I love The Flaming Lips and Coyne seems to be a genuinely warm, interesting, and vibrant fellow. He's capable of inspiring wild optimism with songs about death, aging gracefully by continuing to explore new paths, and executing one of the must energetic and affirmative live shows on the planet. Though it's far from album of the year material (see the previous post), Heady Fwends is a hoot, a collaborative session that sounds like inspired fun rather than the result of boardroom engineering, as many of these guest-flooded albums tend to be.
Their live show is great at producing spectacle- the beaming lights, the giant hamster ball, the funfetti explosions, the bleeding headwraps, the dancing aliens and santas, and singalongs all make for great spectacle. Yet, the cinematic component of much of the Lips's music has always been a bit disappointing. Their long-delayed home movie "Christmas on Mars" was...okay, I guess...a but subpar, even for "head" films, but the most upsetting thing about their visual component is how clumsily they often navigate from Freudian surrealism (such as their live stunt of emerging from a giant vagina) to "Man Show" style T&A.
While the more sanguinary elements of their phantasmagoric shows and videos can seem apropos at times, they often falter at the symbolic level even when they manage to penetrate at the visceral level. Because of this, it's entirely unsurprising that Badu, in her extended tweet, should say that "When asked what the concept meant after u explained it , u replied ,'it doesn't mean anything , I just want to make a great video that everyone is going to watch. ' "
I've not actually seen the video in question so I can't comment on it (apparently, I'm not supposed to see it and I'm okay with that), but the band's insistence on doing videos by themselves (with the exception of this rather bland one offered by Sofia Copolla before she became a filmmaker of note) appears to be to their detriment. While I'm not exactly sure what caused them to leak the "First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" video without first getting approval from Badu, the pattern of exploitation they've observed in slavishly rolling out softcore images of women has been uncomfortable observing as a fan, and not in the transgressive way in which the band thinks it is. This is only heightened by Coyne's twitter feed, which regularly spits out these kind of images with captions like "Yep" or "Awesome!" (including pictures of his own wife, which, the assumptions is, are consensual). Just observe the below, posted after Coyne was reproached by Badu for behaving like a pig ("As a woman I feel violated and underestimated", Badu said):
Any guesses as to which Time magazine cover he's talking about?
Coyne's responses to Badu have the air of badgering, even borderline harassment. Having played in a rock band nearly his whole life, perhaps he is unaccustomed to a world where you don't respond by someone telling you to kiss their ass by commenting on how nice their ass is. In subsequent dialogue, Coyne seems oblivious to just how damaging this kind of objectification is.
There seems to be a bit of a culture clash at play here too. Not only the white male vs. black woman thing, which has its own dynamic, but that of the punk rocker vs. the professional musician (The Flaming Lips's earliest work is collected on a compilation brilliantly titled Finally the Punk Rockers are Taking Acid). As Badu notes:
"You also did the same thing with the song itself which displays crappy "rough "vocals by me . I let it go , perhaps iiiii was missing something, I thought.
"I Should have followed my first mind back in studio when recording the vocals 'your way'."
Elsewhere, she talks about the video compromising her artistic "brand". Badu's world is not one that regularly accommodates abrasion or any king of "rough vocals". She's a pop star and has been since her first album. Decidedly, she's a bit of a retro-act. Despite her alleged allegiance to afro-futurism, her music doesn't seem to have actually incorporated any forward-thinking ideas since the renaissance of black music in the 70s. Coyne, on the other hand, graduated from the 80s/90s college underground where rawness and lack of polish was celebrated. He regularly enlists David Fridmann to muddy up tracks and ramp up the dynamic range compression to make it sound like the band has blown a perfectly good set of speakers. His vocal style can only be described as pubescent since his nasal Midwestern accent can't seem to hold a single note without a voice crack. Compare to the trained and measured style of Badu and we're looking at a collaboration that was destined to fail without some basic communication.
The assumption is that Coyne's art is driven by a frenzied, intrinsic need to create, whereas Badu develops and hones a craft in a professional manner. Yet the way Coyne has guffawed at the publicity he's been getting over the stint makes him seem clownish, less the scatterbrained imaginative type who is not conscious of his actions, than a self-conscious brat exhilarated by all the attention he's getting:
"To all the haters who think Erykah Badu has lost her mind!!! She has NOT!!! The Flaming Lips take full responsibility or the making of and the content of the controversial video !!! We are very sorry if it has offended some of Erykah Badu's more Conservative audience! The video was intended for mature audiences and is NOT an Erykah Badu statement.. It is a Flaming Lips video!!!"
"You were right on! @fatbellybella you said we gonna make a video that is controversial and gets everybody talkin!You the master!! Love you"
"Dang!!!!! @fatbellybella you really know how to do it!!!! You hatin on me has gotten the video 100,000 more views !!!LOVE LOVE LOVE"
His thrill seems completely oblivious or just indifferent to the fundamental issue at hand here: he essentially just posted porn online without the woman's consent. Regardless of whether Badu agreed to be filmed in this manner, no one owns images of someone else's body. If Coyne can't see why distributing personal images like this without a woman's consent is wrong, then he's just a frat boy with a megaphone and blood on his face.
