The Flaming Lips - Wayne Coyne on Miley Cyrus, Icelandic Bananas, and the Future of Music
"With everything we do, there's always going to be these dumbasses out there who think they can tell you how to live."
Nov 26, 2014
Web Exclusive
The Flaming Lips have always been a little strange, but if five years ago someone said that in 2014 they would be most known for working with Miley Cyrus and releasing an indie star-studded full length cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, even that would seem like a stretch of the imagination.
But it’s 2014, and that’s exactly the case. The Lips’ version of Sgt. Pepper (titled With a Little Help From My Fwends) features Miley Cyrus as well as Phantogram, J. Mascis, Tegan and Sara, My Morning Jacket, Moby, Dr. Dog, Juliana Barwick, Foxygen, Ben Goldwasser from MGMT, and more. It’s also incited a few angry Beatles’ fans to threaten Wayne Coyne with death, despite his reassurances that he hasn’t actually done anything to The Beatles’ music itself.
We had a chance to talk to Wayne Coyne about the strange new reality of The Flaming Lips’ world, learning how to deal with haters because of Miley Cyrus, and the inevitable future of the music industry. Spoiler alert: Coyne’s vision of the future is literally bananas.
Cody Ray Shafer (Under the Radar): Working with Miley Cyrus has brought The Flaming Lips a lot of exposure. How has that impacted the band? Has it made anything more complicated?
Wayne Coyne: Most of it is just marvelous. Most of it is wonderful, and it’s all that we’re doing. If we didn’t want to be involved with her, we wouldn’t. We have all the say in what’s going on, and we love her. We love her to death, we absolutely love her. We fight for her, and anybody that goes against her would have to go against us, and it’s because we love her. We never even think about, you know, what do people think of our music and our ideas because of that. Most of the people I talk to think it’s fucking amazing and beautiful and fucking insane, and it’s exactly what The Flaming Lips should do and it’s what we’re about. So to me, it’s like, of course.
With everything we do, there’s always going to be these dumbasses out there who think they can tell you how to live. Someone like Miley, she’s such an easy target. She’s 21 years old and some fucking 45-year-old dude wants to tell her, “here’s how you should live,” and “who do you think you are? You’re ruining rock and roll!” You’re really that worried about rock and roll that you have to put her down. She’s the most punk rock thing in music right now! People who think that, and there’s not that many of them, I just don’t pay attention to them.
She’s fucking insane. She’s the craziest person I’ve ever met, and I’ve met a lot of fucking crazy people. And she doesn’t even think she’s crazy. I’ll talk to her and she’ll say, [in his best Miley Cyrus voice] “man, I’m gonna come out with y’all in Oklahoma and do some crazy shit,” and I’m like, “you’re already doing more crazy shit than anybody ever.” She’s just living her life, like it’s a normal day. She’s awesome, she’s so badass and so full of love. When those people hate on her—and she gets a lot of fucking hate. I get some hate, like when Beatles fans want to come to my house and kill me, but she gets it all the time—she just walks right by ‘em and smiles. I’ve learned so much from her, that’s telling the truth. The way that she is, is fucking amazing. If you were around her for five minutes, you’d feel the same way.
Is there anyone you haven’t had a chance to collaborate with—either on Heady Fwends or the Sgt. Pepper’s cover—that you wish you could?
Yeah, I’m still trying. We were trying to get Sean Lennon, he was going to do it but then he got busy with his band. I’ve tried to get Kevin Shields from My Bloody Valentine, I’ve tried to get Jimmy Page while he’s still, you know, with it and all that. I wish we could have known Miles Davis, you know. I’m trying to do something even today with Deerhoof. As much as we’ve been around them we’ve never gotten to do something together, but we keep trying. I was with Caribou the other night and we keep saying, “let’s do stuff.” There are lots of people, yeah, just being with them and around them and having their ideas and energy float around you, yeah. Even a lot of the old ones, I love Jim James, and Sarah from Phantogram, and Kesha, all those people. I get so much out of it, just being around them.
You said that you thought U2 was onto something with their latest release being automatically downloaded to iTunes. With all the experimentation The Flaming Lips have done in the last few years, not just with the music itself, but with how it’s distributed and consumed, how do you think the recording industry is going to evolve in the future?
I say this to people all the time, music is going the way of water and bananas. It’s because we love it so much that we just want it all the time.
I was in Iceland two days ago. At a fucking hotel, not an expensive coffee shop, just a normal hotel, and at breakfast in the morning they had bananas. Bananas don’t grow anywhere near Iceland. You get them, and I don’t even know how much a banana costs, I don’t know, 10 cents? They should be 20 dollars each! They fucking grow in South America somewhere, they’re put on these large trucks, and they get to you still in perfectly unbruised and perfectly ripe. People just expect it. I expected it! Where’s the bananas? Well, when you’re in Iceland you should be eating fucking dust, you know? But you expect it, and you expect it for free.
The same is true for water. A long time ago it became something that is just everywhere, dude. Who doesn’t have water? It’s because we love it, we need it, it gives us so much in our lives that it’s become everywhere. And it’s free, and you don’t think about it.
Music is getting like that. It’s already almost like that. I think we’re getting that way just to be able to make music. I was in the studio a couple of hours ago and Dennis [Coyne, Wayne’s nephew and Star Death & White Dwarves frontman] and I were talking about how there’s going to be an app pretty soon that’s going to allow anybody in the world to sing a song and this app will take what you sang and turn it into something that can be played on the radio, that will just be what it does. There will be people that are radio stars that only have every sung one song into an app and they’ll be a big radio star. And that will be great!
I think it’s an insane, insane, great time to be an artist and be able to do things you used to have to be a billionaire to do, and now you can do them. It doesn’t make the art less good, it just gives everybody little more insight into it, you know? If you’re a banana grower, you probably make a lot less money, but the world would say they love you even more. The same will probably be true for people who make music. Well, we don’t make as much money as we used to selling music, but if we’re really creative we can figure out a hundred new ways to make money that haven’t been done before. That’s the way all industries have gone. When I was growing up my dad’s brothers were working in the steel mills in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and nobody ever thought the steel mills would go away. And then they went away! That’s a real thing. There will be buildings standing out thee for a hundred years that those men made the steel for, but we don’t need them anymore. Good luck, you know?
I was talking to some journalist the other day, and 20 years ago the journalist used to be one of the highest paid people in this thing, because they were the tastemakers. Now they can’t get a job, and the jobs that are out there don’t pay anything. You can still be a great writer, but I don’t know how you make your money, that’s everybody’s struggle. Eventually, music will go the way of people saying, “I’m not in it for the fame, I’m not in it for the money, I’m in it because I love music.” And that usually makes the greatest music ever, when people don’t give a fuck.
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