Yes Meets The Sex Pistols
Rock and Roll! Drugs! Furry Animal Costumes! Ladies and gentlemen, The Flaming Lips!
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| The Flaming Lips SMASH! |
One of current rock’s most creative forces, The Flaming Lips, have had a rather unusual success story. Hailing from Oklahoma City in the early 80’s, they created a noisy and anarchic brand of psychedelic punk rock that found a cult audience of true freaks but bewildered most. As time went on the band somehow secured a major record label contract in the early 90’s, had a novelty alternative hit with a song called “She Don’t Use Jelly”, and was poised to be the next one-hit-wonder band of the mid 90’s to never be heard from again.
Then, a curious thing happened. They came out with two stellar albums in a row, 1999’s The Soft Bulletin and 2002’s Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, which gave them both critical raves and commercial success. A newly released documentary DVD, The Fearless Freaks, takes a look inside the band members’ personal lives while giving a slight history of how they got to be where they are today.
In The Fearless Freaks, filmmaker Bradley Beesley tries to give us two things: a history of the band and an intimate look at what makes them tick. The history is very disorganized and doesn’t give the viewer a very good idea of how the band progressed from scrappy, noisy punks to adventurous purveyors of orchestrated pop. None of the band’s five albums before their breakthrough Transmissions from the Satellite Heart are really discussed and there are few insights given into how they actually create any of their music.
While Freaks fails on the historical front, it wholly succeeds in providing a very personal document of the band’s origins, home lives, families, and even some of their troubles. The bulk of the movie is made up of current interviews with singer/guitarist Wayne Coyne and drummer/keyboardist/guitarist/all-around musical whiz Steven Drozd. Wayne’s childhood is discussed extensively, with a good portion of the film’s running time devoted to interviews with his family members (one of which was the band’s original singer). While watching these scenes it quickly becomes apparent that growing up in a culturally isolated place like Oklahoma City in the 70’s created the foundation of the band’s weirdness. The gang mentality that Wayne and his siblings had combined with the strange white-trash nature of the people involved make Oklahoma in the 70’s almost seem like a different planet (and this is coming from someone who grew up in Oklahoma about three hours away from the Coyne’s). All of this actually makes the band seem more mythical and strange.
A real turning point in the band came in 1991 with the addition of Steven Drozd. His musicality and ability to play multiple instruments gave the band a sharper focus and eventually steered them towards the kind of music they are making today. Of course, being a talented artist has its price, and Steven’s problems with substance abuse nearly ended the band on a few occasions. This is discussed with such openness that parts of the last third of the movie are a bit shocking, but it makes for very compelling viewing.
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The most original show ever made, and perhaps the best art form ever shown on television, The Prisoner is simply a masterpiece. Hailed as the first television classic, Patrick McGoohan’s allegory of an individual being trapped in a modern society that wants nothing more or less than to break him down into meaningless number is gripping television. More art than television, the show has been compared to Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Lewis Carroll, Aldous Huxley, G.K. Chesterton, Jonathan Swift, Gustav Meyrink, Alfred Kubin and the surrealist painters such as Rene Magritte. The show created awe, hysteria, and finally a profound appreciation for McGoohan’s masterpiece that stands alone as a shining example of what television can, and for at least one year strove, to be. It raises as many questions as answers, but does both with style. The show certainly wasn’t made for the casual viewer, or in an attempt to create a huge hit for the BBC. In McGoohan’s own words, It’s “not to everyone’s taste. It was never intended to be. I wasn’t making Coca-Cola.” No, it was in fact something much, much sweeter.
