lay back in my allegorical cave creating worlds of my own.
That is, until I heard Miley Cyrus and the Notorious B.I.G.’s vocals on the same track. Granted, it was just an unofficial remix/mash-up of Cyrus’ “hit” song “Party in the U.S.A.” where the verses have been changed to Biggie’s, from his old-school classic “Party and Bullshit”, mixed by some herb in his parents’ basement. And it was actually pretty catchy, too (until I heard it at every bar I went to for a week). Apparently a lot of people agree because the song has more than 1.4 million hits on YouTube, and has been a fixture on party playlist sites like fratmusic.com for a while. Maybe I’m getting older and can’t simply enjoy this song the way it’s meant to be enjoyed – twelve beers deep dancing on top of a pong table and throwing drinks at scantily clad ladies who look like J-WOWW and Snookers – or maybe I’m just thinking too much, as usual. But to me the song represents everything wrong with the current music industry, and maybe more so with the people (Generation Y) who have been listening to the music made during the last ten years.
One of the easiest ways to start to define a decade is to look at its music. Politics, fashion, culture and current events should all be reflected in what the kids are listening to. It is impossible to think about the tumultuous, radical sixties without picturing the Beatles looking all hippied-out or Jimi Hendrix jamming his soul to thousands of Woodstockers. Same with the nineties. No one who grew up then will ever forget all the disaffected, flannel-wearing grunge rockers and their rejection of ’80s excess, or the racial chaos that fueled the passionate monologues of West Coast gangster rappers.
But what about the 2000s? The introduction of file sharing and beat-making programs like FruityLoops has cheapened everything about music, has made it accessible to the point of meaninglessness. It has been commoditized like never before. Any knucklehead with a computer can make “quality” sounding tunes in his basement without any real talent besides being able to figure out which samples from REAL songs go best together. Indeed, much of what passes for music today is really just lyrics and riffs from other, better songs that have been digitally combined to form nothing more than a reusable, throw-away product. Yes, much of art and literature borrows from past works. One could argue that nothing new has been created since the ancient Greeks. But this music is not art. This is Wal-M(art). Don’t believe me? Compare rappers from the nineties to those of the 2000s. Tupac and Biggie were the mouthpiece of a generation. Auto-Tune-infested morons like T-Pain and Kanye sound like robots taking a shit. Pop Bottles! Fuck Bitches! Buy rims! We have no soul! Even popular music used to be at least occasionally multi-layered. Recently some gay friends of mine tried to explain to me that Lady Gaga is not only the Madonna of “our” generation, but is possibly more influential to today’s youth than the Material Girl ever was. If this is even remotely true, someone find me a shotgun because I’m about to pull a Hemingway. Is this what we’ve come to? Is it true, as one of the characters in my forthcoming novel puts it, that the 2000s are “a nameless amorphous creature, a vacuum, a sterile computer-chip refuse pile that’s allergic to any specific attitude, to any real passion”?
You may be wondering where The Flaming Lips come in to all of this. Weren’t they in the title? I’m so glad you asked, friend, because The Lips’ newest album, Embryonic, is one of the few musical things I’ve heard recently that has given me hope for a brighter tomorrow.
Although thematically similar to previous releases (Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, The Soft Bulletin), Embryonic is a stark departure musically for Wayne Coyne and Company. The sound is harder, more raw, yet pulsing with unparalleled grandeur and cybernetic beauty. Imagine if members of the Beatles, Joy Division, latter-day Smashing Pumpkins, the Clash, the RZA and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs all got together in the 23rd century and smoked some serious Magical Martian Red Skunk – this is what would come out. If T-Pain sounds like a robot taking a shit, Embryonic sounds like that same robot making love to Miles Davis’ granddaughter in a psychedelic field of android poppies while electric-faced cherubs wail the existential blues.
Perhaps it’s the addition of new drummer Kliph Spurlock, but raucous power jams like “Convinced of the Hex,” “Silver Trembling Hands,” and “Watching the Planets” rock harder and louder than anything since The Lips’ mid-nineties guitar-driven line-ups. But the beats are also funkier, more jam-dance friendly, as any Disco Biscuits fan or Phish phreak will attest. But they also perfectly blend in their softer side with Sigur Ròs-esque space ballads like “The Impulse” and “Gemini Syringes”.
As always, Wayne’s unique songwriting ranges from the startlingly introspective and the philosophical to the obscure and downright silly. There is maybe a bit more darkness and desperation present in tracks like “The Ego’s Last Stand”, where Wayne sings, “The only way out / Is destroying all traces / Oh, destroying yourself /There’s no way back / It’s complete devastation / Oh, there’s no way out” or in (arguably the album’s masterpiece) “See the Leaves” where he laments, “She cannot pretend / To believe that life / Really has no end”. But, in this collection of yins and yangs, there is also an undeniable streak of positive energy and hope, such as in the smile-inducing “Watching The Planets,” where we believe Wayne when he proclaims “See, the sun’s gonna rise / And take your fears away / Like the soft tit of the motherbrain” and the culturally appropriate “If” where we agree and hope in our hearts that “People are evil, it’s true / But on the other side / They can be gentle too / If they decide.”
Other highlights include the bombastic synth-fest “WormMountain" featuring MGMT and the happily bizarre “I Can Be A Frog” in which Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (and the Where The Wild Things Aresoundtrack) helps out by making animal noises through a telephone.
There is a general consensus by hardcore fans that 1999’s groundbreaking The Soft Bulletin was the band’s musical and artistic apex. I would argue that Embryonic not only approaches this gem but outshines it. And I’m not alone. Paste Magazine described the album as "a wonderfully weird parade of sonic delights: an arresting consummation of the Lips' two-and-a-half decade career,” and The Record Review lauded The Lips as "one of the few acts left that stills dares to be original, inspired and off-center in such a mainstream musical climate." Couldn’t have said it better myself.
So take that, Miley, Gaga, Kanye and the rest of you boring, self-obsessed , ear-bleed-inducing leaches! Biggie, please do not roll over in your grave just yet. There is hope.
(However, Miley, when you turn 18, please call or Twitter me @ChrisVola)
Finally, looking ahead: 2010 promises to be another spacey, brain-bending neo-psychedelic balloon ride for The Lips as the band has just released a song-for-song cover of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, featuring the likes of Stardeath and White Dwarves and Henry Rollins. So get your glow-sticks and confetti guns, kids, and prepare your faces to MELT! As for me, my biggest New Year’s resolution is to stay POSITIVE and HAPPY, something made a lot easier by the fact that the Decade from Hell is over and bands like The Flaming Lips have not only survived its aftermath, but continue to thrive. Stay up, God Bless, and please say a prayer for Haiti and everyone hurting right now. Peace.
