HAPPY 15TH BIRTHDAY, “TRANSMISSIONS FROM THE SATELLITE HEART“!
It’s been well over two years since their last full-length album was released, but 2008 has still been a utopian year for Norman, Oklahoma’s own Flaming Lips. Their long-in-the-works movie “Christmas On Mars” finally debuted at the ’08 Sasquatch Fest, just one night before the band’s cataclysmic Led Zeppelin cover inspired a gaggle of comely exuberant scenestresses to frolic nekkid onstage (thereby giving me the most cathartic computer desktop image imaginable; thanks, intrepid Pitchfork photographers). As if that weren’t enough, a recent Lips song that semi-obliquely tears apart our President’s fascistic impulses is now played in the background of a Kraft salad dressing commercial. And that’s big time, people; right up there with Iggy’s snarling ode to heroin addiction serving as the soundtrack for a family cruise line.
Most notably, however, June 22nd of 2008 marks the fifteenth anniversary of the day a fresh-faced lad sporting a youthful mess of Sunny-Delight-colored curls saw the release of his band’s sixth album, “Transmissions From the Satellite Heart.” The album made for a slow but ultimately huge crawl onto MTV, beginning with a micro-budgeted but charming video for “Turn It On” that starred Wayne Coyne’s cute-ass wife Michelle sashaying through a laundromat in plaid golf trousers. Of course, “Turn It On” was not the song that ended up nabbing the Lips the first significant radio airplay of their career (although it’s almost certainly a better song than the one that did); satiating the mid-90’s music industry’s fleeting interest in undergroundish quirk would instead necessitate a kooky musical testament to Vaseline-eating.
To a generation of high schoolers so jaded that they would, within a year, be slow-dancing at PTA-sponsored semi-formals to lyrics like “Her placenta falls to the floor,” the Flaming Lips’ inimitable charisma stood out like a rumpled white suit in a tsunami of fiery orange confetti. It also allowed the Lips to present a cameo performance of “She Don’t Use Jelly” to the chiseled cast members of Beverly Hills, 90210 down at the Peach Pit, inspiring Ian Ziering to utter the profound observation, “I’ve never been a big fan of ‘alternative’ music, but these guys rock the house.” (The band celebrates this radio-airplay milestone to this day; still performing “Jelly” live; and while most bands of the Lips’ caliber would likely find the pop-cultural closet-skeleton of their own shoehorned-in 90210 cameo and adjoining backhanded Ian Ziering compliments vaguely embarrassing, the Lips still employ a blaring, looped clip from that very episode at every one of their concerts, just before the confetti cannons begin to wail.)
Among the people schooled in the Lips only via three-ring-binder karaoke songbooks, “She Don’t Use Jelly” might be the only recognizable song on “Transmissions” at all, which is a shame. Beginning with the cheerful “Turn It On” (still the Lips’ “Good Day Sunshine,” all these albums later) and progressing all the way to the infinitely hummable, six-minute electric churn of “Slow Nerve Action,” the album remains as fun today as ever. Minor filler like “Superhumans” is easy to forgive when, along the way, there’s the weird magic-mushroom digression of “Moth In the Incubator,” the alternating mid-tempo hypnosis and edge-of-yer-seat drum-thundering hooks of “Oh, My Pregnant Head (Labia In the Sunlight),” and Wayne tentatively mumbling like a junior-league Neil Young in an acoustic and whisper-quiet version of “Plastic Jesus.” The latter is unnecessary, but sweet nonetheless; listening to it fifteen years later is still like watching a spaniel puppy trying not to fall asleep.
“Be My Head” is another longtime favorite for various reasons — feedbacky pop with the Lips’ trademark of weirdly echoing background squeals, and a sunny singalong chorus of “Be my head, and I’ll be yours”… something of a precursor to “Do You Realize??” in its display of succinctly unpretentious and pragmatic love. The Flaming Lips have never been too diabetically sweet about such things, and the line “Be my head, and I’ll be yours” remains the purest romantic sentiment of their entire catalog.
Ever humble, Wayne’s only demand on the listener is a chicken-scratched request on the record’s back cover: “Please play all tracks at maximum volume.” Anything you say, birthday boy.
You know, I’ve never been a big fan of “alternative” music, but these guys rock the house.
