GiggySound

The Flaming Lips & Amanda Palmer– “The First Time I Saw Your Face” (Roberta Flack cover)

Alright, this has been sticking in my craw since I saw the video for this pop up on the dickfork and start to make the e-rounds a few days ago. Immediately, it seemed that the most conspicuous and commented upon thing about it seemed to be the proof that Amanda Palmer doesn’t shave her armpits. “Cool,” I thought. “Bet Neil Gaiman doesn’t either.” After all, this was a video that most of us, essentially, had already seen. Then it struck me– why am I seeing this again?

Replacing collaborators is not an easy thing to do, and often you’re better off not doing it. Would you replace Cash with Hazlewood? Maybe once for a laugh. Maybe once. If a collaborator bails, either build on what you guys did together by ya’self, or cease on it and respect what you did together as a jointly owned product. Makes sense. The Flaming Lips/Erykah Badu episode from June is a good lesson in treatin’ yo ex-allies with some respect. For those who don’t know, I’ll try and cut to the meat.

Erykah Badu was sought out by The Flaming Lips to provide vocals for a cover of the Roberta Flack number “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face” for their necessarily batshit fucked up collabs record The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends. Coyne and co. decided to make a video for the song, and Erykah and her sister Nayrok agreed to be in it. It featured the Badu women nude and covered in substances that appeared to represent blood, glitter and semen. So far, so good. Problem was Coyne leaked the video to Pitchfork and posted images to his Twitter from the shoot without the permission of the Badu women, who were quite upset, claiming they’d been compromised and misrepresented as artists by the leaked footage which they had not approved.

So at this point, it’s not looking good for The Lips, who promptly produced the obligatory apology:

“The video link that was erroneously posted on Pitchfork by the Flaming Lips of the Music Video ‘The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face’, which features Erykah Badu, is unedited and unapproved. Sorry!! We, the Flaming Lips, accept full responsibility for prematurely having Pitchfork post it. It has outraged and upset a segment of fans and we apologize if we offended any viewers!!! This is a Flaming Lips video which features Erykah Badu and her sister Nayrok and is not meant to be considered an Erykah Badu or Nayrok statement, creation, or approved version.”

Badu, unsurprisingly, was still unhappy, shooting off a number of tweets and telling Coyne to kiss her glittery ass. Coyne obliged by posting a picture of himself, lips a-glitter. Smooth. She went on to call him self-serving and complained about feeling disgusted about how she and her sister had been treated. Cue Coyne’s response, a weeks later in a Rolling Stone print interview: “I knew she was an unpredictable freak.” Haaaarsh, bro. Out of context, that rings like a told-ya-so–gave-her-a-go-but– admission from a guy who wanted Badu’s skill and name recognition to beef out his equal parts ambition/contrived insanity stunt record, but not her as a collaborator. Want a Roberta Flack song performed by one of the best in business? Get Badu. Want someone with enough edgy cred to justify and embolden the high-art nudity you’re hoping to pass off? Get two Badus. Want to release the video without consulting anyone? BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP bad move. It’s easy to see why Badu would feel used and disdainful.

So, putting the video aside for a moment, let’s unpick this whole situation a bit more. Wikipedia sez that the Badu/Lips collaboration came about from a process of “unsolicited calls”, whereby Badu took “a lot of convincing” from Coyne to want to participate. The process of recording itself sounds hardly less fractious, to hear Badu tell it. In the studio, Coyne told her “29 times” that she was doing it wrong, before she told him to back off so she could deliver the take her way. Compare this with his attitude towards fellow Heady Fwend Ke$ha, who Coyne described as “a f*cking freak… she is so much fun and so creative and she just goes for it.” Coyne described Badu as “crazy, beautiful, emotional” in a video promoting the album. You could say, fair cop, he had just been seeking like spirits– more fearless freaks– who could be as freewheeling and open about his ideas as he was, hence him tripping the light fantastic with Ke$ha. He didn’t get along as well with Badu, so what. But it’s not too hard to view him as having a desire to find someone permissive and willing enough to indulge his trip, as opposed to finding someone to collaborate/butt heads with. Still, not exactly a problem; Coyne is on his own trip. Going to make his albums his way. But, if you scan over the list of Heady Fwend collaborators, they are all either relatively-neophyte fans without his personality/cult of personality (Tame Impala, Neon Indian, New Fumes) or people with enough credibility and name recognition to fill a moon-sized minivan (N. Cave, Y. Ono, L. Bolt). Still, even of those ‘collaborations’ that feature these more dominant personalities, it’s hard to tell where The Flaming Lips end and if their collaborators start, let alone where– the ring-ins feel merely like window dressin’ for some ego tripping at the gates of hell as the Flaming Lips run all over them musically. Is Heady Fwends the indie-rock Shock Value? I don’t know or care, but the whole experiment paints Coyne as a control freak trading on the name recognition, goodwill and passivity of others to inflate his freak balloon. Freaks travel by balloon, right?

Coyne gets an easy ride critically (jesus At War With The Mystics was bullshit) considering he’s The Fearless Freak– the Godfather of modern psychedelia as-it-is. He’s the one who had the cojones to indulge acid-damaged Led Zep fetishism in the 80s, the cheek to be whimsical when the word was Nevermind, the balls to risk commercial failure (admittedly on a safe contract) with carpark rock, and the heart to make ELO sound soulful for the new millenium. This drive, equal parts non-threatening nice guy ambition, good timing and artistic curiosity, is why his band is important. They’ve made music that is, essentially, true to the sonic and ideological blueprint of the moment rock music became progressive (before progressive meant bassists playing off sheet music live). Playful, evolving, ready to incorporate technological advances, and, at heart, accessible. Yet, if you look back over the discography of The Flaming Lips, you can identify another clear reason they are so deeply tied to the origins and forebears of psychedelic rock muuuZAK. That is, women are always either manic pixie dream girls, acid-damaged or children. This isn’t an absolute problem, in terms of the art form; lyrically, most psychedelia tends to explore the grey areas of sensation that exist between poles of sentience, setting up strict dichotomies of good vibes/bad vibes, man/woman, knowing/feeling, real world/false world etc. and diving in to what happens to the ego when you mess its mind up and set it swimming among strictures, often to rebel, transcend or struggle. In male-led psych, women have been objects of desire, fantasy, wisdom, punishment and power. As “Convinced of the Hex” so neatly surmises, she submits and she dominates. But in these worlds, she is not permitted autonomy or agency– she is an object-figure in the world of the trip, either guiding, aiding or obstructing. Taking this tradition in hand as an intrinsic part of how th’ Lips approach their music, Heady Fwends falls in line; Badu wasn’t contributing her own lyrics, Yoko Ono got two words (more or less) and Ke$ha got to play the stargirl child and talk shit about acid. Am I splitting a hair? I dunno. I mean, it’s all fun. It’s a fun record. Everyone is having lots of loud, squelchy, fun. Fun album. Put it on in the car and drive into a playground at night. It’s not great, and much of it doesn’t last beyond novelty, but taking all of this control-freakery and woman-silencing into account, Coyne’s capping off the Heady Fwends adventure by simply replacing collaborators who he’d induced to appear naked with another famous woman feels a wee bit problematic. I’ll go on.

It would have been easy for Coyne to recognise that he’d jeopardized his concept by behaving poorly towards the Badus and put the music video on the backburner. Heck, the video wasn’t that great anyway, and he’s got plenty of other high-concept wacky shit to get on with. Sure of it. Ten hour cover of “Freebird”, played inside a whale’s vagina. Forget the video, put it on a boxset in ten years once you’ve sorted out the legal wrangling. But replacing Erykah and Nayrok with Palmer is confusing; was it just important to have this vision (naked women in bathtubs/covered in substances) out there and associated fundamentally with The Flaming Lips as dudes who are so freewheeling they have beautiful naked ladies cavorting with fluids in their videos cos they can?

There was no problem with Badu’s version of song or the video until The Lips made a hash of making it public. Suddenly, when the video– the naked, writhing video– was a problem in that it could not longer be seen by the public, they needed a ring-in not only to get naked and reshoot it almost shot for shot, but also to re-record the song. If that isn’t petty, I’m not using a computer. Such was her respect for the original song that she was interpreting, Erykah Badu said that you’d have to be “crazy” (that word again) to want to try and cover Roberta Flack. Yet, she balled herself up to the challenge of it and hit it fairly out of the park. Yet, by just roping someone in to re-execute a song because she balked at the manner in which the Lips had undertaken the marketing tactics associated with the video. One of Badu’s complaints was that she had been misled over how the video would look:

“First: You showed me a concept of beautiful tasteful imagery (by way of vid text messages). I trusted that. I was mistaken. Then u release an unedited, unapproved version within the next few days.”

If we’re taking her at her word, The Lips disrespected her musical efforts, abused her and her sister’s rights to control over her own artistic output and representation as an artist, and rejected the idea of fearless freakery for anyone but themselves; not only did she have to sing it right for Coyne, she had to get naked in the right way for his band’s public image as well. A different type of fearless nudity was not enough. Stranger still is the fact that the grotesque fluid play that the Badus worked with is gone; Palmer is just sliding nude in water the whole time. It’s hard for the Lips to play the artistic integrity card here for grounds for reshooting the video and redoing the song. If the problem was the fact they wanted to re-shoot the video, why change the music? If they wanted more naked women, why get Amanda Palmer? Was it so essential to draw the maximum amount of attention to themselves by finding A) a cult musician who was B) female and C) willing to remove her clothes for your art? Marketing 101 tells ya yes, but that’s not the issue here. Coyne excitedly talked in an interview recently about the possibilities of extra-musical marketing:

“Making a record is about look and feel too. The music is just music and then together its all the same thing. I suppose its like when you walk into a McDonald’s, every step of the way in the door is designed as an experience, was planned exactly to have an impact on you. We have the opportunity to design our own marketing and make the music into an experience.”

Badu got it right when she tweeted Coyne earlier on in the furore– “self-serving.”

If we’re going to follow the sexism line of thought here, we may as well; it’s hard to imagine Coyne & co. pulling in, I dunno, the dude from The Fray to re-sing a song and writhe around in the bathtub if Chris Martin had taken a disliking to how his artistic vision/free will/naked body was compromised. The Badu sisters were disempowered as artists and as people by having their bodies thrown out there as a publicity stunt without their permission– one can assume if they were willing to film it, they would have been okay with the video reaching the public had they been consulted about the edited form in which it was released. But, they weren’t asked, and when they withdrew that permission which had been assumed, they were written out of the story altogether and replaced by someone more willing to toe Coyne’s line. I can’t remember the last time one of those EVIL RECORD COMPANIES treated someone this shabbily, let alone the patron saints of do-it-crazy-and-colourful rock music.

I dunno. Storm in a teacup? Maybe. Calling the character of a dude I have not and will not meet into question, based on a few public actions, is hasty. I am not going to burn a flaming lip or decide that I will only use jelly from now on, no matter what. But it’s distressing that someone so often lionized for free-spiritedness and anything-goes-ivity has the hide to treat collaboration like a game of Football Manager 64– bit o’ th’ fascist in every deadhead, maaaaaan. In the process, they showed themselves up to be, at best, overly image conscious, childish and selfish, and at very worst, shy of being shown up by a “crazy, emotional” woman calling shots over what they could and could not make public. Ultimately, though, it seems like if you want to trip with Wayne Coyne, you’ve got to take exactly what he’s taking.