The Flaming Lips YOSHIMI BATTLES THE PINK ROBOTS
This is an early album that I took a liking to. My story tonight is about an afternoon/evening when I was 13. I was in the 7th grade at Bay Middle School. What I remember about YOSHIMI was that I listened to it on a yellow sony walkman on the bus ride to and from University Circle on Cleveland’s East Side. I borrowed the CD from my brother that day and listening to The Flaming Lips made me feel really really cool. On the bus a friend named Teodora wanted to know what I had in my yellow sony walkman and was super impressed when I told her. The CD player was my first and last, and it was such a distinct color. I think my parents bought it for me for Christmas one year but I cannot really remember.
It’s funny how well I remember that CD player. I guess that happens when you use something so many times over and over. At night when I would go to bed I had to memorize where the buttons were when the lights were out. On the right there was + - volume buttons and on the left there was a start/pause button, a stop button, and a button that cycled you through options. The options were shuffle, repeat all, repeat one song, and one that would finish the current song and then stop the CD. It was great. It got really good milage out of AA batteries too. I would change them maybe every 2 or 3 months.
Yet YOSHIMI is album I associate with that CD player. And the bus trip to University Circle was very memorable. It was both 7th and 8th graders going with our Art Teacher to see a couple galleries on the East Side. Listening to that album was really a beginning for me. I think it was the combination of hearing such a euphoric, futuristic series of songs while looking out the window at the very dirty very beautiful parts of Cleveland. The Flaming Lips certainly stand out as experimental and avant-garde musicians. And YOSHIMI is a great example of how they exist in a totally alternate reality. I don’t mean that their music shows the influence of drugs, although some look at it this way. To me it’s more of an episode from a magical, science fiction series. It reminds me of all the 1985 type of predictions that humans create from time to time. It’s storytelling for some distant future with beautiful cities and machines and emotions in binary code. The song I post tonight is about Robots being able to fall in love. I think it’s ingenious.
And the album was released with a great deal of artwork along side it. I saw these pieces well after I had heard the songs for the first time. They are certainly expressive, but don’t match up with the images I had painted in my mind. Maybe one day I should try to paint these ideas myself. And to be honest, I just tonight am realizing the impact the art released with YOSHIMI might have had on my own paintings. It is certainly something I will think lots about.
