The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

I’m smitten. It’s too bad for me that I’m a thirtysomething dude living in the 21st century as opposed to, I don’t know, a teenaged girl living in 1910 because having to use the word “smitten” makes me sound like a wuss. Nothing can be done about that, I’m afraid. I’m smitten with The Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots regardless of whether or not it causes you to question my masculinity. But if I’ve learned nothing else from Yoshimi, it’s that there’s no virtue in always being cool.

Wayne Coyne and the rest of the Oklahoma-based Lips have something vaguely in common with their Texas brethren, The Butthole Surfers. Both bands rifle willy-nilly through pop music genres, appropriating whatever happens to tickle their fancies. Both bands create timbre-rich music that offers less whole-cloth innovation than the unexpected juxtaposition of disparate established styles. The Flaming Lips (or Coyne) have a more sophisticated ear for melody than the Surfers, though. While, at their worst, the Surfers tend to lapse into mesmerizing nursery rhyme cadences, the Lips deliver rich, sugary melodies that are catchy without being stuck-in-your-brain annoying.

The critical consensus on Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is that it’s good, but not as great as The Soft Bulletin, the 1999 disc that kicked off The Flaming Lips’ satisfying use of lush pseudo-symphonic electronica as a cozy bed for good old-fashioned pop tunage (okay, Zaireeka actually kicked off this phase in the Lips’ career, but I’ve never heard it since I don’t have the four stereo systems needed to experience the precocious four-disc musical experiment). Maybe, by some phantom objective standard, Bulletin really is better than Yoshimi, but to my ears each is a satisfying foray into those narrow straits in which technology and raw humanity merge to create infectious, foot-tapping songs that actually have something to say. Yoshimi is more self-aware by virtue of its themes practically commenting on its style. As such, it’s the terminal point of this particular phase of The Flaming Lips’ career. Not surprisingly, their latest record, At War with the Mystics, sets off in new directions.

Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots finds Coyne hip-deep in midlife and exploring all the existential dread the beginning of the descent towards death brings bubbling to the surface of one’s psyche. “Fight Test” and “Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell” are laments to opportunities squandered by inaction, fear, and self-doubt, while “It’s Summertime,” “Do You Realize??” and “All We Have is Now” are calls to live in the present tense and savor the moment.

Lyrically, the latter trio of songs sometimes flirt with cliche, sometimes wallow in it unapologetically. “Do you realize/That everyone you know someday will die/And instead of saying all of your goodbyes/Let them know/You realize that life goes fast/It’s hard to make the good things last” would come across as trite advice except that it’s the sort of thing everyone knows but very few actually take to heart. Many cliches, to paraphrase writer David Foster Wallace, are lame and unexciting on the surface, but nonetheless express great and terrible truths. Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is full of them, which is perhaps an annoyance to those young enough not to have gotten a whiff of their own mortality. For me, the directness of Coyne’s words is surprisingly touching and resonant. Maybe I’m getting soft in my…let’s call it “late youth”.

The lyrical highlight of Yoshimi is the seventh track, “Are You a Hypnotist??” It’s a classic break-up song made rich, humorous, and fresh by Coyne’s wisdom and wit:

“I had forgiven you for tricking me again
But I have been tricked again -
Into forgiving you -
What is this?? Are you some kind of hypnotist??”

I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a pop song that offers a more succint and accurate expression of the emotional confusion and war between heart and brain that attends the ugly end of a romantic relationship. “Are You a Hypnotist??” is so good it almost hurts.

The first half of Yoshimi is dominated by a kind of aural anime song cycle that has led some to call the record a concept album and others to complain it’s inconsistent. It’s neither. The story that unfolds across “One More Robot/Sympathy 3000-21,” “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Parts 1 and 2,” and “In the Morning of the Magicians” is one of an epic battle between emptiness and meaning, conformity and individuality, couched in electronica-laced jams and sci-fi imagery of Japanese fighting girls, evil machinery, and robots longing Pinnochio-like for the rich emotional existence of real human beings. It is a warning not to sleepwalk through life.

The antics of the martial arts-wielding, vitamin-popping, pink robot-defeating heroine, Yoshimi (played in “Part 2” by Boredoms drummer Yoshimi P-we) offer a comic contrast to Coyne’s navel-gazing throughout the record’s other half. While some seem to think the futuristic opus drags the CD down, I’d argue it strengthens it by offering an opaque restatement of the themes Coyne is exploring more explicitly on the rest of the record. Forty-plus minutes of either of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots’ contrasting styles would be too much of a good thing. Combined, though, the two halves of the record create a thoroughly enjoyable listening experience from beginning to end that has left me, well, smitten.

Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, The Flaming Lips: A.