Flaming Lips' Soft Bulletin - a revisitation. (not a word)
I am not one who finds Wayne Coyne tiresome, really ever, until and unless I find myself tiresome. Coyne's interviews and general persona in the Lips docudrama evoke a sense of the kind of soft hippie adulation of possibility of which it is easy, but not mandatory, to disparage. I find myself tiresome retroactively, mostly, when it's clear that a certain dismissal was made out of hand and in service of that basic seen-it-all-done-it-all presumptiveness that, when identified, produces a shudder.
Coyne seems to be aware of this tiresomeness of things that starts with tiresomeness of one's own circumstances, and he's averse to it without being contemptuous of it. I like that - it comes off as acknowledging that it's possible to be willfully sullen but not really desirable. But it's not really that, either, this thing Coyne has going on, or not just that. "being open to possibility," for what that's worth as a description of a kind of stance toward the world Coyne urges, isn't such a bad notion to keep out in front of you in terms of negotiating the ephemeral happenstance stuff that contributes to one-day-and-the-next. It may be easier or more habitual to sort of assimilate the new into the old and keep it contained within the previous understanding - easier or more natural or more likely to be the response beaten into you by sheer repetition - but it can't be more fun or even more stimulating.
It's not clear how to weave together the way Coyne and the other Lips come off in self-representation with the music they make, nor is it necessarily something worth doing. I guess it's inviting in that the music (and I can only talk about the Soft Bulletin, which still confounds my understanding and digs its hooks into me without even trying, now, six or seven years after first coming to it) makes you wonder what its makers think about the process that led to it. After seeing the docudrama - I write that as if I know what it may connote, which I really don't, but it seems right - the thing that stuck is the absolute investment that Coyne makes in making music mean more than just making music. Not to get all Spin magazine or anything, but it is somehow easier to succumb to something when you know that part of what that thing is, is meant for you, expressly and without reservation or stinting pre-formulated idea about what that moment of contact may consist of. And the other slightly out of reach part of it, a dimension of it that is necessarily a product of conjecture, is - to me, here, about this album at least - a recognition that the creators' only assurance of what they make is to be wholly invested in the making of it and an invitation to contemplate what that investment was like at the time the thing was created.
If this doesn't make sense or relies on too much hazy pronoun antecedent confusion, where "it" could be seven things - well, that's part of the thing - and there may be an object lesson here about successful concept albums and the way they manage to elicit a fairly comprehensive engagement with the different possible concepts to which they may be pointing. And obviously if something is successful enough in what you take it to try to be accomplishing to make you wonder if what you take it to accomplish is what was intended to be accomplished, there's even more to think about.
So do it, if it charms you, is what I mean and what I've been doing.
Labels: eye k-hole, Malkmus puke mouth
