The Flaming Lips, the crown jewel of Vanderbilt's Rites of Spring lineup, was announced last week as the band to headline the festival, closing out Saturday night's show.
Although not well known by all Vanderbilt students, The Flaming Lips are a Grammy Award-winning three-piece band whose music has repeatedly broken into the Billboard charts in both the United States and the United Kingdom since the group's inception in the late '80s. Their adventurous and ever-shifting musical style has carried fans along for the ride, while still managing to attract new ones - few bands have been able to so carefully balance and maintain their fan base and musical respectability.
Today, the vast majority of the Lips' musical catalog is best described as psychedelic rock. While their sound has varied throughout the group's career, it has generally been characterized by eccentric lyrics and song titles (one of their more popular albums is titled "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" and includes the song "Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon (Utopia Planitia)"), spacey and alien-sounding compositions, and deliciously off-the-wall instrument and sound choices. In spite of this seemingly extraterrestrial quality, the Lips still manage to keep their music approachable and to some degree mainstream. Their songs have been featured in several commercials, and "Do You Realize," from 2002's "Yoshimi," was voted to become the official rock song of Oklahoma - I don't know what could be more "commercial" than that.
The group's massive popularity is evidenced by their high demand at festivals worldwide: The Flaming Lips have played nearly every major music festival in the United States (as well as many abroad in Europe), including Chicago's Lollapalooza in 2006 and Vanderbilt favorite Bonnaroo in 2007.
Although their technical musical ability has certainly led the way in the group's explosion of critical acclaim and subsequent consistent popularity, the true defining factor of the Flaming Lips musical experience is their live performance. From human-sized glowing orbs to tons of confetti to giant dancing animal mascots, The Flaming Lips have become infamous for their wild onstage antics. Frontman Wayne Coyne is frequently pictured in his "hamster ball," the giant inflated bubble that he sometimes climbs into and uses to surf the crowd, and a quick YouTube search reveals hundreds of clips of the Lips' concert hijinks. When accompanied by a stellar light show and the psychedelic reverberations of the Lips' music, these onstage additions complete the show and have helped to catapult the group to the level of success they enjoy today.
The reason for this festival mania is something that can't be heard in the Lips' music, it has to be experienced live. Attendees at Saturday night's show can only hope to see giant floating balls, fireworks, human-scale hands or any one of the Lips' other famous onstage props, but all can unequivocally expect entertaining onstage antics backed by enormous musical talent.
