The Flaming Lips’ critically acclaimed album, The Soft Bulletin, is now 25 years old. Critics have called it a rock masterpiece for the trippy experimental sounds and big, sweeping orchestral pieces. The lyrics touch on love, faith, grief, death, and addiction. The Soft Bulletin propelled The Flaming Lips into stardom, and it became one of the best albums of the decade.
KCRW DJ Dan Wilcox explains that The Lips began in the 1980s as a psychedelic punk band on the fringes. Then when The Soft Bulletin came out in 1999, even the group’s fans were surprised that they could achieve something so “mammoth and glorious and lush and symphonic.”
In 1999, society was rapidly changing, particularly with the rise of the internet, and feeling a “strange end-of-times vibes in the air,” Wilcox points out. “There was all this premillennial tension … and politics and Y2K. I mean, you could joke about it now because it seemed to be a letdown. But at the time … it was no joke.”
He continues, “So in 1999, there was a lot to be cynical about. And that's what this record is — it's an antidote for cynicism.”
Where does the record’s staying power come from? The lyrics and existential themes about the human condition, Wilcox says.
“Race for the Prize” is one of The Lips’ greatest hits, which they often use to start concerts “because it feels like you're getting shot out of a rocket,” Wilcox says. The lyrics are about two doctors competing to find a cure for cancer — inspired by the bleak cancer diagnosis that frontman Wayne Coyne’s father had received before the group started working on the album.
Wilcox says he didn’t fully understand the song until last year when his daughter was diagnosed with cancer.
“There's a desperation that can set in when you're going through an ordeal like this, where you begin to assign superhuman traits to the doctors that are in the care of your loved one. It’s like if they could only make this one connection or come up with one thing that should be cured and everything would be okay. But at some point, you realize, just like he says in the song, they're just humans with wives and children — which is a sudden truth. So it's an incredibly powerful song both in its sound and its meaning.”
In “The Spiderbite Song,” The Flaming Lips are singing about near-death experiences that threatened the band. One of those: Steven Drozd apparently got a spider bite on his hand that nearly led to the amputation of his arm. As the drummer and keyboard player, that amputation would have ended the band, Wilcox explains.
“But you find out … long after the record came out that it wasn't a spider bite at all. It was it an abscess that became incredibly infected due to repeated needle use. He was a heroin addict. … So this song, and much of the album, is about these tragedies that happen in their lives.”
Wilcox says “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate” is genius in that it clearly deals with mortality, but is “so beautiful and shimmery.”
“It takes the edge off, takes the fear out of the equation, and makes you feel like you're just drifting off into space. … It's taking you somewhere, and where you arrive feels like acceptance. … It's just an incredibly attractive, alluring song about a subject that most people want to recoil from.”
Wilcox points out that The Lips made The Soft Bulletin like it was their last album because their label was on the verge of dropping them. However, it became a huge success that influenced artists like Coldplay, Tame Impala, and others.
“This record, it just changed the ecosystem of music, particularly in the indie, alternative … circles,” he says.