The Flaming Lips - Zaireeka (1997)
There's an old saying that indicates that your year will always mirror the first reviewed album of that year. Wow am I in trouble. The Flaming Lips were already a weird band - the title of their early years collection Finally, the Punk Rockers are Taking Acid pretty well captures the mayhem within - but with Zaireeka, things are taken up at least three Doritos. So if my 2010 (pronounced "twentyten") turns out to be a psychedelic pastiche of schizophrenic incomprehensibility, well, here's why.
It's a quadruple album, though not in the traditional sense. All four CDs have the same track listing, and all four have different components of the individual tracks. But it's not like they're divided up sensibly (e.g., drums and bass on CD one, guitars on two, vocals on three, effects on four). The music fades on and off each disc to other discs, or pops up here and there seemingly randomly. The discs are meant to be played simultaneously, on four different CD players, and if you sync things up perfectly*, you get the "full song," though it's not clear that any singular experience is meant to be born from the album. Because Wayne Coyne, the Flips frontman, also encourages you to play three of the discs - your call which three - on three players. Or two on two. Or listen to the discs individually. That's twelve different ways** to hear the album right there, and once you start thinking about the different fidelities of various audio systems, the subtle differences in timings of track loadings, the different spatial orientations you can give the various players, etc., you essentially have a better chance of being a victim of a terrorist attack than hearing this album the same way twice***.
* - The tracks on the the individual CDs all start with an indication of which disc they are, so if you sync things correctly you will hear a nice, rhythmic "Track number one, this is CD number one, number two, number three, and number four," each part coming from the appropriate disc. If you are at all internet savvy, you can find one of my favorite-named bootlegs of all time, the "Zaireeka: Defeating the Purpose Mix," in which someone sync'ed up the discs and recorded the output to a single mp3 file for each of the tracks. Convenient for when you don't have three friends / four CD players to orchestrate the whole complicated simul-play-pressing event. For the record, that mix is the one on my computer, but I do own the album proper and have listened to it played from a TV, a stereo, and two computers on one occasion, involving remote controls and quick hands. The main problem is that I have never lived anywhere with more than one friend with eclectic enough taste to do this with me. I hereby extend a non-expiring invitation for three of you to come over and Zaireeka it up with me. Please?
** - I'm not doing the math for you.
*** - Unless you cheat and defeat the purpose via the internets.
This whole wacky notion is rooted in "The Parking Lot Experiments." Coyne gave about twenty or so car-driving friends different audio tapes to be played in their cars' tape-decks simultaneously while everyone sat parked in a lot, giving a participatory performance art aspect to Coyne's music. The idea was extended to "The Boom Box Experiments," FLips concerts where attendees were given boom boxes with tapes, and Coyne conducted the boom-box symphony, indicating when to start the tapes, when to crank the volume, etc. These performances post-dated "She Don't Use Jelly," a song from 1993 that in 99.9 percent of alternate realities doomed the FLips to one-hit wonder status. That's noteworthy because the FLips were not exactly hit-cranking machines who could pull out whatever artistic craziness they wanted on the premise that they would make their label (Warner Bros.) money with their other work. They were struggling commercially, falling apart with drugs and departed band members, and had every reason to fade from existence. Yet, for whatever reason, this bizarre project was given the go-ahead by the suits. The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi followed, bringing accolades and a whole ton of album sales, so the whole adventure paid off for everyone involved. This is the part where Maggie Simpson axes you in the back and notes that this is truly a disturbing universe.
Of course, stopping at the quadruple-simul-album concept was not in the cards. The music itself had to scrape outer space, too. The album includes a jazz drum science fiction spazz jam ("Okay I'll Admit That I Really Don't Understand"), an anthemic, psychedelic full orchestra piece complete with syncopated in rounds bass riff ("Riding to Work in the Year 2025 (Your Invisible Now)"), and string-and-synthesizer framed noise-rock ("Thirty-five Thousand Feet of Despair'). It's got a tape-effects and kitchen-sink chaos folk ballad ("A Machine in India") and more Beach Boys harmonies over acid freakouts than you possibly know how to deal with ("The Trains Run Over..."). A harsh John Bonham drum / lo-fi noise experiment dots the end of the album ("March of the Rotten Vegetables"). And mayhaps the most irritating aural experiment ever set to
The obvious highlight of the album, though, is the closer "The Big Ol' Bug Is the New Baby Now," easily my favorite spoken-word piece of all time. Of all time! It's a funny story that I'll copy below, and it has the biggest, grab your Zippo sing-along chorus that you'll ever want to hear. It would be a perfect song, but oh no, that won't do - it closes with a cacophony of dog-barking that nearly blows speakers. So between the superhuman frequency whistles in the aforementioned track and the dog-bark challenge that closes the experience, this album should have been slapped with a "Sparkle-Unfriendly" label. Seriously, if you want to see a miniature monster flip out...
Another album that I enjoy quite a bit but recognize that it requires a weird taste and that it has elements that are undeniably annoying. (It's one thing to argue about the merits of dissonance in music, but I'm relatively sure that no one enjoys 19,990 Hz persistent sounds). On the plus side, there are reasonably accessible highlights on an album whose grandiose, over-the-top bizarre music matches its over-the-top, indulgent concept. There's a lot to love about Zaireeka - you should have seen the indie lovefest when the FLips 2009 return-to-weird album Embryonic came out; the cries of "return to Zaireeka!" echoed through the indie blogs. So if you have that sort of "anything goes" lust, and if you appreciate that Coyne is an utterly sincere art-lover (not a pretentious "artiste") when he does this sort of thing, you'll find this ultimate social album to be quite a trip. That's an admittedly qualified rec, but this is a qualified disc - if nothing else, props to the ambition of requiring me to make friends before I can listen to your tunes.
("Zaireeka," btw, is a neologism combing chaos (of Zaire's social situation in the mid '90s) with genius (Eureka!). Honestly speaking, there might be more Zaire than 'reeka, but there's enough of the latter to make this preposterous experiment a success. So on second thought, while I hope my twentyten doesn't involve utter disorientation and tinnitus, if it carries that ratio of chaos and genius, I'll certainly take it).
Status: Recommended (solid)
Nyet's Fave: "The Big Ol' Bug Is the New Baby Now"
TBOBItNBN Lyrics
We have three dogs that love to chew stuff up, so we're always getting them some toys and stuffed animals and stuff so they can destroy them. And usually whatever we get is shred to pieces within a couple of days. And one day I noticed that this stuffed animal that we had gotten, they had had it for about a week, had remained relatively unharmed, a little bit dirty, but it really didn't have any damage. So I was kind of watching them for the next couple of days, and I noticed that for some weird reason, this little stuffed animal seemed like they all liked it for some weird reason, it was special to them, not only did they not chew it up, they sort of made it seem like it was their baby. They treated as though it was their own baby, so I thought, "This is weird. How strange this is. Of all the toys and things that we get for them, for some weird reason, this one, it wasn't really any different from the rest, this one is picked to be special." So there you go. So some time passed and one day I noticed that this box of big plastic insects, that I had been keeping on a shelf in the bathroom, had somehow fallen down and unfortunately it looked as though the dogs had already chewed up most of the stuff in it, the big giant spiders, ants, and cockroaches and stuff that were in it. And as I walked around the house picking up the shredded pieces of these plastic insects I came across the . . . baby . . . you know, their stuffed animal baby! And there it was just torn to shreds, like everything else - all the other stuff, finally this one was torn to shreds. So later on I came across one of the giant grasshoppers that for some reason hadn't been chewed up at all, not even as much as a small tooth mark. So I watch, and it occurs to me that for some reason their affections have changed . . . and I can plainly see that, instead of the stuffed animal, the big ol' bug is the new baby now.
No comments:
Post a Comment